SECT. 3.] Objective Treatment of Logic. 267 



2. One subdivision of this enquiry is however really 

 forced upon our notice. It does become important to con 

 sider the restrictions to which the ultra-material account of 

 the province of Logic has to be subjected, because we shall 

 thus have our attention drawn to an aspect of the subject 

 which, slight and fleeting as it is within the region of Induc 

 tion becomes very prominent and comparatively permanent 

 in that of Probability. According to this_.ultra-material view, 

 Inductive Logic would generally be considered to have no 

 thing to do with anything but objective facts : its duty is to 

 start from facts and to confine itself to such methods as will 

 yield nothing but facts. What is doubtful it either estab 

 lishes or ib lets alone for the present, what is unattainable 

 it rejects, and in this way it proceeds to build up by slow 

 accretion a vast fabric of certain knowledge. 



But of course all this is supposed to be done by human 

 minds, and therefore if we enquire whether notions or con 

 cepts. call them what we will, have no place in such a 

 scheme it must necessarily be admitted that they have some 

 place. The facts which form our starting point must be 

 grasped by an intelligent being before inference can be built 

 upon them; and the facts which form the conclusion have 

 often, at any rate for some time, no place anywhere else than 

 in the mind of man. But no one can read Mill s treatise, for .& 

 instance, without noticing how slight is his reference to this 

 aspect of the question. He remarks, in almost contemptuous 

 indifference, that the man who digs must of course have a 

 notion of the ground he digs and of the spade he puts into 

 it, but he evidently considers that these notions need not 

 much more occupy the attention of the speculative logician, 

 in so far as his mere inferences are concerned, than they 

 occupy that of the husbandman. 

 / 3. It must be admitted that there is some warrant 



