GENERAL VIEW OF NATURE AND SCOPE OF LOGIC. 21 



This view of the Science of Logic is too narrow, and moreover 

 it is based on the erroneous assumption that the forms of thought 

 are completely separable from its matter, and that it is only from 

 the forms of thought that universal and necessary laws of thought 

 can arise. As a matter of fact, the form of any individual thought 

 can never be separated from its matter, although we can dis 

 tinguish between these elements, and although either can change 

 while the other remains the same. 



The forms of thought are the natural grooves, so to speak, in which, 

 owing to our actual mental constitution, our thought always runs, the ways 

 in which we think. The matter is the thing or object thought about, the 

 content as opposed to the form. When an object of thought is represented 

 in the intellect by an abstract, universal idea, the result of an act of simple 

 apprehension or conception, the idea with its properties may be said to be a 

 form of our thought. When we analyse that object more fully and proceed to 

 make mental assertions, judgments, about it, the form has changed from idea 

 to judgment, the matter remaining unchanged. When, further, we proceed 

 to reason^ to make inferences about that object, the form is again changed. 

 Concepts, judgments, inferences : these are forms of thought. And obviously 

 we may change the matter, the form remaining unchanged : e.g. from reason 

 ing about one subject we may pass to reasoning in the same way about an 

 entirely different subject. 



&quot; There is a sense in which Logic is undoubtedly formal. By forms we 

 mean what is the same in many individuals called materially different the 

 device, for example, on different coins struck from the same die, or the an 

 atomical structure of different vertebrates, or the identical mode in which the 

 law requires the different Colleges of the University to publish their accounts. 

 And all science is formal in the sense that it deals with what is common to 

 different individuals. ... So the logician studies the forms of thinking, such 

 as that involved in referring a quality to a subject possessing it ; but when he 

 has once grasped the nature of this act of thought, he is quite uninterested in 

 the thousand different occasions on which it is performed during the day ; 

 they differ only materially, as to what quality is referred to what subject ; 

 formally, so far as the notion of a quality existing in a subject is concerned, they 

 are the same ; and the forms that run through all our thinking about different 

 matters are what he studies.&quot; 



&quot; But those who have insisted most that Logic is a formal science, or the 

 science of the formal laws of thought, have not merely meant that Logic is in 

 this like other sciences, \\hich all deal with what is formal or universal in their 

 subject-matter. They have meant to exclude from Logic any consideration 

 of forms or modes of thinking which are not alike exemplified in thinking 

 about absolutely every subject. . . . But the truth is that we think in different 

 ways about different kinds of subject, and therefore we must, if we wish to 

 study the principles which regulate our thinking, consider to some extent the 

 differences in the matter about which we think. . . . The most general forms 

 of thought exist diversely modified in thinking about different matters ; and 

 they can no more be fully known without attending to the different matters in 



