Chapter II: History (2)

If we reject the infinite regress and the circle in proof (_circulus in probando_) which resolves itself ultimately into proving A by B and B by A,[63] we are confronted by the need for principles of two kinds, those which condition all search for truth, and those which are the peculiar or proper principles of special sciences, their "positions," viz. the definitions of their subjects and the postulates of the existence of these. All are indemonstrable and cannot be less sure than the body of doctrine that flows from them. They must indeed be recognized as true, primary, causative and the like. But[64] they are not congenitally present in the individual in a determinate shape. The doctrine of latency is mystical and savours of Plato's reminiscence (_anamnesis_). Yet they must have something to develop from, and thereupon Aristotle gives an account of a process in the psychological mechanism which he illustrates by comparative psychology, wherein a [Greek: logos] or meaning emerges, a "first" universal recognized by induction. Yet [Greek: nous], intelligence, is the principle of first principles. It is infallible, while, whatever the case with perception of the special sensibles,[65] the process which combines particulars is not. On the side of induction we find that experience is said to give the specific principles,[66] "the phenomena being apprehended in sufficiency." On the side of intuition, self-evidence of scientific principles is spoken of.[67] Yet dialectic is auxiliary and of methodological importance in their establishment.[68] Mutually limiting statements occur almost or quite side by side. We cannot take first principles "as the bare precipitate of a progressively refined analysis"[69] nor on the other as constitutive a priori forms. The solution seems to lie in the conception of a process that has a double aspect. On the one hand we have confrontation with fact, in which, in virtue of the rational principle which is the final cause of the phenomenal order, intelligence will find satisfaction. On the other we have a stage at which the rational but as yet not reasoned concepts developed in the medium of the psychological mechanism are subjected to processes of reflective comparison and analysis, and, with some modification, maintained against challenge, till at length the ultimate universals emerge, which rational insight can posit as certain, and the whole hierarchy of concepts from the "first" universals to [Greek: ta amerê] are intuited in a coherent system. Aristotle's terminology is highly technical, but, as has often been observed, not therefore clear. Here two words at least are ambiguous, "principle" and "induction." By the first he means any starting-point, "that from which the matter in question is primarily to be known,"[70] particular facts therefore, premises, and what not. What then is meant by principles when we ask in the closing chapter of his logic how they become known? The data of sense are clearly not the principles in question here. The premises of scientific syllogisms may equally be dismissed. Where they are not derivative they clearly are definitions or immediate transcripts from definitions. There remain, then, primary definitions and the postulates of their realization, and the axioms or common principles, "which he must needs have who is to reach any knowledge."[71] In the case of the former, special each to its own science, Aristotle may be thought to hold that they are the product of the psychological mechanism, but are ascertained only when they have faced the fire of a critical dialectic and have been accepted from the point of view of the integral rationality of the system of concepts. Axioms, on the other hand, in which the sciences interconnect[72] through the employment of them in a parity of relation, seem to be implicit indeed in the psychological mechanism, but to come to a kind of explicitness in the first reflective reaction upon it, and without reference to any particular content of it. They are not to be used as premises but as immanent laws of thought, save only when an inference from true or admitted premises and correct in form is challenged. The challenge must be countered in a _reductio ad impossibile_ in which the dilemma is put. Either this conclusion or the denial of rationality. Even these principles, however, may get a greater explicitness by dialectical treatment.[73] The relation, then, of the two orders of principle to the psychological mechanism is different. The kind of warrant that intelligence can give to specific principles falls short of infallibility. Celestial physics, with its pure forms and void of all matter save extension, is not such an exemplary science after all. Rationality is continuous throughout. A [Greek: logos] emerges with some beings in direct sequence upon the persistence of impressions.[74] Sense is of the "first" universal, the form, though not of the ultimate universal. The rally from the rout in Aristotle's famous metaphor is of units that already belong together, that are of the same regiment or order. On the other hand, rationality has two stages. In the one it is relatively immersed in sense, in the other relatively free. The same break is to be found in the conception of the relation of receptive to active mind in the treatise _Of the Soul_.[75] The one is impressed by things and receives their form without their matter. The other is free from impression. It thinks its system of concepts freely on the occasion of the affections of the receptivity. Aristotle is fond of declaring that knowledge is of the universal, while existence or reality is individual. It seems to follow that the cleavage between knowledge and reality is not bridged by the function of [Greek: nous] in relation to "induction." What is known is not real, and what is real is not known. The _nodus_[76] has its cause in the double sense of the word "universal" and a possible solution in the doctrine of [Greek: eidos]. The "form" of a thing constitutes it what it is, and at the same time, therefore, is constitutive of the group to which it belongs. It has both individual and universal reference. The individual is known in the [Greek: eidos], which is also the first universal in which by analysis higher universals are discoverable. These are predicates of the object known, ways of knowing it, rather than the object itself. The suggested solution removes certain difficulties, but scarcely all. On seeing Callias my perception is of man, not Callias, or even man-Callias. The recognition of the individual is a matter of his accidents, to which even sex belongs, and the gap from lowest universal to individual may still be conceived as unbridged. It is in induction, which claims to start from particulars and end in universals,[77] that we must, if anywhere within the confines of logical inquiry, expect to find the required bridge. The Aristotelian conception of induction, however, is somewhat ambiguous. He had abandoned for the most part the Platonic sense of the corresponding verb, viz. to lead forward to the as yet unknown, and his substitute is not quite clear. It is scarcely the military metaphor. The adducing of a witness for which he uses the verb[78] is not an idea that covers all the uses.[79] Perhaps confrontation with facts is the general meaning. But how does he conceive of its operation? There is in the first place the action of the psychological mechanism in the process from discriminative sense upwards wherein we realize "first" universals.[80] This is clearly an unreflective, pre-logical process, not altogether lighted up by our retrojection upon it of our view of dialectical induction based thereon. The immanent rationality of this first form, in virtue of which at the stage when intelligence acts freely on the occasion of the datum supplied it recognizes continuity with its own self-conscious process, is what gives the dialectical type its meaning. Secondly we have this dialectical "induction as to particulars by grouping of similars"[81] whose liability to rebuttal by an exception has been already noted in connexion with the limits of dialectic. This is the incomplete induction by simple enumeration which has so often been laughed to scorn. It is a heuristic process liable to failure, and its application by a nation of talkers even to physics where non-expert opinion is worthless somewhat discredited it. Yet it was the fundamental form of induction as it was conceived throughout the scholastic period. Thirdly we have the limiting cases of this in the inductive syllogism [Greek: dia pantôn],[82] a syllogism in the third figure concluding universally, and yet valid because the copula expresses equivalence, and in analogy[83] in which, it has been well said, instances are weighed and not counted. In the former it has been noted[84] that Aristotle's illustration does not combine particular facts into a lowest concept, but specific concepts into a generic concept, and[85] that in the construction of definite inductions the ruling thought with Aristotle is already, though vaguely, that of causal relation. It appears safer, notwithstanding, to take the less subtle interpretation[86] that dialectical induction struggling with instances is formally justified only at the limit, and that this, where we have exhausted and know that we have exhausted the cases, is in regard to individual subjects rarely and accidentally reached, so that we perforce illustrate rather from the definite class-concepts falling under a higher notion. After all, Aristotle must have had means by which he reached the conclusions that horses are long-lived and lack gall. It is only then in the rather mystical relation of [Greek: nous] to the first type of induction as the process of the psychological mechanism that an indication of the direction in which the bridge from individual being to universal knowledge is to be found can be held to lie.

