British Logicians

1.28.34   G-1869-2

  28. ... [The] history of logic is not altogether without an
interest as a branch of history. For so far as the logic of an age
adequately represents the methods of thought of that age, its
history is a history of the human mind in its most essential
relation -- that is to say with reference to its power of
investigating truth. But the chief value of the study of historical
philosophy is that it disciplines the mind to regard philosophy
with a cold and scientific eye and not with passion as though
philosophers were contestants.
  29. British logic is a subject of some particular interest
inasmuch as some peculiar lines of thought have always been
predominant in those islands, giving their logicians a certain
family resemblance, which already begins to appear in very
early times. The most striking characteristic of British thinkers
is their nominalistic tendency. This has always been and is
now very marked. So much so that in England and in England
alone are there many thinkers more distinguished at this day
as being nominalistic than as holding any other doctrines.
William Ockham or Oakum, an Englishman, was beyond
question the greatest nominalist that ever lived; while Duns Scotus,
another British name, it is equally certain is the subtilest
advocate of the opposite opinion. These two men, Duns Scotus and
William Ockham, are decidedly the greatest speculative minds
of the middle ages, as well as two of the profoundest
metaphysicians that ever lived. Another circumstance which makes
[the] logic of the British Islands interesting is that there more
than elsewhere have the studies of the logic of the natural
sciences been made. Already we find some evidences of
English thought running in that direction, when we meet with that
singular phenomenon Roger Bacon -- a man who was
scientific before science began. At the first dawn of the age [of]
science, Francis Bacon wrote that professedly and really logical
treatise, the Novum Organum, a work the celebrity of which
perhaps exceeds its real merits. In our own day, the writings
of Whewell, Mill, and Herschel afford some of the finest
accounts of the methods of thought in science. Another
direction in which logical thought has gone farther in England than

  * From Lecture I, "Early Nominalism and Realism" of the "Lectures on
British Logicians," delivered at Harvard in 1869.
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elsewhere is in mathematico-formal logic -- the chief
writers on which are Boole, DeMorgan, and the Scotch Sir
William Hamilton -- for although Hamilton was so bitter against
mathematics, that his own doctrine of the quantified predicate
is essentially mathematical is beyond intelligent dispute. This
fondness for the formal part of logic had already appeared in
the middle ages, when the nominalistic school of Ockham -- the
most extremely scholastic of the scholastics -- and next to
them the school of Scotus carried to the utmost the doctrines
of the Parva Logicalia which were the contribution of those
ages to this branch of the science. And those Parva Logicalia
may themselves have had an English origin, for the earliest
known writer upon the subject -- unless the Synopsis {..}
{...} be attributed to Psellus -- was an
Englishman, William Shirwood....*
  30. The most striking characteristic of medieval thought
is the importance attributed to authority. It was held that
authority and reason were two coordinate methods of arriving
at truth, and far from holding that authority was secondary to
reason, the scholastics were much more apt to place it quite
above reason. When Berengarius in his dispute with Lanfranc
remarked that the whole of an affirmation does not stand after
a part is subverted, his adversary replied: " The sacred
authorities being relinquished, you take refuge in dialectic, and when
I am to hear and to answer concerning the ministry of the
Faith, I prefer to hear and to answer the sacred authorities
which are supposed to relate to the subject rather than
dialectical reasons." To this Berengarius replied that St. Augustine
in his book De doctrina christiana says that what he said
concerning an affirmation is bound up indissolubly with that very
eternity of truth which is God. But added: "Maximi plane
cordis est, per omnia ad dialecticum confugere, quia confugere
ad eam ad rationem est confugere, quo qui non confugit, cum
secur dum rationem sit factus ad imaginem Dei, suum honorem
reliquit, nec potest renovari de die in diem ad imaginem Dei." **
Next to sacred authorities -- the Bible, the church and the
fathers -- that of Aristotle of course ranked the highest. It
could be denied, but the presumption was immense against his
being wrong on any particular point.

