analysed, the exercise of the understanding at all,—it is a legislative science in the highest sense. Any so-called thought, be it a concept, a judgment, or a reasoning, which violates the form of the Understanding, ceases to be,— becomes, in a word, nonsensical and merely verbal.

This is shown in detail, with the strictness of demonstration, by the application of the rules of logical science to the various products of the understanding-Notion, Judgment, Reasoning. These special rules strictly form the fundamental laws of thinking, and partake of a demonstrative character. The special rules of Reasoning, for example, are but tests of validity which, resting ultimately on the character and number of the primary laws of thinking, are deducible from them.

(a) On this head, Kant says that, as canon of the understanding, Logic can borrow nothing from another science, or from experience. It must contain only the pure a priori laws, which are necessary, and which are the heritage of the understanding in general. This language is misleading and exaggerated. Along with other expressions of the same sort, it has led to the delusion that there is "a rational science," or science of abstractions; and this has been employed to supersede -even abolish-the reality from which the abstraction was taken, and which alone gave it meaning. Logic is, in a sense, an abstraction from experience, and can be nothing else. It is the science of what is necessary in experience, and, therefore, universal. Our means of knowing and testing the necessity of its laws are found in experimenting on particular instances. The strength of the particular thought which embodies truly a law is as great as the strength of the abstract law itself; it is only not so extensive as the law.

(b) "Ratio de suo actu rationari potest . . . et hæc est ars logica, id est rationalis scientia, quæ non solum rationalis est ex hoc quod est secundum rationem, quod est omnibus artibus commune, sed etiam in hoc quod est circa ipsam artem rationis sicut circa propriam materiam." -(St Thomas, quoted by St Hilaire, i. p. 24.)

"Logica enim est omnium artium aptissimum instrumentum, sine qua nulla scientia perfecte haberi potest; quæ non more materialium instrumentorum usu crebro consumitur, sed per cujuslibet alterius artis vel scientiæ studiosum exercitium continuum recipit incrementum."(Occam, Proom. Sum t. Log.)

37

CHAPTER V.

OBJECTIONS TO LOGIC AS A FORMAL SCIENCE-THE VIEWS OF KANT, HEGEL, AND UEBERWEG.

§ 50. If Logic be, as Kant puts it, the rational science of the necessary laws of thought, and as these have to do not with particular objects, but with all objects generally, this science cannot be said to be subjectively formal, or to be divorced from any relation to objects, even real objects. On the contrary, it embraces the most general aspects of objects as these are actually and possibly cognised and cognisable by us. These aspects, no doubt, are named forms of thought, our notions, judgments, and reasonings. But they are also, in relation to intuition or perception, forms of the realities, the objects therein given. They are the ways in which we may, nay, must, mediately represent to ourselves what is given in the course of experience, through intuition. If the forms apply to all objects generally, and to every object indifferently, they ought not to be represented as having no application to any object.

$51. Further, as it is very distinctly the doctrine of Kant and of others on whom this exaggerated formal view is charged, that the contradictory is necessarily non-existent,-unreal as it is nonsensical,-it can hardly be fairly maintained that the logic they teach is abstracted from any relation to objective existence. Kant's vital mistake lay in regarding the laws of thought as of a wholly subjective character, and in restricting in the Logic as elsewhere what is necessary in thought to a purely subjective function,-a function of constitution,whereas they represent but one side of a coincidence between human thought and divine thought as embodied in things.

The true conciliation of the Kantian and the realistic view is to be found in the principle that the understanding is apprehensive as the intuition,-apprehensive, to wit, of relations, as the latter is of the terms of the relations.

§ 52. We may go quite beyond saying that we have only to do with the consistency of our thoughts. We may quite well hold that this consistency is essential, negatively, to truth of fact, and we may even vindicate the many connections of Identity and Non-Contradiction as correspondences to the actual connections of things. For these may be denied, and spoken of as "not absolute,"-that is, the actual oppositions of experience may be denied to be such, because it is assumed that behind this experience there is some one thing, or force, or entity which, being one, manifests itself in all. This, even if it could be proved, could not be shown to abolish the differences in time or as we actually perceive things.

