The Essentials of Logic

In this course of lectures I have attempted to carry out, under the freer conditions of the University Extension system, a purpose conceived many years ago at Oxford. It was suggested to me by the answer of a friend, engaged like myself from time to time in teaching elementary Logic, to the question which I put to him, "What do you aim at in teaching Logic to beginners? What do you think can reasonably be hoped for?" "If the men could learn what an Inference is, it would be something," was the reply.

The course of lectures which I now publish was projected in the spirit thus indicated. Though only the two last discourses deal explicitly with Inference, yet those which precede them contribute, I hope, no less essentially, to explain the nature of that single development which in some stages we call Judgment, and in others Inference. So far as I could see, the attempt to go to the heart of the subject, however imperfectly executed, was appreciated by the students, and was rewarded with a serious attention which would not have been commanded by the trivialities of formal Logic, although more entertaining and less abstruse.

The details of traditional terminology may be found in Jevons's Elementary Lessons in Logic (Macmillan). Those who desire to pursue the study more in the sense of the present work, may be referred above all to Bradley's Principles of Logic, and also to Lotze's Logic (E. Tr.), and to Sigwart's great work on Logic, the English translation of which, just completed, opens a storehouse of knowledge and robust good sense to the English student. My own larger Logic expresses in extenso the views which these lectures set out in a shorter form.

I hope it will be admitted by my critics that this experiment, whether successful or unsuccessful, was worth making, and that except in the University Extension system, it could not easily have been made.

Bernard Bosanquet. London, January 1895.

In most other sciences, even in the philosophical sciences, there is a continual stimulus to sense-perception, to curiosity, to human interest. The learner is called upon to dissect animals or plants, to undertake delicate manipulations with beautifully contrived instruments, to acquaint himself with the history of nations, with the genesis of worlds, with strange and novel speculations upon the nature of space, or with the industry and well-being of various classes among mankind at the present day. And these elements of novelty, these stimulations of sense-perception or of practical interest, carry us forward imperceptibly, and sustain our eagerness to analyse and combine in theoretic completeness the novel matter thus constantly impinging upon us.

In Philosophy, and more especially in Logic, we can promise little or nothing of this kind. The teacher of Philosophy, from Socrates downwards, has talked about common things, things already familiar to his hearers. And although he calls upon them to think of these things in a peculiar way, and from an unaccustomed point of view, yet it is likely to be felt that he is demanding a new effort, without supplying a new interest. And it is a common experience, that after a time the mind rebels against this artificial attitude, which fatigues without instructing, if we have accustomed ourselves to understand by instruction the accumulation of new sense-perceptions and the extension of historical or scientific vision over a wider superficial area.

Now this I cannot help, and I will not disguise. In Philosophy, and in Logic above all, it must be so. The whole point and meaning of the study is that in it we re-traverse familiar ground, and survey it by unfamiliar processes. We do not, except accidentally, so much as widen our mental horizon. For those who care to understand, to trace the connecting principles and functions that permeate our intellectual world, there is indeed an interest of a peculiar kind. But even experienced students will occasionally feel the strain of attending to difficult distinctions, entirely without the excitement of novelty in sense-perception or of a practical bearing upon human life. It is this that makes Logic probably the hardest of all the sciences.

The problem stated

2. We cannot hope to vanquish this difficulty unless we face it boldly from the first. There are in the old-fashioned Logic-books tricks and puzzles, fallacies and repartees, which can in some degree be made amusing; but of these I do not intend to speak. The course by which alone I can hope honestly to awaken a true logical interest among any who may be quite unfamiliar with the subject, is to approach the matter descriptively, and try to set before you fully and fairly what the problem is which the process of knowledge has to meet. And then it may be possible to claim a genuine theoretical curiosity—none the less genuine that it may be tinged with a sympathy for man's common birthright of intelligence—for the detailed explanation of the means by which this problem is solved from day to day. Such an explanation is the science of Logic.

The problem may be thus introduced. Several of those present have, I believe, attended a previous course of lectures on Psychology. They have learned, I presume, to think of the mind as the course of consciousness, a continuous connected presentation, more or less emphasising within it various images, and groups of images and ideas, which may be roughly said to act and re-act upon each other, to cohere in systems, and to give rise to the perception of self. This course of consciousness, including certain latent elements, the existence of which it is necessary to assume, is an individual mind, attached to a particular body, and so far as we know, not separable from the actions and affections of that body. What is the connection between such a course of consciousness in any individual, and the world as that individual knows and wills it? This is the point at which Psychology passes into Logic. Psychology treats of the course of ideas and feelings; Logic of the mental construction of reality. How does the course of my private ideas and feelings contain in it, for me, a world of things and persons which are not merely in my mind?

World as Idea

3. Schopenhauer called his great work, The World as Will and Idea. Leaving out Will for the moment, let us consider the world "as Idea."

"'The world is my idea;' this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as an idea, i.e. only in relation to something else, the consciousness which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this; for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, space, or causality, for they all pre-suppose it.

...

"No truth, therefore, is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject and exists only for the subject. The world is idea."

E. Tr. (Trubner, 1883).

Schopenhauer, op. cit. beginning.

The world, then, for each of us, exists in the medium of our mind. It is a sort of building, of which the materials are our ideas and perceptions.

The "world"

4. So much for "idea." What do we mean by "world"? A succession of images passing before us, or rather making up our consciousness, like a dream, is not a world. The term is very expressive; it is a favourite word in Shakespeare. When the courtier says —

"Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you,"

he does not mean, as I used to think, "in heaven"; he means in a better condition of social affairs. In "mad world, mad kings, mad composition," the term means more especially the set of political and family connections within which extraordinary reversals of behaviour have just taken place. Often we use the expression, with a qualifying epithet, to indicate some particular sphere of connected action, "the ecclesiastical world," "the political world," and so forth. Always there seems to be implied the notion of a set of things or persons bound together by some common quality which enables them to act upon each other, and to constitute what is technically termed a "whole." The "world" par excellence, then, ought to mean the one connected set of things and persons which we all recognise and refer to as the same, and as including ourselves along with all who use the word in the same sense.

Then the "world as idea" means no less than this, that the system of things and persons which surrounds all of us, and which each of us speaks of and refers to as the same for every one, exists for each of us as something built up in his own mind—the mind attached to his own body—and out of the material of his own mind.

The animal's world