i 



218 Charles Darwin. 



of poetic but superficial analogies. In the mental 

 activity of that time many new philosophies were 

 proposed, diverse and contradictory ; and the wisest 

 philosophers said, " How shall we know the truth? " 

 And they endeavoured to discover some criterion by 

 which truth should be known. This resulted in the 

 development oi formal logic 2^.% a testing machine 

 into which opinions were put for the purpose of sift- 

 ing truth from error. 



Now the machine called logic, the tool of the 

 metaphysician, is curiously constructed. Its chief 

 hypothesis is that man was primitively endowed 

 with fundamental principles as a basis of reasoning, 

 and that these principles can be formulated. These 

 fundamental principles are supposed to be universal, 

 and to be everywhere accepted by mankind as self- 

 evident propositions of the highest order and of the 

 broadest generalisation. These fundamental propo- 

 sitions were called major propositions. The machine, 

 in formal logic, was a verbal juxtaposition of propo- 

 sitions with the major propositions at the head, 

 followed by the minor propositions, and from this 

 truth was supposed to flow. 



This formal logic of the Aristotelian epoch has 

 lived from that period to the period of science. 

 Logic is the instrument of metaphysics, and meta- 

 physic philosophy, in its multifarious forms, is the 

 product of logic. But during all that time — 2,000 

 years — no truth has been discovered, no error has 

 been detected by the use of the logical machine. 

 Its fundamental assumption is false. 



It has been discovered that man is not endowed 



