A new logic / by Charles Mercier.

  • Mercier, Charles Arthur, 1852-1919.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A new logic / by Charles Mercier. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    forms of vegetables—oaks, palms, peas, and potatoes—what would they think of him, and what would they say ? Would they not say ‘ We, who have never paid any attention to vegetables, know of hundreds more forms than this. In every garden, in every country walk, we see scores for every one you have enumerated. You, with your wider experience, and your expert knowledge, must be acquainted with innumerable forms that are unknown to us. Either you are joking, or your friends must be advised to look after you.’ But when the zoologist and the botanist go to the logician, and ask him how many forms of propositions there are, and are told by him that there are but four, they receive the statement with unquestioning submission. Aristotle said so ; and if he said so, it must be so. In spite of their daily experience of cow propositions and horse propositions; in spite of their experience, in every house and garden, in every country walk, and on every occasion of human intercourse, of hundreds of propositions besides the A, E, I, and O of Traditional Logic ; they accept the assurance of logicians with a faith, that it would be a libel on the intelligence of children to call child-like. It is the most astounding instance of the power of authority to blind the eyes and deafen the ears to plain, insistent, and clamorous fact, that the history of the world can show. Truly says Bacon, ‘The mind . . . has become possessed with corrupted doctrines, and filled with the vainest idols. The art of Logic . . . has tended more to confirm errors, than to disclose truth.’ According to Traditional Logic, the combinations of propositions into triplets in the form of the syllogism, amount in all to sixty- four. In fact, if all quantities of both Subject- and Object-term, and all combinations of the negative in Ratio and Terms, are taken into account, the triple combinations run into thousands of millions. The proportion of sixty-four to thousands of millions represents, therefore, the degree of adequacy of Traditional Logic in its own small department of Inference alone, leaving out of account the vast field of Inference that it does not pretend to explore, and the still greater field of Induction and Analogy. Of the vast field of Empirical reasoning; of the solution of Problems ; of Hypothesis and Conjecture ; Traditional Logic knows nothing. Inductive Logic confuses Empirical reasoning with Inference, with Generalisation, and with Analogy, and so does Modern Logic.