In order to escape the necessity of concerning itself with personality and particular circumstances in questions of truth and error, Intellectualism appeals to Logic, which it conceives as a purely formal science and its impregnable citadel. This appeal, however, rests on a number of questionable assumptions, and most of these are not avowed.

1. It assumes that forms of thought can be treated in abstraction from their matter—in other words, that the general types of thinking are never affected by the particular context in which they occur. Now, this means that the question of real truth must not be raised; for, as we have seen (Chapter V.), real truth is always an affair of particular consequences. The result is, that as truth-claims are no longer tested, they all pass as true for Logic, and are even raised to the rank of 'absolute truths,' or are mistaken for them. For the notion of a really ('materially') true judgment which someone has chosen, made, and tested, there is substituted that of a formally valid proposition, and in the end Logic gets so involved in the study of 'validity' that it puts aside altogether all real tests of truth, and becomes a game with verbal symbols which is entirely irrelevant to scientific thinking.

2. Formal Logic assumes the right of abstracting from the whole process of making an assertion. It presumes that the assertion has already been made somehow. How, it does not inquire. Yet it is clear that in each case there were concrete reasons why just that assertion was preferred to any other. These concrete reasons it makes bold to dismiss as 'psychological,' and between 'logic' and 'psychology'^[F] it decrees an absolute divorce. Where, when, why, by and to whom, an assertion was made, is taken to be irrelevant, and put aside as 'extralogical.'

3. This convenient assumption, however, ultimately necessitates an abstraction from meaning, though Formal Logic does not avow this openly. Every assertion is meant to convey a certain meaning in a certain context, and therefore its verbal 'form' has to take on its own individual nuance of meaning. What any particular form of words does in fact mean on any particular occasion always depends upon the use of the words in a particular context. Meaning, therefore, cannot be depersonalized; if meanings are depersonalized, they cease to be real, and become verbal.

Formal Logic has, in fact, mistaken words, which are (within the same language) identical on all occasions, for the thoughts they are intended to express, which are varied to suit each occasion. Words alone are tolerant of the abstract treatment Formal Logic demands. This 'science,' therefore, finally reduces to mere verbalism, distracted by inconsistent relapses into 'psychology.'

But will this conception of Logic either work out consistently in itself or lead to a tenable theory of scientific thinking? Emphatically not. What is the use of a logic which (1) cannot effect the capital distinction of all thought, that between the true and the false? (2) is debarred by its own principles from considering the meaning of any real assertion? and (3) is thus tossed helplessly from horn to horn of the dilemma 'either verbalism or psychology'?

We may select a few examples of this fatal dilemma.

1. In dealing with what it calls 'the meaning' of terms, propositions, etc., Formal Logic has always to choose between the meaning of the words and the meaning of the man. For it is clear that words which may be used ambiguously may on occasion leave no doubt as to their meaning, while conversely all may become 'ambiguous' in a context. If, therefore, the occasion is abstracted from, all forms must be treated verbally as ambiguous formulae, which may be used in different senses. If it is, nevertheless, attempted to deal with their actual meaning on any given occasion, what its maker meant the words to convey must be discovered, and the inquiry at once becomes 'psychological'—that is to say, 'extralogical.'

2. If judgments are not to be verbal ('propositions'), but real assertions which are actually meant, they must proceed from personal selections, and must have been chosen from among alternative formulations because of their superior value for their maker's purpose. But all this is plainly an affair of psychology. So inevitable is this that a truly formal Ideal of 'Logic' would exclude ail judgment whatever from the complete system of 'eternal' Truth. For from such a system no part could be rightly extracted to stand alone. Such a selection could be effected and justified only by the exigencies of a human thinker.

The impotent verbalism of the formal treatment of judgment appears in another way when the question is raised how a 'true' judgment is to be distinguished from a 'false.' For the logician, if his public will not accept either the relegation of this distinction to 'psychology' or the proper formal answer that all judgments are (formally) 'true' and even 'infallible,' can think of nothing better to say than that if the 'judgment' is not true it was not a 'true judgment,' but a false 'opinion' which may be abandoned to 'psychology.'^[G] Apparently he is not concerned to help men to discriminate between 'judgments' and 'opinions,' or even to show that true 'judgments' do in fact occur.

3. Inference involves Formal Logic in a host of difficulties.

(a) If it is not to be a verbal manipulation of phrases whose coming together is not inquired into, it must be a connected train of thought. But such a connection of thoughts cannot be conceived or understood without reference to the purpose of a reasoner, who selects what he requires from the totality of 'truths.' If, then, 'Logic' has merely to contemplate this eternal and immutable system of truth in its integrity, and forbids all selection from it for a merely human purpose, how can it either justify, or even understand, the drawing of any inference whatever?

(b) Formal Logic clearly will not quail before the charge of uselessness. But on its own principles it ought to be consistent. But by this test also, when it is rigorously judged by it, it fails completely. Its inconsistencies are many and incurable. It cannot even be consistent in its theory of the simplest fundamentals. It is found upon some occasions to define judgment as that which may be either true or false; and upon others as that which is 'true' (formally)—i.e., it cannot decide whether or not to ignore the existence of error.

(c) The Formal view of inference regards it as a 'paradox.' An inference is required on the one hand to supply fresh information, and on the other to follow rigorously from its premisses; it must, in a word, exhibit both novelty and necessity. It would seem, however, that if our inference genuinely had imparted new knowledge, the event must be merely psychological; for how can any process or event perturb, or add to, the completed totality of truth in itself? On the other hand, if the 'necessity' of the operation be taken seriously, the 'inference' becomes illusory; for if the conclusion inferred is already contained in the premisses, what sense is there in the purely verbal process of drawing it out?

