Part 19

The setting of Herbart's logic in his thought as a whole might of itself perhaps justify separate treatment. His far-reaching influence in the development of later logic must certainly do so. Directly he affected a school of thought which contained one logician of first-rate importance in Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802-1896), professor at Leipzig. In less direct relation stands Lotze, who, although under other influences he developed a different view even in logic, certainly let no point in the doctrine of his great predecessor at Göttingen escape him. A Herbartian strain is to be met with also in the thought of writers much further afield, for example F. H. Bradley, far though his metaphysic is removed from Herbart's. Herbart's influence is surely to be found too in the evolution of what is called _Gegenstandstheorie_. Nor did he affect the logic of his successors through his logic alone. Reference has been made above to the effect upon the rise of the later psychological logic produced by Herbart's psychology of apperception, when disengaged from the background of his metaphysic taken in conjunction with his treatment in his practical philosophy of the judgment of value or what he calls the aesthetic judgment. Emerson's verdict upon a greater thinker--that his was "not a mind to nestle in"--may be true of Herbart, but there can be no doubt as to the stimulating force of this master.

Logic as the rationale of knowledge.

Schleiermacher.

The second way of interpreting the antithesis of thought to what is thought of, was taken by a group of thinkers among whom a central and inspiring figure was Schleiermacher. They in no sense constitute a school and manifest radical differences among themselves. They are agreed, however, in the rejection, on the one hand, of the subjectivist logic with its intrinsic implication that knowledge veils rather than reveals the real world, and, on the other hand, of the logic of the speculative construction with its pretension to "deduce," to determine, and finally at once to cancel and conserve any antithesis in its all-embracing dialectic. They agree, then, in a maintenance of the critical point of view, while all alike recognize the necessity of bringing the thought-function in knowledge into more intimate relation with its "other" than Kant had done, by means of some formula of correlation or parallelism. Such an advance might have taken its cue directly from Kant himself. As an historical fact it tended rather to formulate itself as a reaction towards Kant in view of the course taken by the speculative movement. Thus Schleiermacher's posthumously published _Dialektik_ (1839) may be characterized as an appeal from the absolutist element in Schelling's philosophy to the conception of that correlation or parallelism which Schelling had exhibited as flowing from and subsisting within his absolute, and therein as a return upon Kant's doctrine of limits. Schleiermacher's conception of dialectic is to the effect that it is concerned with the principles of the art of philosophizing, as these are susceptible of a relatively independent treatment by a permissible abstraction. Pure thinking or philosophizing is with a view to philosophy or knowledge as an interconnected system of all sciences or departmental forms of knowledge, the mark of knowledge being its identity for all thinking minds. Dialectic then investigates the nexus which must be held to obtain between all thoughts, but also that agreement with the nexus in being which is the condition of the validity of the thought-nexus. In knowing there are two functions involved, the "organic" or animal function of sensuous experience in virtue of which we are in touch with being, directly in inner perception, mediately in outer experience, and the "intellectual" function of construction. Either is indispensable, though in different departments of knowledge the predominant rôle falls to one or other, e.g. we are more dependent in physics, less so in ethics. The idea of a perfect harmony of thinking and being is a presupposition that underlies all knowing but cannot itself be realized in knowledge. In terms of the agreement of thought and being, the logical forms of the part of dialectic correspondent to knowledge statically considered have parallels and analogies in being, the concept being correlated to substance, the judgment to causal nexus. Inference, curiously enough, falls under the technical side of dialectic concerned with knowledge in process or becoming, a line of cleavage which Ueberweg has rightly characterized as constituting a rift within Schleiermacher's parallelism.