Summary.

Enough has been said to justify the great place assigned to Aristotle in the history of logic. Without pressing metaphysical formulae in logic proper, he analysed formal implication grounded implication as a mode of knowledge in the rationality of the real, and developed a justificatory metaphysic. He laid down the programme which the after history of logic was to carry out. We have of course abandoned particular logical positions. This is especially to be noted in the theory of the proposition. The individualism with which he starts, howsoever afterwards mitigated by his doctrine of [Greek: to ti ên einai] or [Greek: eidos] constituting the individual in a system of intelligible relations, confined him in an inadmissible way to the subject-attribute formula. He could not recognize such vocables as the impersonals for what they were, and had perforce to ignore the logical significance of purely reciprocal judgments, such as those of equality. There was necessarily a "sense" or direction in every proposition, with more than the purely psychological import that the advance was from the already mastered and familiar taken as relatively stable, to the new and strange. Many attributes, too, were predicable, even to the end, in an external and accidental way, not being derivable from the essence of the subject. The thought of contingency was too easily applied to these attributes, and an unsatisfactory treatment of modality followed. It is indeed the doctrine of the intractability of matter to form that lies at the base of the paradox as to the disparateness of knowledge and the real already noted. On the one hand Aristotle by his doctrine of matter admitted a surd into his system. On the other, he assigned to [Greek: nous] with its insight into rationality too high a function with regard to the concrete in which the surd was present, a power to certify the truth of scientific principles. The example of Aristotle's view of celestial physics as a science of pure forms exhibits both points. On the Copernican change the heavenly bodies were recognized as concrete and yet subject to calculable law. Intelligence had warranted false principles. The moral is that of the story of the heel of Achilles.

