Answering to the first principles of demonstration in logic, if not absolutely identical with them, are what Aristotle calls causes in the nature of things. We have seen what an important part the middle term plays in Aristotles theory of the syllogism. It is the vital principle of demonstration, the connecting link by which the two extreme terms are attached to one another. In the theory of applied logic, whose object is to bring the order of thought into complete parallelism with the order of things, the middle term through which a fact is demonstrated answers to the cause through which it exists. According to our notions, only two terms, antecedent and consequent, are involved in the idea of causation; and causation only becomes a matter for reasoning when we perceive that the sequence is repeated in a uniform manner. But Aristotle was very far from having reached, or even suspected, this point of view. A cause is with him not a determining antecedent, but a secret nexus by which the co-existence of two phenomena is explained. Instead of preceding it intercedes; and this is why he finds its subjective counterpart in the middle term of the syllogism. Some of his own examples will make the matter clearer. Why is the moon eclipsed? Because the earth intervenes between her and the sun. Why is the bright side of the moon always turned towards the sun? Because she shines by his reflected light (here light is the middle term). Why is that person talking to the rich man? Because he wants to borrow money of him. Why are those two men friends? Because they have the same enemy.281"So far so good," Prout remarked. "It's not a very pleasant experience, but I am sorry I have not finished yet. I shall have to trouble you to come as far as Raven Street with me and identify the body."
ONE:Dear Friend And Partner,--At last the luck of the deuce has departed and my virtue has its own reward. I have found my man. At first my man blustered, but logic, mon cher, logic gets the best of temper always. I parted with him and he parted with 400. In sovereigns. Mark the cunning of the man! No notes or cheques for him. But money in cash I dare not send to you. Therefore I have changed my gold for notes, and 200 in forty lovely crisp bits of paper I forward herewith. They are numbered from 190753 to 190792. This I tell you for precaution's sake. I am waiting for the cipher from K and this I will enclose. Next Saturday I propose to salute you. Till then with my most distinguished admiration,
TWO:They drank deep, in long draughts, with trembling lips, and beseeched us not to leave them again: "Oh, gentlemen, then we shall die!" We swore that we should come back, and that later on carriages would arrive from Louvain to take them to some convent or hospital; and, trusting us, they resigned themselves in the end.In England and America the evils which arise from a false or over estimate of mere theoretical knowledge have thus far been avoided. Our workshops are yet, and must long remain, our technological schools. The money value of bare theoretical training is so fast declining that we may be said to have passed the point of reaction, and that the importance of sound practical knowledge is beginning to be more felt than it was some years ago. It is only in those countries where actual manufactures and other practical tests are wanting, that any serious mistake can be made as to what should constitute an education in mechanics. Our workshops, if other means fail, will fix such a standard; and it is encouraging to find here and there among the outcry for technical training, a note of warning as to the means to be employed.
THREE:Meanwhile the old principle of universal doubt could no longer be maintained in presence of the certainties already won by modern science. Man, in the time of Newton, had, as Pope tersely puts it, too much knowledge for the sceptic side. The problem was not how to establish the reality, but how to ascertain the origin and possible extent of that knowledge. The first to perceive this, the first to evolve criticism out of scepticism, and therefore the real founder of modern philosophy, was Locke. Nevertheless, even with him, the advantage of studying the more recent in close connexion with the earlier developments of thought does not cease; it only enters on a new phase. If he cannot, like his predecessors, be directly affiliated to one or more of the Greek schools, his position can be illustrated by a parallel derived from the history of those schools. What Arcesilaus and Carneades had been to Socrates and his successors, that Locke was, in a large measure, to Bacon and the Cartesians. He went back to the initial doubt which with them had been overborne by the dogmatic reaction, and insisted on making it a reality. The spirit of the Apologia is absent from Platos later dialogues, only to reappear with even more than its original power in the teaching of the New Academy. And, in like manner, Descartes introspective method, with its demand for clear ideas, becomes, in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, an irresistible solvent for 420the psychologyy and physics of its first propounder. The doctrine of innate ideas, the doctrine that extension is the essence of matter, the doctrine that thought is the essence of mind, the more general doctrine, held also by Bacon, that things have a discoverable essence whence all their properties may be deduced by a process analogous to mathematical reasoning,all collapsed when brought to the test of definite and concrete experience.
