August 22, 1884.] 



SCIENCE, 



153 



this conclusion we are not prepared to express 

 a disagreement ; but we feel quite convinced of 

 the unprofitableness of reading three or four 

 hundred pages of particularly uninteresting 

 matter to arrive at it. 



There are two reasons why it seems especially 

 ungracious to speak so slightingly of the value 

 of Mr. Sidgwick's book. In the first place, 

 almost every page bears evidence of the author's 

 logical power and literary cleverness ; and many 

 passages are really good and valuable. There 

 is an excellent chapter on the burden of proof ; 

 the remarks on the variation in the meaning of 

 words, and many other detached discussions, 

 are admirable ; and the author is always refresh- 

 ingly severe on the subject of baseless meta- 

 physical speculation. It is pleasant, too, to 

 come upon such human, unscholastic ways of 

 putting things as we are frequently treated to. 

 Thus, on p. 128: — 



" For, besides the real danger of platitude, there is 

 an opposite danger to be avoided; namely, that of 

 unduly and vexatiously stopping an argument to have 

 the terins explained. Without wishing exactly to 

 defend those who made Socrates drink poison, one 

 still cannot help recognizing that there is a limit, be- 

 yond which the laudable desire for definiteness loses 

 its value, and becomes a hindrance and a snare. There 

 is something so fatally easy in the attitude of a sceptic 

 or mere questioner. Any child can keep demanding 

 explanations, any man sufficiently stubborn can delay 

 the most important truth by pretending not to un- 

 derstand its import. An obstructive policy of this 

 kind requires no great intellectual power; and, when 

 adopted solely for obstructive purposes, it demands, 

 as much as any thing, a rule of urgency. Life is not 

 long enough for exhaustive explanations." 



And on p. 289: — 



"Nothing could well be more confusing than an 

 attempt to apply the cumbrous machinery of the 

 syllogism to arguments met with in real life. And 

 whoever has tampered with his mother-wit by sub- 

 stituting for it a clumsy logic depending on elaborate 

 mnemonics, must, no doubt, pay the penalty in loss 

 of power, so long as the mischief remains." 



In speaking of the methods of induction, 

 as stated by Mill, the author judiciously re- 

 marks, — 



" Since there may possibly be, in some quarters, a 

 disposition to take these methods for more than they 

 were probably intended to be worth, there will per- 

 haps be some use in reminding the reader that it is 

 the guarding against the danger to which each method 

 is liable, that is in every case the all-important cir- 

 cumstance, far more so than the mere employment 

 of this or the other method." 



And a clever hit is made in introducing these 

 methods : — 



"While, as their author himself (and more lately, 

 Professor Jevons) expended labor in showing, none 

 of these is, except in an ideal sense, completely satis- 

 factory" . . . 



The other reason for one's dislike to con- 

 demn the book as a whole is, that the 

 author's faults are so largely the defauts cle ses 

 qualites. His mind is so open to even- argu- 

 ment that can be urged on either side of a 

 question, that he finds it much harder than 

 ordinary mortals do to come to a decision : and 

 he is so conscientious in his attempt to tell the 

 reader the whole truth, that he gives some 

 measure of approval to any view that has the 

 least proportion of truth in it. This scrupu- 

 lousness is most annoying and obstructive when 

 he deals with the definitions of his terms. Here 

 we have to watch a long process of painful 

 labor, sometimes over very simple matters, 

 almost always with very little result. It is, of 

 course, a vulgar error to suppose that a scien- 

 tific definition ought to be so framed that no 

 doubt can arise as to any individual case beino- 

 comprehended under it. Scientific men well 

 understand by r this time, that, however we mav 

 frame our definition, there will always be a 

 strip, more or less narrow, of debatable ground 

 along the boundary. But Mr. Sidgwick is 

 alone, we may hope, in going a step farther, 

 and carefully making his boundary run in such 

 a way that the debatable ground shall be 

 co-extensive with the whole territory. This 

 peculiar excess of refinement, which so often 

 interferes with the effectiveness of our author's 

 work, strongly reminds one of two recent im- 

 portant works on ethics and economics, and 

 almost demands the coining of the adjective 

 ' Sidgwickian ' to describe it. 



Of logical errors there are few, if any, in the 

 book ; but the author occasionally illustrates his 

 own doctrine of the difficulty of establishino- 

 a charge of fallacy, due to one's inability to 

 know how a given argument was intended to be 

 understood by its proposer. Thus, in the quo- 

 tation discussed on p. 259, et seq., we can but 

 regard the criticism as captious. If the passage 

 is an example of false analogy at all, it is so in 

 a very mild degree ; nor are the two examples 

 on p. 2G4 strikingly in point, if at all. And 

 this leads us to mention one final criticism on 

 the work, in so far as it is intended to be 

 practically useful. There are very few illustra- 

 tive examples, and a notable absence of any 

 discussion of the fallacies which have actually 

 played a part in the history of intellectual 

 progress. The author does not familiarize the 

 reader with the dangers of fallacious reasoning 

 by concrete instances, or stimulate his interest 

 by pointed discussions involving the applica- 

 tions of principles rather than "the principles 

 themselves. It would be time to write a book 

 in the spirit of this one, when evervbodv had 



