DARWIN MEMORIAL. 63 



Now the machine called logic, the tool of the metaphysician, is 

 curiously constructed. Its chief hypothesis is that man was primi- 

 tively endowed with fundamental principles as a basis of reason- 

 ing, and that these principles can be formulated. These fundamen- 

 tal 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 generalization. These fundamental 

 propositions were called major propositions. The machine, in for- 

 mal logic, was a verbal juxtaposition of propositions 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 meta- 

 physics, and metaphysic 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 with a body of 

 major propositions. It is found that in the course of the evolution 

 of mind minor propositions are discovered first, and major prop- 

 ositions are reached only by the combination of minor propositions; 

 that always in the search for truth the minor proposition comes 

 first, and that no major proposition can ever be accepted until the 

 minor propositions included therein have been demonstrated. 



The error in the metaphysic philosophy was the assumption that 

 the great truths were already known by mankind, and that by the 

 proper use of the logical machine all minor truths could be discov- 

 ered, and all errors eliminated from philosophy. As metaphysic 

 methods of reasoning were wrong, metaphysic philosophies were 

 false ; the body of metaphysic philosophy is a phantasmagoria. 



THE ORIGIN OF SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY. 



While metaphysic philosophers have been playing with their 

 logical kaleidoscopes, another body of philosophers have been at 