FORE:IV.
Again, the new position occupied by Mind as an intermediary between the world of reality and the world of appearance, tended more and more to obliterate or confuse the demarcations by which they had hitherto been separated. The most general headings under which it was usual to contrast them were, the One and the Many, Being and Nothing, the Same and the Different, Rest and Motion. Parmenides employed the one set of terms to describe his Absolute, and the other to describe the objects of vulgar belief. They also served respectively to designate the wise and the ignorant, the dialectician and the sophist, the knowledge of gods and the opinions of men; besides offering points of contact with the antithetical couples of Pythagoreanism. But Plato gradually found that the nature of Mind could not be understood without taking both points of view into account. Unity and plurality, sameness and difference, equally entered into its composition; although undoubtedly belonging to the sphere of reality, it was self264-moved and the cause of all motion in other things. The dialectic or classificatory method, with its progressive series of differentiations and assimilations, also involved a continual use of categories which were held to be mutually exclusive. And on proceeding to an examination of the summa genera, the highest and most abstract ideas which it had been sought to distinguish by their absolute purity and simplicity from the shifting chaos of sensible phenomena, Plato discovered that even these were reduced to a maze of confusion and contradiction by a sincere application of the cross-examining elenchus. For example, to predicate being of the One was to mix it up with a heterogeneous idea and let in the very plurality which it denied. To distinguish them was to predicate difference of both, and thus open the door to fresh embarrassments.The study of psychology with Plato stands in a fourfold relation to his general theory of the world. The dialectic method, without which Nature would remain unintelligible, is a function of the soul, and constitutes its most essential activity; then soul, as distinguished from body, represents the higher, supersensual element of existence; thirdly, the objective dualism of reality and appearance is reproduced in the subjective dualism of reason and sense; and lastly, soul, as the original spring of movement, mediates between the eternal entities which are unmoved and the material phenomena which are subject to a continual flux. It is very characteristic of Plato that he first strains an antithesis to the utmost and then endeavours to reconcile its extremes by the interposition of one or more intermediate links. So, while assigning this office to soul as a part of the universe, he224 classifies the psychic functions themselves according to a similar principle. On the intellectual side he places true opinion, or what we should now call empirical knowledge, midway between demonstration and sense-perception. Such at least seems to be the result reached in the Theaettus and the Meno. In the Republic a further analysis leads to a somewhat different arrangement. Opinion is placed between knowledge and ignorance; while the possible objects to which it corresponds form a transition from being to not-being. Subsequently mathematical reasoning is distinguished from the higher science which takes cognisance of first principles, and thus serves to connect it with simple opinion; while this again, dealing as it does with material objects, is related to the knowledge of their shadows as the most perfect science is related to mathematics.138Under such guidance as this. Platonism had made but little way. We saw, in the concluding sections of the last chapter and in the opening section of the present chapter, that it profited by the religious and literary revival of the second century, just as it was to profit long afterwards by the greater revival of the fifteenth century, so much so as to become the fashionable philosophy of the age. Yet, even in that period of its renewed splendour, the noblest of contemporary thinkers was not a Platonist but a Stoic; and although it would be unfair to measure the moral distance between the Porch and the Academy by the interval which separates an Aurelius from an Apuleius, still it would seem as if naturalism continued to be the chosen creed of strenuous and dutiful endeavour, while spiritualism was drifting into an alliance with hysterical and sensuous superstition. If we may judge by the points which Sextus Empiricus selects for controversial treatment, Stoicism was still the reigning system in his time, that is to say, about the beginning of the third century; and if, a generation later, it had sunk into neglect, every rival school, except that of Epicurus, was in exactly the same condition. Thus the only advance made was to substitute one form of materialism for another, until Neo-Platonism came and put an end to their disputes by destroying the common foundation on which they stood; while, at the same time, it supplied a completely organised doctrine round which the nobler elements of the Hellenic revival could rally for a last stand against the foes that were threatening it from every side."Have you got anything for me to eat?" I asked, not heeding his words.
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