TWO:The next step was to create a method for determining the particular configuration on which any given property of matter depends. If such a problem could be solved at all, it would be by some new system of practical analysis. Bacon did not see this because he was a Schoolman, emancipated, indeed,377 from ecclesiastical authority, but retaining a blind faith in the power of logic. Aristotles Organon had been the great storehouse of aids to verbal disputation; it should now be turned into an instrument for the more successful prosecution of physical researches. What definitions were to the one, that Forms should be to the other; and both were to be determined by much the same process. Now Aristotle himself had emphatically declared that the concepts out of which propositions are constructed were discoverable by induction and by induction alone. With him, induction meant comparing a number of instances, and abstracting the one circumstance, if any, in which they agreed. When the object is to establish a proposition inductively, he has recourse to a method of elimination, and bids us search for instances which, differing in everything else, agree in the association of two particular marks.541 In the Topics he goes still further and supplies us with a variety of tests for ascertaining the relation between a given predicate and a given subject. Among these, Mills Methods of Difference, Residues, and Concomitant Variations are very clearly stated.542 But he does not call such modes of reasoning Induction. So far as he has any general name for them at all, it is Dialectic, that is, Syllogism of which the premises are not absolutely certain; and, as a matter of nomenclature, he seems to be right. There is, undoubtedly, a process by which we arrive at general conclusions from the comparison of particular instances; but this process in its purity is nothing more nor less than induction by simple enumeration. All other reasoning requires the aid of universal propositions, and is therefore, to that extent, deductive. The methods of elimination or, as they are now called, of experiment, involve at every step the assumption of378 general principles duly specified in the chapter of Mills Logic where they are analysed. And wherever we can rise immediately from, a single instance to a general law, it is because the examination of that single instance has been preceded by a chain of deductive reasoning.CHAPTER VI. CHARACTERISTICS OF ARISTOTLE.
FORE:Finally, while the attempt to attain extreme accuracy of definition was leading to the destruction of all thought and all reality within the Socratic school, the dialectic method had been taken up and parodied in a very coarse style by a class of persons called Eristics. These men had, to some extent, usurped the place of the elder Sophists as paid instructors of youth; but their only accomplishment was to upset every possible assertion by a series of verbal juggles. One of their favourite paradoxes was to deny the reality of falsehood on the Parmenidean principle that nothing cannot exist. Plato satirises their method in the Euthydmus, and makes a much more serious attempt to meet it in the Sophist; two Dialogues which seem to have been composed not far from one another.156 The Sophist effects a considerable simplification in the ideal theory by resolving negation into difference, and altogether omitting the notions of unity and plurality,perhaps as a result of the investiga265tions contained in the Parmenides, another dialogue belonging to the same group, where the couple referred to are analysed with great minuteness, and are shown to be infected with numerous self-contradictions. The remaining five ideas of Existence, Sameness, Difference, Rest, and Motion, are allowed to stand; but the fact of their inseparable connexion is brought out with great force and clearness. The enquiry is one of considerable interest, including, as it does, the earliest known analysis of predication, and forming an indispensable link in the transition from Platonic to Aristotelian logicthat is to say, from the theory of definition and classification to the theory of syllogism.
FORE:Suddenly several shots sounded in the neighbourhood. The three took their rifles and looked round, somewhat scared. They assured me that they would protect me. If there had been occasion for it, it would have been against their own comrades,117 for a troop of soldiers came sailing along, swinging about their rifles and shooting at the burning houses as they walked on, without rhyme or reason, anyhow and anywhere. These were drunk also. At last I was able to shake off my "friends," and got through another street into the market-place, at the town-hall and St. Peter's Church. The beautiful town-hall happily was not destroyed, as the first reports intimated, but St. Peter's had been damaged most cruelly. The spire had disappeared, the roof collapsed, windows broken, the altar burned, the pulpit badly damaged, and so forth. The two last-named parts were fine works of art.
FORE:"Did you ever put me in it?" Bruce asked gravely.
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THREE:
THREE:Leona Lalage smiled unsteadily. Her lips twitched horribly.The seconds slipped by. The North Shore was almost under them.
THREE:Bruce caught his breath sharply. He had scarcely time to consider what it all meant when the light flared up again, and the fair woman returned with a kettle and basin and a tin of mustard."How did you know it was the last of my store?" Leona cried.
