Page:On an Evolutionist Theory of Axioms.djvu/11

4 united diverse gifts in a remarkable way. He was an acute metaphysician and logician, a man of great artistic taste, a classical scholar, one of the foremost psychologists, and one of the foremost biologists in Germany.

To enter into the work of any one of these three dead teachers would be a great ambition. I hardly feel worthy to entertain it, much less, do I hope to realise it.

I must not forget that it was also my singular fortune to be the pupil of one of the most distinguished mathematicians in Europe, Professor Henry Smith. Would that my abilities had allowed me to profit more by his instruction.

I do not forget others distinguished in mathematics, classics, or philosophy, to whom I am indebted for instruction, but I do not name them, for I am thankful to say they are still alive.

Whatever a man's own unworthiness may be, he is allowed to praise his teachers. For me, however, the task is altogether too difficult—I have had such great teachers.

Leaving these personal matters, I propose, after giving a very short account of what I imagine, rightly or wrongly, to be the chief tendencies of English Logic, to offer a criticism of what has been thought the crowning achievement of a school of philosophy which is rather popular in England.

What is called Formal Logic, does not seem to have had many attractions for the greater number of the principal English philosophers. Something like a paradox is true of it. While its subject-matter has perhaps seemed neither to demand nor to reward any great effort of thought, the question as to how it should be defined, and what constitutes the difference between the Form and the Matter of Thought has been an object of laborious and subtle investigation to thinkers of high repute in Metaphysics.

Within Formal Logic itself, however, there has been a