20 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



whether constructive or didactic, trains the mind to careful reflection and 

 develops the critical faculty. 



In the first place, it certainly gives one the habit of disentangling and 

 clearing up his ideas, of arranging them in order, of introducing rigorous 

 logical sequence among them. 



Then, secondly, it teaches us to distinguish certainty from probability, 

 truth from appearances, science from plausible theorizing, and established 

 conclusions from unverified hypotheses. 



Thirdly, it inculcates a spirit of disinterested inquiry after the truth. In 

 Scholastic philosophy truth is regarded in its native, unadorned beauty, so to 

 speak ; it is sought for its own sake, and with a dispassionate calm : to the 

 Scholastic, rhetoric makes no appeal : mere rhetoric excites the imagination 

 and emotions, disturbs the balance of judgment, begets confusion of ideas, and 

 hasty, ill-considered views. An inflammatory discourse that will arouse an 

 untrained audience to the highest pitch of passion or enthusiasm may not be 

 able to stand the test of a cold analysis, or the logic of the syllogism. The 

 language of Scholasticism is the very antithesis of rhetorical. It &quot; simply and 

 solely expresses the intellectual concept, abstracting from all its relations to 

 the other faculties of the soul, and from the reactions it may call forth in them. 

 All possible obstacles between the mind and the objective truth are pitilessly 

 set aside. Its style, stripped of all ornament, free from all feeling and senti 

 ment and all the artifices of rhetoric, and hence so often accused of crudeness 

 and barbarism, has all the exactness and precision of a mathematical formula 

 or proposition ; it is pre-eminently truthful and clear. It was methodically 

 and most successfully shaped into the aptest possible instrument for the 

 systematization of thought : the instrument that was to build up the great 

 Summae, whose materials lay scattered for generations through a whole 

 world of literature. Reduced to the simple form and proportions of proposi 

 tion and syllogism, those truths could be logically moulded into an organic 

 whole in which each part received a prominence due to its relative import 

 ance.&quot; 1 We are often nowadays reminded of what Plato said : We ought 

 to tend to the truth with our whole soul avv 6X17 rfj faxd f TO Sv 

 &amp;lt;at TOV ovros ro (fravoTorov . . . TOUTO 8 (ival (fraptv TayaBov.* The Schol 

 astics receive those words with respect, but .also with caution. When the 

 truth is known, yes, by all means, let us love it, embrace it with all the ardour 

 of our souls, act up to it, work for it, suffer for it if needs be, and if duty 

 demands the sacrifice. But in searching for the truth our chance of finding 

 it will be in proportion to the degree in which our intellect succeeds in laying 

 aside all considerations foreign to the truth itself. At bottom, the truth is 

 always good, always truly useful, therefore ; of that there can be no doubt. 

 But this or that doctrine, which is subjectively judged to be useful, may not be 

 so in reality ; and some other, judged to be dangerous, may be the only one 

 truly useful in the long run, because it happens to be the one that is really 

 true. 



Fourthly and finally, the Scholastic method counteracts the narrowing 

 influence exerted on the mind by a constant and exclusive contact with the 



1 P. RICHARD, Etude critique sur le but et la nature de la scolastique (Revue 

 Thomiste, May and November, 1904). 



2 PLATO, Republic, vii. 