Schleiermacher's formula obviously ascribes a function in knowledge to thought as such, and describes in a suggestive manner a duality of the intellectual and organic functions, resting on a parallelism of thought and being whose collapse into identity it is beyond human capacity to grasp. It is rather, however, a statement of a way in which the relations of the terms of the problem may be conceived than a system of necessity. It may indeed be permitted to doubt whether its influence upon subsequent theory would have been a great one apart from the spiritual force of Schleiermacher's personality. Some sort of correlationist conception, however, was an inevitable development, and the list[136] of those who accepted it in something of the spirit of Schleiermacher is a long one and contains many distinguished names, notably those of Trendelenburg and Ueberweg. The group is loosely constituted however. There was scope for diversity of view and there was diversity of view, according as the vital issue of the formula was held to lie in the relation of intellectual function to organic function or in the not quite equivalent relation of thinking to being. Moreover, few of the writers who, whatsoever it was that they baptized with the name of logic, were at least earnestly engaged in an endeavour to solve the problem of knowledge within a circle of ideas which was on the whole Kantian, were under the dominance of a single inspiration. Beneke's philosophy is a striking instance of this, with application to Fries and affinity to Herbart conjoined with obligations to Schelling both directly and through Schleiermacher. Lotze again wove together many threads of earlier thought, though the web was assuredly his own. Finally it must not be forgotten that the host of writers who were in reaction against Hegelianism tended to take refuge in some formula of correlation, as a half-way house between that and formalism or psychologism or both, without reference to, and often perhaps without consciousness of, the way in which historically it had taken shape to meet the problem held to have been left unresolved by Kant.

Lotze.

Lotze on the one hand held the Hegelian "deduction" to be untenable, and classed himself with those who in his own phrase "passed to the order of the day," while on the other hand he definitely raised the question, how an "object" could be brought into forms to which it was not in some sense adapted. Accordingly, though he regards logic as formal, its forms come into relation to objectivity in some sort even within the logical field itself, while when taken in the setting of his system as a whole, its formal character is not of a kind that ultimately excludes psychological and metaphysical reference, at least speculatively. As a logician Lotze stands among the masters. His _flair_ for the essentials in his problem, his subtlety of analysis, his patient willingness to return upon a difficulty from a fresh and still a fresh point of view, and finally his fineness of judgment, make his logic[137] so essentially logic of the present, and of its kind not soon to be superseded, that nothing more than an indication of the historical significance of some of its characteristic features need be attempted here.

In Lotze's pure logic it is the Herbartian element that tends to be disconcerting. Logic is formal. Its unit, the logical concept, is a manipulated product and the process of manipulation may be called abstraction. Processes of the psychological mechanism lie below it. The paradox of the theory of judgment is due to the ideal of identity, and the way in which this is evaded by supplementation to produce a non-judgmental identity, followed by translation of the introduced accessories with conditions in the hypothetical judgment, is thoroughly in Herbart's manner. The reduction of judgments is on lines already familiar. Syllogism is no instrumental method by which we compose our knowledge, but an ideal to the form of which it should be brought. It is, as it were, a schedule to be filled in, and is connected with the disjunctive judgment as a schematic setting forth of alternatives, not with the hypothetical, and ultimately the apodictic judgment with their suggestion that it is the real movement of thought that is subjected to analysis. Yet the resultant impression left by the whole treatment is not Herbartian. The concept is accounted for in Kantian terms. There is no discontinuity between the pre-logical or sub-logical conversion of impressions into "first universals" and the formation of the logical concept. Abstraction proves to be synthesis with compensatory universal marks in the place of the particular marks abstracted from. Synthesis as the work of thought always supplies, beside the mere conjunction or disjunction of ideas, a ground of their coherence or non-coherence. It is evident that thought, even as dealt with in pure logic, has an objectifying function. Its universals have objective validity, though this does not involve direct real reference. The formal conception of pure logic, then, is modified by Lotze in such a way as not only to be compatible with a view of the structural and functional adequacy of thought to that which at every point at which we take thinking is still distinguishable from thought, but even inevitably to suggest it. That the unit for logic is the concept and not the judgment has proved a stumbling-block to those of Lotze's critics who are accustomed to think in terms of the act of thought as unit. Lotze's procedure is, indeed, analogous to the way in which, in his philosophy of nature, he starts from a plurality of real beings, but by means of a reductive movement, an application of Kant's transcendental method, arrives at the postulate or fact of a law of their reciprocal action which calls for a monistic and idealist interpretation. He starts, that is in logic, with conceptual units apparently self-contained and admitting of nothing but external relation, but proceeds to justify the intrinsic relation between the matter of his units by an appeal to the fact of the coherence of all contents of thought. Indeed, if thought admits irreducible units, what can unite? Yet he is left committed to his puzzle as to a reduction of judgment to identity, which partially vitiates his treatment of the theory of judgment. The outstanding feature of this is, nevertheless, not affected, viz. the attempt that he makes, inspired clearly by Hegel, "to develop the various forms of judgment systematically as members of a series of operations, each of which leaves a part of its problem unmastered and thereby gives rise to the next."[138] As to inference, finally, the ideal of the articulation of the universe of discourse, as it is for complete knowledge, when its disjunctions have been thoroughly followed out and it is exhaustively determined, carried the day with him against the view that the organon for gaining knowledge is syllogism. The Aristotelian formula is "merely the expression, formally expanded and complete, of the truth already embodied in disjunctive judgment, namely, that every S which is a specific form of M possesses as its predicate a particular modification of each of the universal predicates of M to the exclusion of the rest." Schleiermacher's separation of inference from judgment and his attribution of the power to knowledge in process cannot find acceptance with Lotze. The psychologist and the formal logician do indeed join hands in the denial of a real movement of thought in syllogism. Lotze's logic then, is formal in a sense in which a logic which does not find the conception of synthetic truth embarrassing is not so. 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 concept, it brings the statics of knowledge, so to speak, into integral relation with the dynamics. And throughout, wherever the survival from 1843, the identity bug-bear, is for the moment got rid of in what is really a more liberal conception, the statical doctrine 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 especially 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 illuminating 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 realise 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."[139] The impulse of thought to reduce coincidence to coherence reaches immediately only to objectivity or validity. The sense in which the presupposition of a further reference is to be interpreted and in which justificatory notions for it can be adduced is only determinable 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, completely alien to and unadapted to it. The further step to the determination of the ground of harmony is not to be taken in logic, where limits are present and untranscended.