(d) Most glaringly inadequate of all, however, is the Formal doctrine of 'Proof' contained in its theory of the Syllogism. A Formal or verbal syllogism depends essentially on the ability of its Middle Term to connect the terms in its conclusion. If, however, the Middle Term has not the same meaning in the two premisses, the syllogism breaks in two, and no 'valid' conclusion can be reached. Now, whether in fact any particular Middle Term bears the same meaning in any actual reasoning Formal Logic has debarred itself from inquiring, by deciding that actual meaning was 'psychological.' It has to be content, therefore, with an identity in the word employed for its Middle, But this evidence may always fail; for when two premisses which are (in general) 'true' are brought together for the purpose of drawing a particular conclusion, a glaring falsehood may result. E.g., it would in general be granted that 'iron sinks in water,' yet it does not follow that because 'this ship is iron' it will 'sink in water,' Hence syllogistic 'proof' seems quite devoid of the 'cogency' it claimed. After a conclusion has been 'demonstrated' it has still to come true in fact. This flaw in the Syllogism was first pointed out by Mr. Alfred Sidgwick.

(e) The formal Syllogism, moreover, conceals another formal flaw. An infinite regress lurks in its bosom. For if its premisses are disputed, they must in turn be 'proved.' Four fresh premisses are needed, and if these again are challenged, the number of true premisses needed to prove the first conclusion goes on doubling at every step ad infinitum. The only way to stop the process that occurred to logicians was an appeal to the 'self-evident' truth of 'intuitions'; but this has been shown to be argumentatively worthless. From this difficulty the pragmatist alone escapes, by assuming his premisses provisionally and arguing forwards, in order to test them by their consequences. If the deduced conclusion can be verified in fact, the premisses grow more assured. Thus every real inference is an experiment, and 'proof' is an affair of continuous trial and verification—not an infinite falling back upon an elusive 'certainty,' but an infinite reaching forwards towards a fuller consummation.

(f) So long as the logician regards his premisses not as hypotheses to be tested, but as established truths, he must condemn the Syllogism as a formal fallacy. It is inevitably a petitio principii. If the argument 'All men are mortal; Smith is a man, therefore Smith is mortal,' means that we know, before drawing our inference, that literally all men are mortal, we must already have discovered that Smith is mortal; if we did not know beforehand that Smith is mortal, we were not justified in stating that all men are mortal. Nor is it an escape to interpret 'All men are mortal' to mean that immortals are excluded from 'man' by definition. For then the question is merely begged in the minor premiss. That 'Smith is a man' cannot be asserted without assuming that he is mortal. If, lastly, 'All men are mortal' be taken to state a law of nature conjoining inseparably mortality and humanity, the logician either already knows that Smith is rightly classed under the species 'man,' and so subject to its mortality, or else he assumes this. But how does he know Smith is not like Elijah or Tithonus, a peculiar case, to which for some reason the law does not apply? Will he declare it to be 'intuitively certain' that whatever is called, or looks like, a case of a 'law' ipso facto becomes one?

The logician's analysis of reasoning, then, breaks down. In whichever way he interprets the Syllogism it is revealed as either a superfluity or a fallacy: it is never a 'formally valid inference' that can compel assent. But common sense is undismayed by the pragmatist's discovery that if the Syllogism is to have any sense its premisses must be taken as disputable; for, unlike Formal Logic, it has perceived that men do not reason about what they think they know for certain, but about matters in dispute.

4. It is not necessary to dwell at length on the futility of the formal notion of Induction. Formal Induction presupposes that enough particular instances have been collected to establish a general rule; but in actual practice inductions always repose, not on indiscriminate observation, but on a selection of relevant instances, and never claim to be based upon an exhaustive knowledge of particulars. Hence in form the most satisfactory induction is always incomplete, and differs in no wise from a bad one. 'All bodies fall to the ground' is an induction which has worked. 'All swans are white' broke down when black swans were discovered in Australia. The validity of an induction, then, is not a question of form.

The necessity for such selection no intellectualist theory of Induction has understood. All have aimed at exhaustiveness, and imagined that if it could be attained, inductive reasoning would be rendered sound, and not impossible. Their ideal 'cause' was the totality of reality, identified with its 'effect,' in a meaningless tautology. Nothing but voluntarism can enable logicians to see that our actual procedure in knowing is the reverse of this, that causal explanation is the analysis of a continuum, and that 'phenomena,' 'events,' 'effects,' and 'causes' are all creations of our selective attention; that in selecting them we run a risk of analyzing falsely, and that if we do, our 'inductions' will be worthless. But whether they are right or wrong, valuable or not, real reasoning from 'facts' can never be a 'formally valid' process.

We are thus brought to see the hollowness of the contention that 'Pure Reason' can ignore its psychological context and dehumanize itself. A thought, to be thought at all, must seem worth thinking to someone, it must convey the meaning he intends, it must be true in his eyes and relevant to his purposes in the situation in which it arises—i.e., it must have a motive, a value, a meaning, a purpose, a context, and be selected from a greater whole for its relevance to these. None of these features does intellectualist logic deign to recognize. For if truth is absolute and not relative, it is all or nothing. Yet no actual thinking has such transcendent aims. It is content with selections relative to a concrete situation. If it were permissible to diversify a debate—e.g., about the authorship of the Odyssey—by an irruption of undisputed truths—e.g., a recitation of the multiplication table—how would it be possible to distinguish a philosopher from a lunatic?

Formal Logic is either a perennial source of errors about real thinking, or at best an aimless dissection of a caput mortuum—i.e., of the verbal husks of dead thoughts, whose value Formal Logic could neither establish nor apprehend, A real Logic, therefore, would most anxiously avoid all the initial abstractions which have reduced Formal Logic to such impotence, and would abandon the insane attempt to eliminate the thinker from the theory of thought.

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