Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/135

 F. H. BRADLEY'S mryirLEx OF u><n<'. 1-2H extending its boundaries as to be able only by arbitrary refusal to reject the deeper questions inevitably raised by any discussion of the nature of knowledge. In a multiplicity of ways, complete dissolution of the one, and partial dissolution of the other of these apparently compact doctrines has been brought about, and now the state of Logic is like that of Israel under the Judges : every man doeth that which is right in his own eyes. Even when a writer is aware that fundamental difficulties lie in the way of the view upon which he is proceeding, he claims the right to act as did the prudent divine, to look the difficulty in the face and pass on. The reader is perplexed by continual references to a distinction between logical and non-logical, a very phantom on which he can lay no hold, but which in some strange fashion appears to regulate his author's proceedings and to extricate him when any formidable danger is at hand. Each Lc presents some new arrangement of material, some fresh classification of notions, judgments, and the like, some novel way of getting over an old familiar stile, but it is rare indeed that in any such treatment a really vigorous effort is made to show the grounds for all that is advanced and so allow the reader to form what our German friends call an objective opinion. Affairs are no better, perhaps to some they may appear worse, among the German logicians. In that speculative domain. /.' swarm as bees in spring-time. Many of them, it is true, do not aspire to more tnan merely academic honours ; they are text-books from which the reader may learn a little, and by which he may to some extent be disciplined in thinking. But. these apart, there have been supplied by German writers within the last few years quite half-a-dozen treatises of a much higher order, com- prehensive, elaborate, based on principles of some sort, and each giving an altogether individual and new reading of the funda- mental logical processes. He who endeavours to extract from the LI ><_ i i&* of Lotze, Sigwart, Bergmann, Schuppe. even if he does not extend consideration to the somewhat earlier but yet living works of Ulrici, Trendeleuburg and Ueberweg, a systematic representa- tion of logical doctrines, has before him a task to which the labours of Hercules were simple. He will doubtless be able to discover that in some fashion all are treating of the same fact, whether it be described as thought or knowledge ; more of agree- ment than this he will hardly find. In the mass and in detail, each treatment pursues its own way, and supports itself by a more or less explicit reference to something else, whether psycho- logy, or metaphysics, or common sense, or philology, or anthro- pology, or what not. Classifications and distinctions are intro- duced, on grounds sufficient or insufficient but invariably diverse, and thus, in so cardinal a matter as the distribution of the forms of judgment, we are presented not only with such rearrangement of the comparatively familiar types as indicates a novel point of view, but with a variety of new forms, substantial and accidental,