Logic as Metaphysic.

The position of the search for truth, for which knowledge is a growing organism in which thought needs, so to speak, to feed on something other than itself, is conditioned in the post-Kantian period by antagonism to the speculative movement which culminated in the dialectic of Hegel. The radical thought of this movement was voiced in the demand of Reinhold[140] that philosophy should "deduce" it all from a single principle and by a single method. Kant's limits that must needs be thought and yet cannot be thought must be thought away. An earnest attempt to satisfy this demand was made by Fichte whose single principle was the activity of the pure Ego, while his single method was the assertion of a truth revealed by reflection on the content of conscious experience, the characterization of this as a half truth and the supplementation of it by its other, and finally the harmonization of both. The pure ego is inferred from the fact that the non-ego is realized only in the act of the ego in positing it. The ego posits itself, but reflection on the given shows that we must add that it posits also the non-ego. The two positions are to be conciliated in the thought of reciprocal limitation of the posited ego and non-ego. And so forth. Fichte cannot be said to have developed a logic, but this rhythm of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, foreshadowed in part for Fichte in Spinoza's formula, "omnis determinatio est negatio" and significantly in Kant's triadic grouping of his categories, gave a cue to the thought of Hegel. Schelling, too, called for a single principle and claimed to have found it in his Absolute, "the night" said Hegel, "in which all cows are black," but his historical influence lay, as we have seen, in the direction of a parallelism within the unity, and he also developed no logic. It is altogether otherwise with Hegel.

Hegel.

