LOGIC AND KINDRED SCIENCES. 39 



study of logic : a facility in detecting error in reasoning pro 

 cesses, and a consequent likelihood of avoiding such errors, and 

 of thinking and reasoning about difficult matters with clearness 

 and consistency a capacity much rarer, even among educated 

 people, than is commonly suspected. 



But there is another and perhaps greater utility in the 

 study of logic : the advantage of the admirable mental discipline 

 which the study of the science indirectly and unconsciously in 

 volves. It is by this mental training rather than by the explicit, 

 positive knowledge of its technical rules, that logic gives us the 

 power and the habit of thinking clearly. Probably more than 

 any other science, a careful study of logic trains and develops 

 the reasoning powers, and not merely the power of thinking con 

 sistently , but the power of discovering and proving truth. 



Yet another and no small advantage of logic is that it gives 

 us some insight into the nature and powers of our own minds, arid 

 suggests to us in one way or another perhaps most of the great 

 problems with which it is the function of philosophy to deal : 

 hence its value as an introduction to philosophy. 



Of course the exclusive study of the more formal, deductive, abstract 

 side of our reasoning processes might easily result in an abnormal and one 

 sided mental development. And it may be admitted that an occasional undue 

 accentuation of such studies is perhaps partially accountable for the reaction 

 which has manifested itself in an affected distaste and disregard for logic in 

 some centres of education and intellectual culture. The English mind has 

 never been remarkable for any deep respect for logical consistency. It has an 

 undeniable respect for concrete facts, and protests against the abstract as if 

 the abstract were unreal. Cardinal Newman s attitude, for instance, towards 

 the traditional, deductive, abstract logic, was unsympathetic. Yet, in the 

 main, his Grammar of Assent, so far from discouraging the study of logic, 

 will prove an invaluable aid to the latter if only by acting as a wholesome cor 

 rective against the possible danger of over-emphasizing the role of the pure 

 reasoning faculty and under-estimating the place and the importance of those 

 more delicate and complex mental processes by which we arrive at practical 

 conclusions concerning the concrete facts and phenomena of real life. 



25. SOURCES AND HISTORY OF LOGIC. * Most of the questions 

 studied nowadays in logic were dealt with by Aristotle in several 



figures, what information, if any, does this proposition give us concerning things 

 which are not triangles ? As to untrained thinkers, they seldom discriminate be 

 tween the most widely distinct assertions. De Morgan has remarked, in more than 

 one place, that a beginner, when asked what follows from Every A is B, answers 

 4 Every B is A of course &quot; (JEVONS, Studies in Deductive Logic, Pref. ix, x). 



1 Cf. VEITCH, Institutes of Logic, Part i., ch. ii. and iii. ; PRANTL, Geschichte 

 der Logik. 



