DEFINITION AN T D PROVINCE OF LOGIC. 15 



muscles were vitiated by local weakness, or other 

 physical defect, a knowledge of their anatomy might 

 be very necessary for effecting a cure. But we should 

 be justly liable to the criticism involved in this objec- 

 tion, were we, in a treatise on Logic, to carry the 

 analysis of the reasoning process beyond the point at 

 which any inaccuracy which may have crept into it 

 must become visible. In learning bodily exercises (to 

 carry on the same illustration) we do, and must, 

 analyze the bodily motions so far as is necessary for 

 distinguishing those which ought to be performed 

 from those which ought not. To a similar extent, 

 and no further, it is necessary that the logician should 

 analyze the mental processes with which Logic is 

 concerned. Any ulterior and minuter analysis must 

 be left to transcendental metaphysics; which in this, 

 as in other parts of our mental nature, decides 

 what are ultimate facts, and what are resolvable into 

 other facts. And I believe it will be found that 

 the conclusions arrived at in this work have no 

 necessary connexion with any particular views re- 

 specting the ulterior analysis. Logic is common 

 ground on which the partisans of Hartley and of 

 Reid, of Locke and of Kant, may meet and join 

 hands. Particular and detached opinions of all these 

 philosophers will no doubt occasionally be controverted, 

 since all of them were logicians as well as metaphy- 

 sicians ; but the field on which their great battles have 

 been fought, lies beyond the boundaries of our science ; 

 and the views which will be here promulgated, may, I 

 believe, be held in conjunction with the principal 

 conclusions of any one of their systems of philosophy. 

 It cannot, indeed, be pretended that logical prin- 

 ciples can be altogether irrelevant to those more 

 abstruse discussions; nor is it possible but that the 



