Page:An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854, Boole, investigationofl00boolrich).djvu/55

CHAP. III.] CHAPTER III. DERIVATION OF THE LAWS OF THE SYMBOLS OF LOGIC FROM THE LAWS OF THE OPERATIONS OF THE HUMAN MIND. HE object of science, properly so called, is the knowledge of laws and relations. To be able to distinguish what is essential to this end, from what is only accidentally associated with it, is one of the most important conditions of scientific progress. I say, to distinguish between these elements, because a consistent devotion to science does not require that the attention should be altogether withdrawn from other speculations, often of a metaphysical nature, with which it is not unfrequently connected. Such questions, for instance, as the existence of a sustaining ground of phænomena, the reality of cause, the propriety of forms of speech implying that the successive states of things are connected by operations, and others of a like nature, may possess a deep interest and significance in relation to science, without being essentially scientific. It is indeed scarcely possible to express the conclusions of natural science without borrowing the language of these conceptions. Nor is there necessarily any practical inconvenience arising from this source. They who believe, and they who refuse to believe, that there is more in the relation of cause and effect than an invariable order of succession, agree in their interpretation of the conclusions of physical astronomy. But they only agree because they recognise a common element of scientific truth, which is independent of their particular views of the nature of causation. If this distinction is important in physical science, much more does it deserve attention in connexion with the science of the intellectual powers. For the questions which this science presents become, in expression at least, almost necessarily mixed up with modes of thought and language, which betray a metaphysical origin. The idealist would give to the laws of reasoning