Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/104

Rh 94 to the thought, and therefore to the existence, of any objective external world at all, the universal conditions of the knowable and therefore also of reality. In doing so, to use Hegel s metaphor, which is but an extension of Kepler s, we are &quot;thinking what God thought and was before the creation of the world,&quot; i.e., we are thinking the spiritual unity presupposed in all knowledge, and therefore in all objects of knowledge the consciousness in relation to which everything is, and is known. 3. The Relation of Logic to Metaphysic. The ordinary view of logic is based on two presuppositions which tend to separate it almost entirely from metaphysic : it is based on the presupposition of an opposition, or at least a merely external relation, between thought and its object, and again of an opposition, or merely external relation, between the form or method and the content or matter of thought. The intelligence is regarded as dealing with an object which is given to it externally, and to which, therefore, it can be true only if it leaves it unchanged and introduces into it nothing of its own. Truth, to use a well-known definition, is the agreement of our conceptions with their objects, and in bringing about this agreement all the concessions must be on the side of thought. Conformably to this view, the processes of thought must be purely analytic; i.e., thought may break up the given idea of the object into its con stituent elements, and again out of these elements it may recompose the idea in its unity, but it can add nothing and take nothing away. It is like an instrument which alternately dissects a solid mass into smaller parts and again mechanically presses them together, but which never penetrates and dissolves the hard matter, still less fuses it into a new form by bringing it into contact with new chemical elements. This conception, like much of the philosophy of which it is a specimen, is a kind of exaggerated caricature of one aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle. Aristotle is the great analytic philosopher. He first laid down boundaries in that continuous domain of science which Plato had first surveyed. Not that he ever completely lost sight of the unity or continuity of the different sciences which he thus distinguished. His unrivalled speculative genius is shown no where more clearly than in those not unfrequent utterances of speculative insight into the unity of things different, by which, as at a stroke, he makes his own landmarks and all landmarks to disappear. Yet such utterances generally stand by themselves, and do not alter the general analytic spirit of his philosophy. They are not so developed as to show distinctly the merely relative character of the divisions and distinctions which are set up, or the limits of the sphere within which they hold good. Hence it was easy for minds which possessed something of Aristotle s keenness of understanding without his speculative depth to neglect such expressions, or to explain them away. And this process of degradation was the more rapid as the philosophy of Aristotle soon ceased to be studied in his own writings, and became a traditionary possession of the schools. In this way we may partly explain how logic came to be regarded by mediaeval philosophy as a form of thought which could be altogether separated from the matter, and by the application of which that matter could be in no way affected or changed. But for such a view, indeed, it is difficult to conceive how the schoolmen could have ventured to apply any logical processes at all to the sacred matter of dogma. The idea of externally adding anything to the faith once delivered to the saints was excluded by the principle of authority ; and the idea of developing out of that faith anything that was not immediately contained in it had not yet presented itself to any one. Hence the business of thought seemed to be purely formal and analytic, and it was only on the plea of its being such that its activity could be tolerated at all. Nor was this view of logic at once changed by the revolt against scholasticism. The first philosophical exponents of the modern scientific movement, while they rejected the matter of dogma as fictitious, or at least as transcending the sphere of positive knowledge, and while they substituted in its place, as the object of investigation, the facts of experience, did not realize any more than the schoolmen that the form and method of knowledge could be other than analytic of given matter. Bacon, their protagonist, was above all solicitous to guard against any subjective anticipatio naturse; nor did he see that the questions which, in his theory of forms, he proposed that science should ask of nature themselves involved any preconceived theory regarding it. Conscious, as every true scientific man must be, that the study of nature involves a constant self-abnegation, a patient self- distrustful course of experiment and observation, he and his followers did not realize the presuppositions that make the inquiry possible, and by which it must be guided. Still less did they recognize that the separation between the mind and its object which they took for granted can only be a relative division, i.e., a division on the basis of a unity, and that therefore the self-abnegation of the mind in its investigation of facts cannot be an absolute self- abnegation, but is only the first step on the way to the discovery that the facts are intelligible, and so essentially related to the intelligence. Hence to them logic stiii seemed a mere analytic process, the end and aim of which was understood to be that a world, existing in itself out of relation to thought, should be reproduced in a more or less imperfect image in thought. And, when it came to be suspected by a less naive philosophy of experience that, after all, certain presuppositions, not given in experience itself, were involved in the scientific interpretation of it, various expedients were devised to reduce these presupposi tions in an indirect way to empirical truths, expedients of which Mill s attempt to base the law of causality upon an inductio per enumerationem simplice?n may be taken as the type. When we go back to Aristotle, who was the &quot; founder of logic &quot; in the sense that he was the first who treated logical method as a separate branch of science, we find that his division of logic from metaphysic is by no means so definite and complete as it was made by some of his successors. The verification of the highest principle of thought, the law of contradiction, is treated by him as the business of metaphysic. And, though he separates the idea of truth from the idea of reality, and regards the former as involving a relation of thought to a reality which is determined in itself independent of that relation, yet he does not regard this independence as by any means absolute. Truth is defined by him as a connexion or distinction of ideas which corresponds to a union or separation of things, but does not necessarily so correspond. This definition, however, holds good only in so far as things are not scientifically known, or in so far as things not essentially related are brought together Kara cru/x/3e/??;/cos. Where necessity comes in, and is apprehended by reason, the case is different. For in that case we have not merely an external synthesis, but an essential identity, i.e., a unity of elements which can neither be, nor be known, apart from each other. In relation to the principles of science, therefore, Aristotle holds that error, i.e., a connexion of ideas not corresponding to a connexion of things, is impos sible, and that the only alternatives are knowledge and ig norance. Either we possess the idea or we do not possess it ; as Aristotle otherwise expresses it, in thought we are either in contact with the things or not in contact with them; there is no third possibility. The meaning of Aristotle becomes clearer wlicr. we remember that, according to his