38 HUMANISM n 



maintaining, viz. that whatever is true is useful and that 

 whatever is useless is false ? 



Yes. I think you could assist us greatly, Aristotle, 

 by doing this. 



I shall do so with the greatest pleasure, that, to wit, 

 of logical contemplation. If whatever is true is useful it 

 follows that (i) nothing true is useless, and (2) that notliing 

 useless is true, that (3) whatever is useless is false, that (4) 

 some things useful are true, and (5) not false, while (6) 

 some things false are useless and (7) not useful. But since 

 your second proposition that whatever is tiseless is false, 

 is the third of those which follow from your first, that 

 whatever is true is useful, being indeed its &quot; obverted 

 contra-positive,&quot; it is clear that in this also all the others 

 are implied. 



What a thing it is to be a formal logician and con 

 versant with the forms of immediate inference ! I myself 

 have never been able to break myself of the habit of 

 trying to convert an universal affirmative simply, and I 

 suppose I ought now to be able to guess how far you are 

 from agreeing with a statement which I found lately in a 

 book by one of your Oxford sophists, 1 who seemed to be 

 discussing much the same questions, that &quot; the false is the 

 same as the theoretically untenable &quot; ? You would rather 

 say that it was &quot; the same as the practically untenable &quot; ? 



Of course. Or rather I would go on to say that the 

 theoretically untenable always turns out to be so called 

 because it is practically untenable. 



The sophist whom, with difficulty, I read seemed to 

 see no way from the one to the other. 



I don t suppose he wished to. It would have upset his 

 whole philosophy, and you know how ready philosophers 

 are to declare inexplicable and not to be grasped by man 

 whatever &quot; difficulty &quot; reveals the errors into which they 

 have plunged. 



Yes, there is no Tartaros to which they would not 

 willingly descend rather than confess that they have 

 started on the wrong track. But even you have asserted 



1 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 155. 