§ 53. There is the view of Hegel, which, assuming the identity of thought and existence, identifies the laws of thought with the laws of being, or the forms of thought, as he interprets them, with the forms of being; then describes a certain process of so-called self-development of pure thought as also the process of the self-production of existence; identifies (or confuses) the form and the matter of thought, professing to evolve the latter out of the former as a pure evolution, apart from intuition or experience. This may be called the metaphysico-logical theory. But, in point of fact, there is nothing in its method in the least analogous to any recognised logical law; in fact, there is, from first to last, an absolute, even proclaimed, reversal of logical law, and thus of definite intelligibility, even rationality.1

§ 54. This is not the place to enter into a full discussion of the Logic of Hegel, what may be called Speculative Logic. This would involve a discussion of the whole principles of his philosophy. But I may indicate generally the nature of his logical theory, and its relation to the Aristotelian. In Aristotle throughout truth is regarded as a relation,—a harmony between thought or judgment, our judgment and reality. The spirit of realism or dualism permeates the whole thinking of Aristotle, and no where is it more felt and seen than in the Organon. The logical conceptions, forms, terms, 1 On this see Descartes, Introd., §§ xi. xii.

laws, are taken directly from experience, and they are tested by reference to experience. Aristotle is the most concrete of logicians, in some respects the healthiest. His practical sense is as outstanding as his unmatched subtlety. His conception of truth as a relation or harmony between thought and reality, it is the principal end of Hegel to break down. With him there is no such distinction. There is no dualism, either of man and nature, of subject and object, of spirit and matter, of finite and infinite, of the real and the ideal, of man and God. So that logic in his conception need not seek to lay down criteria or rules for testing the true or real harmony of thought and things. There is no difference or distinction. And how does he proceed to show this? Of course, his process is that of Reason, the pure reason,pure thought. The idea in its total development. And what is this? In plain words, throw away man, nature, God, -go back to the stage of thought in itself-pure thought, objectless, indeterminate; or as it is identical with being, go back to quality less being, without mark, feature, or discrimen. of any sort, and you will get what will develop necessarily into all truth or reality, for these are but names for the same thing. This is thought in itself; the bare form of thought without object is your starting-point,-Reason in its first expression, Being in its primary reality. The development of this prius of all is the dialectic process, the march of the speculative reason, the ongoing of the speculative logic. It makes, it is, in its course, man, nature, God,all being; it is in its course all truth. "What is rational is real; what is real is rational." And this is the rational; this is the real. In the march-the wonderful march of the Idea -from in selfness, which is not yet even conscious, and is objectless, from Being, which has not quality to distinguish it from nothingness, the Aristotelic Logic is comprised. It is a stage, an early stage of the course, which is trampled out and yet absorbed. Aristotle represents the abstract point of view, the point of view of the understanding, which still holds by difference and distinction and the laws of Identity and Non-contradiction. Speculative truth, however, lies in the fusion of contradictories and the march of universal identity. Yes is only yes as it is also no, and no is only no as it is also yes; and the truth lies in the yes which

is no, and the no which is yes. And we must not speak of contradiction as "absolute"; it is only temporary; in the real nature or truth of things opposites are one, and are only as they are one. What, in this case, we may ask, comes of moral distinctions? What, for example, of veracity and unveracity? Are these simply temporal distinctions, to be fused in a higher medium, since contradiction is not absolute but perishable? And what of man the worshipper, and God the object of worship? When man worships does he worship only himself in another form? And is this God? Are there two orders of truth? One in which there is difference and distinction, another in which all this is abolished? Then, which is the true? and who is to decide this question? It will be meanwhile more reasonable for us intellectually, and better for us morally, to keep by the knowledge we have than trust in the "Speculative Logic."

§ 55. The Idea is developed, or rather develops itself, from stage to stage in virtue of its inherent power,—its being all potentially, though it is at the same time a perfectly quali tyless conception,-in three great lines,-Being, Essence, Notion, which of course come in the end to be the same. The treatment of these makes up the Philosophy or Logic of Hegel. And under the first two heads Hegel borrows the Aristotelic and Kantian categories, and seeks to show how they arise, move, and are transmuted. Under the third,Notion, we have the Aristotelic forms,-Notion, Judgment, and Reasoning, taken up and dealt with according to Hegel's conceptions. These forms are not in his view to be taken as modes of our knowing merely or as representing reality. They are "the living spirit itself of the reality, and nothing in the reality is true except what is by those forms and in those forms" (En., p. 161, 162). The notion is an abstraction, but in its true concrete totality it is all that is. Judgment is the identity of the general and the particular. Attribute is only the general. The subject is the particular. The copula is their identity,-and so on. The outcome of the whole matter is that there is but one reality, and that is the Idea or Reason ever developing itself, absorbing its developments, and so becoming enriched, and rising, we cannot say finally, for there is no limit anywhere, but somehow and somewhere, to the consciousness of itself, as God who manifests all and