Kants and Post-Kantian Logic

It is canon and not organon. In the one case, however, where it recognizes what is truly synthesis, i.e., in its account of the con cept, it brings the statics of knowledge, so to speak, into integral relation with the dynamics. And throughout, wherever the sur vival from 1843, the identity bug-bear, is for the moment got rid of in what is really a more liberal conception, the statical doc trine is developed in a brilliant and informing manner. Yet it is in the detail of his logical investigations, something too volatile to fix in summary, that Lotze's greatness as a logician more es pecially lies.

With Lotze the ideal that at last the forms of thought shall be realized to be adequate to that which at any stage of actual knowledge always proves relatively intractable is an illuminat ing projection of faith. He takes courage from the reflection that to accept scepticism is to presume the competence of the thought that accepts. He will, however, take no easy way of parallelism.

Our human thought pursues devious and circuitous methods. Its forms are not unseldom scaffolding for the house of knowledge rather than the framework of the house itself. Our task is not to realize correspondence with something other than thought, but to make explicit those justificatory notions which condition the form of our apprehension. "However much we may presuppose an original reference of the forms of thought to that nature of things which is the goal of knowledge, we must be prepared to find in them many elements which do not directly reproduce the actual reality to the knowledge of which they are to lead us." The im pulse of thought to reduce coincidence to coherence reaches im mediately only to objectivity or validity. The sense in which pre supposition of a further reference is to be interpreted and in which justificatory notions for it can be adduced is only deter minable in a philosophic system as a whole, where feeling has a place as well as thought, value equally with validity.

Lotze's logic then represents the statical aspect of the function of thought in knowledge, while, so far as we go in knowledge thought is always engaged in the unification of a manifold which remains contradistinguished from it, though not, of course, com pletely alien to and unadapted to it. The further step to the de termination of the ground of harmony is not to be taken in logic, where limits are present and untranscended.

Hegel.—The so-called "Logic" of Hegel and of other German idealists belongs to the history of Metaphysics rather than to the history of Logic properly so called.

The logic of this period exhibits, though in characteristically modified shapes, all the main types that have been found in its past history. There is an intellectualist logic coalescent with an absolutist metaphysic as aforesaid. There is an epistemological logic with sometimes formalist, sometimes methodological lean ings. There is a formal-symbolic logic engaged with the elabora

tion of a relational calculus. Finally, there is what may be termed psychological-voluntaryist logic. It is in the rapidity of develop ment of logical investigations of the third and fourth types and the growing number of their exponents that the present shows most clearly the history of logic in the making. All these move ments are logic of the present, and a very brief indication may be added of points of historical significance.

Bradley.--Of

intellectualist logic Bradley (Principles of Logic 1883) and Bernard Bosanquet (Logic, 1888) may be taken as typical exponents. The philosophy of the former concludes to an Absolute by the annulment of contradictions. His metaphysical method is, like Herbart's, not identifiable with his logic, and the latter has for its central characteristic its thorough restatement of the logical forms traditional in language and the text-book in such a way as to harmonize with the doctrines of a reality whose organic unity is all-inclusive. The thorough recasting that this in volves, even of the thought of the masters when it occasionally echoes them, has resulted in a phrasing uncouth to the ear of the plain man with his world of persons and things in which the f or mer simply think about the latter, but it is fundamentally neces sary for Bradley's purpose. The negative judgment, for example, cannot be held in one and the same undivided act to presuppose the unity of the real, project an adjective as conceivably appli cable to it and assert its rejection. We need, therefore, a restate ment of it. With Bradley reality is the one subject of all judg ment immediate or mediate. The act of judgment "which refers an ideal content (recognized as such) to a reality beyond the act" is the unit for logic. Grammatical subject and predicate necessarily both fall under the rubric of the adjectival, that is, within the logical idea or ideal content asserted. This is a mean ing or universal which can have no detached or abstract self subsistence. As found in judgment it may exhibit differences with in itself, but it is not two, but one, an articulation of unity, not a fusion which could only be a confusion, of differences. With a brilliant subtlety Bradley analyses the various types of judg ment in his own way, with results that must be taken into ac count by all subsequent logicians of this type. The view of in ference with which he complements it is only less satisfactory be cause of a failure to distinguish the principle of nexus in syllogism from its traditional formulation and rules, and because he is hampered by the intractability which he finds in certain forms of relational construction.