Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/129

Rh account of the derivation of the material of the judgment, inductive logic is still hampered by the scholastic conception of thought. Secondly, the empirical logic begins with sensation as a basis for the superstructure of epistemology; now, apart from the question of the metaphysical meaning of sensationalism, this basis is still not fact, this analysis not the analysis of scientific method as such, but the analysis of something back of the fact of science. Inductive logic, then, is not a free, unprejudiced inquiry into the special forms and methods of science, starting from the actual sciences themselves, but is built up with reference to the scholastic notion of thought. Transcendental logic has been one with inductive logic in rejecting formal logic as not a method or a criterion of truth. Further, transcendental logic shows not only that it is impossible to get valid truth out of the formal scholastic thought, but that there is no such thought at all. It thus advances beyond the empirical logic in discarding altogether scholastic logic, and in trying to form its theory of thought by simply following the principles of the actual process by which man has thus far in history discovered and possessed fact. Hegel is the quintessence of the scientific spirit (while Kant starts from scholastic conceptions of thought). What Hegel means by objective thought is the meaning and the significance of fact itself; and by methods of thought simply the processes in which this meaning of fact is evolved; his reference is not to some outside action of thought in maintaining fact as an object of knowledge, but to the entire structure of fact itself. Hegel denies the existence of any faculty of thought which is other than the expression of fact itself; he contends not that thought in the scholastic sense has validity, but that reality is significant, and thus really anticipates the actual outcome of the scientific spirit. To-day we are at a point where we may, through the successes of scientific method, talk of the rationality of fact. Science, in fact, can afford to lose its fear of metaphysic and attempt to build up the intrinsic method of its domain. The present position of logical theory, then, is that the abstract and general lines of logical theory will run into the particular and isolated lines of positive science.

H.'s question is whether deduction involves something quite different from generalization, or is the same thing under a different aspect, or a particular species of the same thing; in any case can it be found to imply any single axiom, and if so, what is the relation of that axiom to the axiom of induction? Taking first syllogism as deduction, he finds that the conclusion of a syllogism is implicit in the premises on no