212 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



universality of the major premise and to exclude a quaternio 

 terminorum; and it is possible that this condition is not satisfied 

 in any real deduction. But the answer is, that deduction is a 

 thought-process in which ideas are regarded as if they were fixed 

 and distinct; and an ample justification of the process is the fact 

 that ideas must be so regarded if their specific obscurities and 

 self-contradictions are ever to be exhibited and removed. It is 

 by working our ideas for all that they are worth, that their 

 limitations are brought to light. Is the syllogism a true account 

 of the deductive process as it goes on in our minds? We cannot 

 say that; for, in the first place, it would claim for the doctrine 

 of the syllogism an absolute certitude which we are not disposed 

 to claim for any knowledge whatsoever; and, in the second place, 

 we know in a general way that obscurity and vacillation every 

 where pervade our thought. But in a specific instance, the syl 

 logism may well enough describe our thought, so far as our per 

 ception of its significance yet extends ; and when that perception 

 becomes deeper, we no longer call the total process, as thus dis 

 tinguished, deduction. And furthermore, at any stage of prog 

 ress, the syllogism is the form which the clearest of our thought 

 appears to take. In so far, the rationalist was undoubtedly 

 right in his conception of deductive certainty as the ideal of 

 science. He did not see, however, that it is an ideal which can 

 only be progressively realized, that its absolute realization 

 would, indeed, be the extinction of thought altogether. If there 

 were any such assured knowledge as the rationalist dreamed of 

 final, irreducible, modifiable only by accretion his logic would 

 have been unanswerable. It is our sense of the universal process 

 that for us limits the truth of his account to a temporal cross- 

 section of knowledge, regarded as if it were eternal. 



Very similar must be our comment upon the pragmatist s 

 treatment of the conception of fundamental categories of thought. 

 Despite its lack of finality the conception has a very considerable 

 degree of usefulness. Kant is popularly believed to have been 

 one of the most wanton of theorists, exceeded in this respect 



