Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/73

Rh His chief anxiety seemed to be to make it impossible that Mr. Jevons should appear as in any way authorized by him. In later years Mr. Jevons was heard to say: "Boole means something that no one has understood yet; the world is not ready to understand him." The solution of Mr. Jevons' perplexity might have been found in the very title of the work on which he was commenting. The symbols which such logicians as he quite rightly discard from Boole's notation, because they are useless and cumbersome and even misleading when employed to work out logical problems, are the necessary implements which those must learn to use who wish to apply mathematical processes to analyze for themselves the Laws of Thought. Had George Boole been chiefly aiming to supply logicians with a ready-made method, his method must be confessed a very bad one; he was aiming to set the example of studying the Laws of Mental Action.

The nature of the change introduced by George Boole into logical analysis may be summed up thus:—In working a sum or equation, we seem to ourselves to be only manipulating and transforming the particular statements contained in the so-called "stating" of our question. But these very transformations are effected by means of our knowledge of certain general truths about number, such, for instance, as those registered in the multiplication-table. "Working" a sum means combining its special statements with general statements which are latent in the mind. Working a thought-sum, then, should mean transforming its premises by combining them with our general knowledge of the Laws of Mental Action. And, in fact, the Aristotelian