Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/134

 VI. CRITICAL NOTICES. The Principles of Logic. By F. H. BRADLEY, LL.D., Glasgow ; Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883. Pp. xvii., 534. Mr. Bradley's work comes very opportunely. It is a charac- teristic feature of much of the best philosophical work of the present time that it consists in the main of revision of funda- mental principles. A period of eminently constructive work lies behind us, and it is not impossible that much of the present stir may signify only the process of coming to understand what has been done. But it is true now, as at all times, that a philosophic view is only to be attained from one's own position, and that a comprehensive philosophic method can only become living and fruitful if it connects itself and is penetrated with the thoughts of the present. There is no simple tradition in philosophy and, if a method or system is accepted, the ground must lie in the fact that its leading idea has proved itself capable of expanding so as to cover the new aspects under which the perennial problems have appeared. It is but natural that the process of scrutinising first principles, and testing them by application to the great body of questions that has always formed the material of philosophy should appear, when regarded from a somewhat external point of view, like a chaos of disjointed and mutually opposing tendencies. Certainly the present state of the study of Logic has this appearance. If one takes only the representative English writings in that depart- ment, one cannot but be struck by the apparently boundless diversity of view in regard to every matter of fundamental im- portance. Province and method of the science, auxiliary prin- ciples with which to make the approach to logical doctrines, theory of the doctrines themselves in no one of these points is there anything like an established view, a common basis. It is not many years since one might have said that, on the whole, putting aside the merely historical teaching of what is erroneously entitled the Aristotelian logic, English writing on the subject might have been fairly distributed under two main heads : on the one hand, a purely formal logic, basing itself, though perhaps unwittingly, on an extremely imperfect psychology, supporting itself by appeal to the high authority of Kant, and claiming to have effected, if at a cost of rejecting the most interesting ques- tions, a purification and scientific limitation of the sphere of logical discussion ; on the other hand, a general theory of know- ledge, likewise involving much disputable psychology, but rightly claiming to represent more truthfully than its rival the actual process of thought as exemplified in scientific work, and so