a6 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



erroneously they do de facto violate those laws owing to careless 

 ness of thought, ambiguities of language, or some of the many 

 causes of error but no one does or can consciously violate them 

 by thinking a contradiction. 



They are laws not merely in the scientific sense of being uni 

 formities embodied and repeated in every conscious thought of 

 every rational being but in the deeper sense of being constrain 

 ing principles productive of such uniformities : as the law of the 

 land, though in a different way, by its binding force produces 

 uniformity of conduct in the citizens. 



They are a priori laws or principles in the sense that they are 

 not mere generalizations arrived at by experience like the physi 

 cal laws of falling bodies, for example but reveal themselves as 

 directly operative in our very first conscious thoughts about things ; 

 not, however, in the sense of their being innate endowments pos 

 sessed by the mind antecedently to all thought and experience. 



They are forma! in the sense that their validity is absolutely 

 universal and entirely independent of the particular subject-matter 

 on which our thought may be exercised ; not, however, in the sense 

 that their inviolable necessity and universal applicability result 

 exclusively from the constitution of the mind, which is the subject 

 of thought, and not at all from the nature and constitution of the 

 reality which is the object of thought. 



Conceptualist logicians are wont to assume that the necessity and univer 

 sality of those laws of thought are grounded exclusively in the subjective factor 

 of thought the mind. But such an assumption is both unnecessary and un 

 warranted in logic besides being erroneous. Whether these first principles 

 of Thought are not also first principles of Being, of Reality ; whether their 

 necessity is not ultimately grounded in the matter of thought as well as in its 

 form, in the object no less than in the subject ; and whether therefore they 

 do not apply to all being as well as to all thought it is the province of meta 

 physics, rather than of logic, to decide. Nowhere yet, at all events, has 

 any valid reason been advanced why we should doubt the soundness of man s 

 spontaneous convictions that the necessary truth of those self-evident first 

 principles is rooted in the nature of things no less than in the nature of thought 

 (10). They not merely assure us that we cannot think that a thing can be 

 other than itself, or that we cannot conceive a thing being and not being at 

 the same time and in the same respect, or that we are forced to think that a 

 thing must either possess a certain attribute or not possess it : they assure us 

 that the things themselves are so, as we think them, and that it is not merely 

 a matter of how we must think about things, but also a matter of how things 

 really are. 



Of course they refer primarily to our thoughts, i.e. our judgments about 

 things. It is just because they are seen to be true of all conceivable things 