Hegel's logic,[141] though it involves inquiries which custom regards as metaphysical, is not to be characterized as a metaphysic with a method. It is logic or a rationale of thought by thought, with a full development among other matters of all that the most separatist of logicians regards as thought forms. It offers a solution of what has throughout appeared as the logical problem. That solution lies doubtless in the evolution of the Idea, i.e. an all-inclusive in which mere or pure thought is cancelled in its separateness by a transfiguration, while logic is nothing but the science of the Idea viewed in the medium of pure thought. But, whatever else it be, this _Panlogismus_, to use the word of J. E. Erdmann, is at least a logic. Thought in its progressive unfolding, of which the history of philosophy taken in its broad outline offers a pageant, necessarily cannot find anything external to or alien from itself, though that there is something external for it is another matter. As Fichte's Ego finds that its _non-ego_ springs from and has its home within its very self, so with Hegel thought finds itself in its "other," both subsisting in the Idea which is both and neither. Either of the two is the all, as, for example, the law of the convexity of the curve is the law of the curve and the law of its concavity. The process of the development of the Idea or Absolute is in one regard the immanent process of the all. Logically regarded, i.e. "in the medium of mere thought," it is dialectical method. Any abstract and limited point of view carries necessarily to its contradictory. This can only be atoned with the original determination by fresh negation in which a new thought-determination is born, which is yet in a sense the old, though enriched, and valid on a higher plane. The limitations of this in turn cause a contradiction to emerge, and the process needs repetition. At last, however, no swing into the opposite, with its primarily conflicting, if ultimately complementary function, is any longer possible. That in which no further contradiction is possible is the absolute Idea. Bare or indeterminate being, for instance, the first of the determinations of Hegel's logic, as the being of that which is not anything determinate, of Kant's thing-in-itself, for example, positively understood, implicated at once the notion of not-being, which negates it, and is one with it, yet with a difference, so that we have the transition to determinate being, the transition being baptized as becoming. And so forth. It is easy to raise difficulties not only in regard to the detail in Hegel's development of his categories, especially the higher ones, but also in regard to the essential rhythm of his method. The consideration that mere double negation leaves us precisely where we were and not upon a higher plane where the dominant concept is richer, is, of course, fatal only to certain verbal expressions of Hegel's intent. There is a differentiation in type between the two negations. But if we grant this it is no longer obviously the simple logical operation indicated. It is inferred then that Hegel complements from the stuff of experience, and fails to make good the pretension of his method to be by itself and of itself the means of advance to higher and still higher concepts till it can rest in the Absolute. He discards, as it were, and takes in from the stock while professing to play from what he has originally in his hand. He postulates his unity in senses and at stages in which it is inadmissible, and so supplies only a schema of relations otherwise won, a view supported by the way in which he injects certain determinations in the process, e.g. the category of chemism. Has he not cooked the process in the light of the result? In truth the Hegelian logic suffers from the fact that the good to be reached is presupposed in the beginning. Nature, e.g., is not deduced as real because rational, but being real its rationality is presumed and, very imperfectly, exhibited in a way to make it possible to conceive it as in its essence the reflex of Reason. It is a vision rather than a construction. It is a "theosophical logic." Consider the rational-real in the unity that must be, and this is the way of it, or an approximation to the way of it! It was inevitable that the epistemologists of the search for truth would have none of it. The ideal in whatsoever sense real still needs to be realized. It is from the human standpoint regulative and only hypothetically or formally constitutive. We must not confuse [Greek: ousia] with [Greek: einai], nor [Greek: einai] with [Greek: gignesthai].

Yet in a less ambitious form the fundamental contentions of Hegel's method tend to find a qualified acceptance. In any piece of presumed knowledge its partial or abstract character involves the presence of loose edges which force the conviction of inadequacy and the development of contradictions. Contradictions must be annulled by complementation, with resultant increasing coherence in ascending stages. At each successive stage in our progress fresh contradictions break out, but the ideal of a station at which the thought-process and its other, if not one, are at one, is permissible as a limiting conception. Yet if Hegel meant only this he has indeed succeeded in concealing his meaning.

Hegel's treatment of the categories or thought determinations which arise in the development of the immanent dialectic is rich in flashes of insight, but most of them are in the ordinary view of logic wholly metaphysical. In the stage, however, of his process in which he is concerned with the notion are to be found concept, judgment, syllogism. Of the last he declares that it "is the reasonable and everything reasonable" (_Encyk._ § 181), and has the phantasy to speak of the definition of the Absolute as being "at this stage" simply the syllogism. It is, of course, the rhythm of the syllogism that attracts him. The concept goes out from or utters itself in judgment to return to an enhanced unity in syllogism. Ueberweg (_System_ § 101) is, on the whole, justified in exclaiming that Hegel's rehabilitation of syllogism "did but slight service to the Aristotelian theory of syllogism," yet his treatment of syllogism must be regarded as an acute contribution to logical criticism in the technical sense. He insists on its objectivity. The transition from judgment is not brought about by our subjective action. The syllogism of "all-ness" is convicted of a _petitio principii_ (_Encyk._ § 190), with consequent lapse into the inductive syllogism, and, finally, since inductive syllogism is involved in the infinite process, into analogy. "The syllogism of necessity," on the contrary, does not presuppose its conclusion in its premises. The detail, too, of the whole discussion is rich in suggestion, and subsequent logicians--Ueberweg himself perhaps, Lotze certainly in his genetic scale of types of judgment and inference, Professor Bosanquet notably in his systematic development of "the morphology of knowledge," and others--have with reason exploited it.