First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life

tion of teaching method by a more systematic knowledge of its principles and methods, and I took the courses for the diplomas of Licentiate and Fellow of the London College of

ived and with which I had to deal. As it came to me in the ordinary textbooks, it presented itself as the science of inference using the syllogism as

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ted it as anything more than a test of consistency in statement. But I found the textbooks of logic disposed to ignore my customary method of reasoning a

S3, and

3 + S4 + .

S is

jective reality of classification of which my studies in biology and mineralogy had largely disabused me. Logic, it seemed to me, had taken a common innate error of the mind and had emphasised it in order to develop a system of reasoning that shoul

ther biological species only by the fact that an enormous number of other linking individuals are inaccessible in time - are in other words dead and gone - and each new individual in that species does, in the distinction of its own indivi

neral redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and brown, shading into crimson, and so on and so on. And this is true not only of biological species. It is true of the mineral specimens constituting a min

is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense quantities of atoms necessarily taken

and become settees, dentist's chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me. Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineral and rock speci

fine differences of objective realities, have in th

inition and class and abstract form! But these things,- number, definition, class and abstract form,- I hold, are merely unavoidable conditions of mental acti

a little distance you really seem to have a faithful reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closely you find not the unique form and masses of the original, but a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shape and size. The more earnestly you go into the thing, the closelier you look, the more the picture is lost in reticulations. I submit, the world

king, relentless logic is only another name for a stupidity - for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical inquiry through a series of valid syllogisms - never committing any generally recognised fallacy - you nevertheless leave behind you at each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth, and you get deflections that are difficult to trace at each phase in the process. Every

he world of fact it is the rarest thing to encounter this absolute alternative; S1 is pink, but S2 is pinker, S3 is scarcely pink at all, and one is in doubt whether S4 is not properly to be called scarlet. The finest type specimen you can find simply has the characteristic quality a little more rat