* Cf. Prantl's Geschichte der Logik, 2 Aufl. Bd. 2, S. 266; Bd. 3, S. 10ff.
** Ibid., vol. 2, p. 72.
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  31. Such a weight being attached to authority -- a weight
which would be excessive were not the human mind at
that time in so uneducated a state that it could not do better
than follow masters, since it was totally incompetent to solve
metaphysical problems for itself -- it follows naturally that
originality of thought was not greatly admired, but that on the
contrary the admirable mind was his who succeeded in
interpreting consistently the dicta of Aristotle, Porphyry, and
Boethius. Vanity, therefore, the vanity of clevemess, was a
vice from which the schoolmen were remarkably free. They
were minute and thorough in their knowledge of such
authorities as they had, and they were equally minute and thorough
in their treatment of every question which came up.
  32. All these characters remind us less of the philosophers
of our day than of the men of science. I do not hesitate
to say that scientific men now think much more of authority
than do metaphysicians; for in science a question is not regarded
as settled or its solution as certain until all intelligent and
informed doubt has ceased and all competent persons have
come to a catholic agreement, whereas fifty metaphysicians,
each holding opinions that no one of the other forty-nine can
admit, will nevertheless generally regard their fifty opposite
opinions as more certain than that the sun will rise tomorrow.
This is to have what seems an absurd disregard for others'
opinions. The man of science attaches positive value to the opinion
of every man as competent as himself, so that he cannot but
have a doubt of a conclusion which he would adopt were
it not that a competent man opposes it; but on the other hand,
he will regard a sufficient divergence from the convictions of
the great body of scientific men as tending of itself to argue
incompetence, and he will generally attach little weight to the
opinions of men who have long been dead and were ignorant
of much that has been since discovered which bears upon the
question in hand. The schoolmen, however, attached the
greatest authority to men long since dead, and there they were
right, for in the dark ages it was not true that the later state of
human knowledge was the most perfect, but on the contrary.
I think it may be said then that the schoolmen did not attach
too much weight to authority, although they attached much
more to it than we ought to do or than ought or could be
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attached to it in any age in which science is pursuing a
successful and onward course -- and of course infinitely more than is
attached to it by those intellectual nomads, the modern
metaphysicians, including the positivists.
  33. In the slight importance they attached to a brilliant
theory, the schoolmen also resembled modern scientific men,
who cannot be comprehended in this respect at all by men not
scientific. The followers of Herbert Spencer, for example,
cannot comprehend why scientific men place Darwin so infinitely
above Spencer, since the theories of the latter are so much
grander and more comprehensive. They cannot understand
that it is not the sublimity of Darwin's theories which makes
him admired by men of science, but that it is rather his minute,
systematic, extensive, strict, scientific researches which have
given his theories a more favorable reception -- theories which
in themselves would barely command scientific respect. And
this misunderstanding belongs to all those metaphysicians who
fancy themselves men of science on account of their
metaphysics. This same scientific spirit has been equally
misunderstood as it is found in the schoolmen. They have been above
all things found fault with because they do not write a literary
style and do not "study in a literary spirit." The men who
make this objection cannot possibly comprehend the real merits
of modern science. If the words quidditas, entitas, and
haecceitas are to excite our disgust, what shall we say of the Latin
of the botanists, and the style of any technically scientific work?
As for that phrase " studying in a literary spirit " it is
impossible to express how nauseating it is to any scientific man, yes
even to the scientific linguist. But above all things it is the
searching thoroughness of the schoolmen which affiliates them
with men of science and separates them, world-wide, from
modern so-called philosophers. The thoroughness I allude to
consists in this, that in adopting any theory, they go about
everywhere, they devote their whole energies and lives in
putting it to tests bona fide -- not such as shall merely add a new
spangle to the glitter of their proofs but such as shall really go
toward satisfying their restless insatiable impulse to put their
opinions to the test. Having a theory, they must apply it to
every subject and to every branch of every subject to see
whether it produces a result in accordance with the only criteria
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they were able to apply -- the truth of the Catholic faith
and the teaching of the Prince of Philosophers.
  34. Mr. George Henry Lewes in his work on Aristotle *
seems to me to have come pretty near to stating the true cause
of the success of modern science when he has said that it was
verification. I should express it in this way: modern students
of science have been successful because they have spent their
lives not in their libraries and museums but in their
laboratories and in the field; and while in their laboratories and in
the field they have been not gazing on nature with a vacant
eye, that is, in passive perception unassisted by thought, but
have been observing -- that is, perceiving by the aid of analysis
 -- and testing suggestions of theories. The cause of their
success has been that the motive which has carried them to the
laboratory and the field has been a craving to know how things
really were, and an interest in finding out whether or not
general propositions actually held good -- which has overbalanced
all prejudice, all vanity, and all passion. Now it is plainly not
an essential part of this method in general that the tests were
made by the observation of natural objects. For the immense
progress which modern mathematics has made is also to be
explained by the same intense interest in testing general
propositions by particular cases -- only the tests were applied by
means of particular demonstrations. This is observation, still,
for as the great mathematician Gauss has declared -- algebra
is a science of the eye, ** only it is observation of artificial
objects and of a highly recondite character. Now this same
unwearied interest in testing general propositions is what
produced those long rows of folios of the schoolmen, and if the
test which they employed is of only limited validity so that
they could not unhampered go on indefinitely to further
discoveries, yet the spirit, which is the most essential thing -- the
motive, was nearly the same. And how different this spirit is
from that of the major part, though not all, of modern
philosophers -- even of those who have called themselves empirical,
no man who is actuated by it can fail to perceive.

  * Aristotle: A Chapter from the History of Science, London (1864).
  ** Quoted by Sylvester in his Presidential Address to the British Assn. in 1868.
See Sylvester's Mathematical Papers, vol. 2, p. 654.