THE RELATIONS OF LOGIC TO OTHER DISCIPLINES 



BY PROFESSOR WILLIAM A. HAMMOND 



[William Alexander Hammond, Assistant Professor of Ancient and Medieval 

 Philosophy and ^Esthetics, Cornell University, b. May 20, 1861, New Ath- 

 ens, Ohio. A. B. Harvard, 1885; Ph.D. Leipzig, 1891. Lecturer on Classics, 

 King's College, Windsor, N. S., 1885-88; Secretary of the University Fac- 

 ulty, Cornell; Member American Psychological Association, American 

 Philosophical Association. Author of The Characters of Theophrastus, 

 translated with Introduction ; Aristotle's Psychology, translated with Intro- 

 duction.] 



IN 1787, in the preface to the second edition of the Kr. d. r. V., Kant 

 wrote the following words: "That logic, from the earliest times, 

 has followed that secure method " (namely, the secure method of a 

 science witnessed by the unanimity of its workers and the stability 

 of its results) " may be seen from the fact that since Aristotle it has 

 not had to retrace a single step, unless we choose to consider as 

 improvements the removal of some unnecessary subtleties, or the 

 clearer definition of its matter, both of which refer to the elegance 

 rather than to the solidity of the science. It is remarkable, also, that 

 to the present day, it has not been able to make one step in advance, 

 so that to all appearances it may be considered as completed and 

 perfect. If some modern philosophers thought to enlarge it, by 

 introducing psychological chapters on the different faculties of 

 knowledge (faculty of imagination, wit, etc.), or metaphysical chapters 

 on the origin of knowledge or different degrees of certainty accord- 

 ing to the difference of objects (idealism, skepticism, etc.), or, lastly, 

 anthropological chapters on prejudices, their causes and remedies, 

 this could only arise from their ignorance of the peculiar nature of 

 logical science. We do not enlarge, but we only disfigure the sciences, 

 if we allow their respective limits to be confounded ; and the limits 

 of logic are definitely fixed by the fact that it is a science which has" 

 nothing to do but fully to exhibit and strictly to prove the formal 

 rules of all thought (whether it be a priori or empirical, whatever be 

 its origin or its object, and whatever be the impediments, accidental 

 or natural, which it has to encounter in the human mind). " [Trans- 

 lated by Max Miiller.] Scarcely more than half a century after the 

 publication of this statement of Kant's, John Stuart Mill (Intro- 

 duction to System of Logic) wrote: "There is as great diversity 

 among authors in the modes which they have adopted of defining 

 logic, as in their treatment of the details of it. This is what 

 might naturally be expected on any subject on which writers have 

 availed themselves of the same language as a means of delivering 

 different ideas. . . . This diversity is not so much an evil to be 



