NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 651 



— "Socrates, man, mortal.'' But we also have • Sorites ' 

 — Socrates, man, animal, machine, run down, mortal, etc. — 

 and it violates psychology to represent these as syllogisms 

 with terms suppressed. The ground of there being any 

 logic at all is our power to grasp any series as a whole, 

 and the more terms it holds the better. This synthetic 

 consciousness of an uniform direction of advance through 

 a multiplicity of terms is, apparently, what the brutes and 

 lower men cannot accomplish, and what gives to us our 

 extraordinary povv'er of ratiocinative thought. The mind 

 which can grasp a string of is's as a whole — the objects 

 linked by them may be ideal or real, physical, mental, or 

 symbolic, indifferentl}- — can also apply to it the principle 

 of skipped intermediaries. The logic-list is thus in its origin 

 and essential nature just like those graded classijicatory lists 

 which ive ereiohile described. The ' rational proposition' which 

 lies at the basis of all reasoning, the dictum de omni et nullo 

 in all the various forms in which it may be expressed, 

 the fundamental law of thought, is thus only the result o/ 

 the function of comparison in a mind which has come by 

 some lucky variation to apprehend a series of more than 

 two terms at once.* So far, then, both Systematic Classic- 

 cation and Logic are seen to be incidentcd results of the mere 

 capacity for discerning difference and likeness, which capacity 

 is a thing with which the order of experience, properly so 

 styled, has absolutely nothing to do. 



But how comes it (it may next be asked) when sys- 

 tematic classifications have so little ultimate theoretic im- 

 portance — for the conceiving of things according to their 

 mere degrees of resemblance always yields to other modes 

 of conceiving when these can be obtained — that the logical 

 relations among things should form such a mighty engine 

 for dealing with the facts of life ? 



Chapter XXII already gave the reason (see p. 335, 

 above). This world might be a world in which all things 

 differed, and in which what properties there were were 



* A mind, in other words, which has got beyond the merely dichotomic 

 style of thought which Wundt alleges to be the essential form of human 

 thinking (Physiol. Psych., ii. 312). 



