SECT. 15.] Modality. 309 



four wheels of flesh and blood, or grew planted in the ground, 

 like Polydorus in the ^Eneid, as well evidenced as a great 

 many nearly as marvellous stories.&quot; Hence, in default of 

 better inductions, it might have been convenient to make 

 rough classifications of the facts which were and which were 

 not to be accepted on testimony (the necessary, the impos 

 sible, &c.), and to employ these provisional inductions (which 

 is all we should now regard them) as testing the stories 

 which reached him. Propositions belonging to the class of 

 the impossible might be regarded as having an antecedent 

 presumption against them so great as to prevail over almost 

 any testimony worth taking account of, and so on. 



15. But this old four-fold division of modals con 

 tinued to be accepted and perpetuated by the logicians long 

 after all philosophical justification for it had passed away. 

 So far as I have been able to ascertain, scarcely any logician 

 of repute or popularity before Kant, was bold enough to 

 make any important change in the way of regarding them 1 . 

 Even the Port-Royal Logic, founded as it is on Cartesianism, 

 repeats the traditional statements, though with extreme 

 brevity. This adherence to the old forms led, it need not be 

 remarked, to considerable inconsistency and confusion in 

 many cases. These forms were founded, as we have seen, on 

 an objective view of the province of logic, and this view was 



1 The subject was sometimes al- tant are referred to in one passage 



together omitted, as by Wolf. He (Philosophia Rationalis sive Logica, 



says a good deal however about pro- 593). 



bable propositions and syllogisms, Lambert stands quite apart. In 



and, like Leibnitz before him, looked this respect, as in most others where 



forward to a &quot; logica probabilium&quot; mathematical conceptions and sym- 



as something new and desirable. I bols are involved, his logical attitude 



imagine that he had been influenced is thoroughly unconventional. See, 



by the writers on Chances, as of the for instance, his chapter Von dem 



few who had already treated that Wahrscheinlichen , in his Neites 



subject nearly all the most impor- Organon. 



