Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/146

 134 F. H. BBADLEY'S PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC. and to be products of ideal experimentations, do in themselves involve the fundamental categories of universal, particular and individual of whose connexion the syllogism is but the form. That from these categories taken in abstrado inferences in con- crete matter can be drawn is of course false, but it does not seem at all needful, in order to rescue the syllogism from oblivion, to insist that concrete thinking involves nothing more than these abstract categories. To reject the syllogism and to lay all stress upon these processes construction, comparison, abstraction and the like is to tend towards a purely subjective reading of thought, and to interpret the real as a kind of unknowable, foreign to thought, and only assumed, on grounds good or bad, to conform in some way to it. With much care and elaboration Mr. Bradley in his Third Book works out the forms in which as it seems to him in- ference really proceeds, finally bringing them under the two rubrics Analysis and _Synthfisjs, with indication of a third process (perfiaps" System) at the root of which lies the ultimate idea of the real as concrete individuality, unfolding itself in its peculiar forms into all the richness of existence. Such third process, which perhaps connects itself with the class of judgments not expressly handled, those in which the subject is non-pheno- menal reality, is but hinted at, and the problem raised by it is treated in the concluding chapters from a narrower point of view. Bj:iefly_,_^h^jC[Uje^tionJih.ej:e raised is that of the validity of inference a many-sided question, the mere formulation of which in its true terms is philosophy at large. Mr. Bradley approaches it from various sides, discussing the relation of ground of know- ledge to ground of existence, of formal validity to real truth, and finally of knowing as a whole to fact known. The difficulty, which no one will be more ready to acknowledge than Mr. Bradley himself, of coming to a perfect understanding with re- gard to the significance of the terms employed in so abstruse a discussion, and the dependence of any meaning on a more or less developed philosophic view, render it impossible to do more than remark on one or two of the aspect of the treatment here given. Mr. Bradley refers in his discussion to Lotze, and most readers of the Loyik will remember the stringent criticism to which the claims of logical forms to real validity are subjected. But, at the same time, it ought not to be forgotten that such criticism rested on a metaphysical basis, on a theory of the soul and of psychical life, which rendered it absolutely necessary to regard logical forms as being mere products of the psychological mechanism under certain presuppositions. The whole difficulty which rises out of the very term ' truth ' was simply cast back into the undetermined field of assumptions ; for by these assump- tions only can ' reality ' have a significance for us. To follow in this track is to play with the tenn ' reality ' and to be driven in the long run to the citput mortumn of the ' thing- in-itself '. I