to the development of the post-Kantian psychological logic.
Another movement helped also; the exponents of naturalistic
evolution were prepared with Spencer to explain the so-called
a priori in knowledge as in truth a posteriori, if not to the
individual at any rate to the race. It is of course a newer type
of psychological logic that is in question, one that is aware of
Kant’s “answer to Hume.” Stuart Mill, despite of his relation
of antagonism to Hamilton and Mansel, who held themselves to
be Kantian in spirit, is still wholly pre-Kantian in his outlook.
Kant’s influence, then, upon subsequent logic is least of all to be measured by his achievement in his professed contribution to technical logic. It may be attributed in some slight degree, perhaps, to incidental flashes of logical insight where his thought is least of what he himself calls logic, Summary. e.g. his exposition of the significance of synthetic judgments a priori, or his explanation of the function of imagery in relation to thought, whereby he offers a solution of the problem of the conditions under which one member of a group unified through a concept can be taken to stand for the rest, or again the way in which he puts his finger on the vital issue in regard to the alleged proof from essence to existence, and illustrations could be multiplied. But much more it belongs to his transformation of the epistemological problem, and to the suggestiveness of his philosophy as a whole for an advance in the direction of a speculative construction which should be able to cancel all Kant’s surds, and in particular vindicate a “ground of the unity of the supersensible which lies back of nature with that which the concept of freedom implies in the sphere of practice,”[1] which is what Kant finally asserts.
iv. After Kant.
Starting from the obvious antithesis of thought and that of which it is the thought, it is possible to view the ultimate relation of its term as that of mutual indifference or, secondly, as that of a correspondence such that while they retain their distinct character modification of the one implies modification of the other, or thirdly and lastly, as that of a mergence of one in the other of such a nature that the merged term, whichever it be, is fully accounted for in a complete theory of that in which it is merged.
The first way is that of the purely formal logicians, of whom Twesten[2] and in England H. L. Mansel may be regarded as typical. They take thought and “the given” as self-contained units which, if not in fact separable, are at any rate susceptible of an abstraction the one from The Formal Logicians. the other so decisive as to constitute an ideal separation. The laws of the pure activity of thought must be independently determined, and since the contribution of thought to knowledge is form they must be formal only. They cannot go beyond the limits of formal consistency or analytic correctness. They are confined to the determination of what the truth of any matter of thought, taken for granted upon grounds psychological or other, which are extraneous to logic, includes or excludes. The unit for logic is the concept taken for granted. The function of logic is to exhibit its formal implications and repulsions. It is questionable whether even this modest task could be really achieved without other reference to the content abstracted from than Mansel, for example, allows. The analogy of the resolution of a chemical compound with its elements which is often on the lips of those who would justify the independence of thought and the real world, with an agnostic conclusion as to non-phenomenal or trans-subjective reality, is not really applicable. The oxygen and hydrogen, for example, into which water may be resolved are not in strictness indifferent one to the other, since both are members of an order regulated according to laws of combination in definite ratios. Or, if applicable, it is double-edged. Suppose oxygen to be found only in water. Were it to become conscious, would it therefore follow that it could infer the laws of a separate or independent activity of its own? Similarly forms of thinking, the law of contradiction not excepted, have their meaning only in reference to determinate content, even though distributively all determinate contents are dispensable. The extreme formalist is guilty of a fallacy of composition in regard to abstraction.
It does not follow, however, that the laws asserted by the formal logicians are invalid or unimportant. There is a permissible abstraction, and in general they practise this, and although they narrow its range unduly, it is legitimately to be applied to certain characters of thinking. As the living organism includes something of mechanism—the skeleton, for example—so an organic logic doubtless includes determinations of formal consistency. The skeleton is meaningless apart from reference to its function in the life of an organism, yet there are laws of skeleton structure which can be studied with most advantage if other characters of the organism are relegated to the background. To allow, however, that abstraction admits of degrees, and that it never obliterates all reference to that from which it is abstracted, is to take a step forward in the direction of the correlation of logical forms with the concrete processes of actual thinking. What was true in formal logic tended to be absorbed in the correlationist theories.
Those formal logicians of the Kantian school, then, may be summarily dismissed, though their undertaking was a necessary one, who failed to raise the epistemological issue at all, or who, raising it, acquiesced in a naïve dualism agnostic of the real world as Kant’s essential lesson. They failed to develop any view which could serve either in fact or in theory as a corrective to the effect of their formalism. What they said with justice was said as well or better elsewhere.
Among them it is on the whole impossible not to include the names of Hamilton and Mansel. The former, while his erudition in respect to the history of philosophical opinion has rarely been equalled, was not a clear thinker. His general theory of knowledge deriving from Kant and Reid, and including among other things a contaminatio of their theories of perception,[3] in no way sustains or mitigates his narrow view of logic. He makes no effective use of his general formula that to think is to condition. He appeals to the direct testimony of consciousness in the sense in which the appeal involves a fallacy. He accepts an ultimate antinomy as to the finiteness or infinity of “the unconditioned,” yet applies the law of the excluded middle to insist that one of the two alternatives must be true, wherefore we must make the choice. And what is to be said of the judgment of a writer who considers the relativity of thought demonstrated by the fact that every judgment unites two members? Hamilton’s significance for the history of logic lies in the stimulus that he gave to the development of symbolic logic in England by his new analytic based upon his discovery or adoption of the principle of the quantification of the predicate. Mansel, too, was learned, specially in matters of Aristotelian exegesis, and much that is of value lies buried in his commentation of the dry bones of the Artis Logicae Rudimenta of Locke’s contemporary Aldrich. And he was a clearer thinker than Hamilton. Formal logic of the extremest rigour is nowhere to be found more adequately expressed in all its strength, and it must be added in all its weakness, than in the writings of Mansel. But if the view maintained above that formal logic must compromise or mitigate its rigour and so fail to maintain its independence, be correct, the logical consistency of Mansel’s logic of consistency does but emphasize its barrenness. It contains no germ for further development. It is the end of a movement.
The brief logic of Herbart[4] is altogether formal too. Logical forms have for him neither psychological nor metaphysical reference, we are concerned in logic solely with the systematic
- ↑ Critique of Judgment, Introd. § 2 (Werke, v., 276 ll. 9 sqq.); cf. Bernard’s “Prolegomena” to his translation of this, (pp. xxxviii. sqq.).
- ↑ Die Logik, insbesondere die Analytik (Schleswig, 1825). August Detlev Christian Twesten (1789–1876), a Protestant theologian, succeeded Schleiermacher as professor in Berlin in 1835.
- ↑ See Sir William Hamilton: The Philosophy of Perception, by J. Hutchison Stirling.
- ↑ Hauptpunkte der Logik, 1808 (Werke, ed. Hartenstein, i. 465 sqq.), and specially Lehrbuch der Einleitung in die Philosophie (1813), and subsequently §§ 34 sqq. (Werke, i. 77 sqq.).
