ch. ix.] PHILOSOPHY AS AN OBGANON. 235 



syllogistic logic. He held, and justly, that something besides 

 the scholastic quibbling over Baroco, Camestres and Barbara, 

 was needed in prosecuting the search after new truths. To 

 attempt, by prolonged dealing in these dialectic subtleties, to 

 acquire the art of correct reasoning, was, in his opinion, 

 much like trying to learn the art of correct speaking by pro- 

 longed study of the rules of grammar. Men do not learn to 

 swim, to fence, or to hunt, by reading elaborate treatises on 

 gymnastics and sportsmanship. The study of rhetoric, how- 

 ever thorough, careful and systematic, will never of itself 

 enable us to write a clear and forcible style. We may know 

 all the commandments of ethics by heart, and be able to 

 utter the soundest judgment upon the comparative merits of 

 the utilitarian and the intuitional theories, and yet be unable 

 to lead upright lives. And similarly we may go on stringing 

 together majors and minors until we are grey, and yet after 

 all be unable to make an accurate observation, or perform a 

 legitimate induction. Therefore, according to Comte, logic is 

 not so much a science as an art, indispensable in the prose- 

 cution of all the sciences, but to be learned only by practice. 

 As philosophy, regarded as a general conception of the 

 universe, has hitherto, like the mistletoe, had its roots in the 

 air, but has now been brought down and securely planted in 

 the fertile soil of scientific knowledge, so let us no longer 

 permit logic to remain in isolation, feeding upon airy nothings, 

 but let us bring it down and nourish it with scientific 

 methods. As we learn to live rightly, not by dogmatic in- 

 struction, but by the assiduous practice of right living, as we 

 learn to speak properly and to write forcibly by practice and 

 not by theory, so let us gain control of the various instru- 

 ments for investigating Nature by the study of the several 

 sciences in which those instruments come into play. To 

 become skilful in the use of deduction, let us study mathe- 

 matics, especially in its direct applications to the solution of 

 problems in astronomy and physics. If we would become 



