KANT'S AND POST-KANTIAN LOGIC Kant.—Kant's treatment of technical logic was wholly tradi tional, and in itself is almost negligible. It is comprised in an early essay on the mistaken subtlety of the syllogistic figures, and a late compilation by a pupil from the introductory matter and running annotations with which the master had enriched his interleaved lecture-room copy of Meyer's Compendium of 1752. Wolff's general logic, "the best," said Kant, "that we possess," had been abridged by Baumgarten and the abridgement then subjected to commentation by Meyer. With this traditional body of doctrine Kant was, save for matters of minor detail, quite content. Logic was of necessity formal, dealing as it must with those rules without which no exercise of the understanding would be possible at all. Upon abstraction from all particular methods of thought these rules were to be discerned a priori or without dependence on experience by reflection solely upon the use of the understanding in general. The science of the form of thought abstracted in this way from its matter or content was regarded as of value both as a propaedeutic and as canon. It was manifestly one of the disciplines in which a position of finality was attainable. Aristotle might be allowed, indeed, to have omitted no essential point of the understanding. What the moderns had achieved consisted in an advance in accuracy and methodical completeness. "Indeed, we do not require any new discoverers in logic," said the discoverer of a priori synthesis, "since it contains merely the form of thought." Applied logic is merely psychology, and not properly to be called logic at all. The technical logic of Kant, then, justifies literally a movement among his successors in favour of a formal conception of logic with the law of contradiction and the doctrine of formal implica tion for its equipment. Unless the doctrine of Kant's "trans cendental logic" must be held to supply a point of view from which a logical development of quite another kind is inevitable, Kant's mantle, so far as logic is concerned, must be regarded as having fallen upon the formal logicians.
The Formal Logicians, of whom Twesten and H. L. Mansel may be regarded as typical, 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 other so de cisive 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 con sistency or analytical correctness. They are confined to the de termination of what the truth of any matter of thought, taken for granted upon grounds psychological or other, which are ex traneous 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 ex ample, allows. The analogy of the resolution of a chemical com pound 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-sub jective reality, is not really applicable. The oxygen and hydrogen, for example, into which water may be resolved are not in strict ness 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 The distributively all determinate contents are dispensable. The extreme formalist is guilty of a fallacy of composition in regard to abstraction.