To return to logic proper. The Aristotelian theory of the universal of science as secure from dependence on its instances and the theory of linking in syllogism remain a heritage for all later logic, whether accepted in precisely Aristotle's formula or no. It is because the intervening centuries had the Aristotelian basis to work on, sometimes in reduced quantity and corrupt form, but always in some quantity and some form, that the rest of our logical tradition is what it is. We stand upon his shoulders.

iii. _Later Greek Logic._

After Aristotle we have, as regards logic, what the verdict of after
times has rightly characterized as an age of _Epigoni_. So far as the
Aristotelian framework is accepted we meet only minor corrections and
extensions of a formal kind. If there is conscious and purposed
divergence from Aristotle, inquiry moves, on the whole, within the
circle of ideas where Aristotelianism had fought its fight and won its
victory. Where new conceptions emerge, the imperfection of the
instruments, mechanical and methodological, of the sciences renders
them unfruitful, until their rediscovery in a later age. We have
activity without advance, diversity without development. Attempts at
comprehensiveness end in the compromises of eclecticism.

The Peripatetics.

Illustrations are not far to seek. Theophrastus and in general the
elder Peripatetics, before the rise of new schools with new lines of
cleavage and new interests had led to new antagonisms and new
alliances, do not break away from the Aristotelian metaphysic. Their
interests, however, lie in the sublunary sciences in which the
substantive achievement of the school was to be found. With
Theophrastus, accordingly, in his botanical inquiries, for example,
the alternatives of classification, the normal sequence of such and
such a character upon such another, the conclusion of rational
probability, are what counts. It is perhaps not wholly fanciful to
connect with this attitude the fact that Aristotle's pupils dealt with
a surer hand than the master with the conclusions from premises of
unlike modality, and that a formal advance of some significance
attributable to Theophrastus and Eudemus is the doctrine of the
hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms.

The Stoics.

The Stoics are of more importance. Despite the fact that their
philosophic interests lay rather in ethics and physics, their activity
in what they classified as the third department of speculation was
enormous and has at least left ineffaceable traces on the terminology
of philosophy. Logic is their word, and consciousness, impression and
other technical words come to us, at least as technical words, from
Roman Stoicism. Even inference, though apparently not a classical
word, throws back to the Stoic name for a conclusion.[87] In the
second place, it is in the form in which it was raised in connexion
with the individualistic theory of perception with which the Stoics
started, that one question of fundamental importance, viz. that of the
criterion of truth, exercised its influence on the individualists of
the Renaissance. Perception, in the view of the Stoics, at its highest
both revealed and guaranteed the being of its object. Its hold upon
the object involved the discernment that it could but be that which it
purported to be. Such "psychological certainty" was denied by their
agnostic opponents, and in the history of Stoicism we have apparently
a modification of the doctrine of [Greek: phantasia katalêptikê] with
a view to meet the critics, an approximation to a recognition that the
primary conviction might meet with a counter-conviction, and must then
persist undissipated in face of the challenge and in the last resort
find verification in the haphazard instance, under varying conditions,
in actual working. The controversy as to the self-evidence of
perception in which the New Academy effected some sort of conversion
of the younger Stoics, and in which the Sceptics opposed both, is one
of the really vital issues of the decadence.

Another doctrine of the Stoics which has interest in the light of
certain modern developments is their insistence on the place of the
[Greek: lekton] in knowledge. Distinct alike from thing and mental
happening, it seems to correspond to "meaning" as it is used as a
technical phrase now-a-days. This anticipation was apparently sterile.
Along the same lines is their use of the hypothetical form for the
universal judgment, and their treatment of the hypothetical form as
the typical form of inference.

The Stoical categories, too, have an historical significance. They are
apparently offered in place of those of Aristotle, an acquaintance
with whose distinctions they clearly presume. Recognizing a linguistic
side to "logical" theory with a natural development in rhetoric, the
Stoics endeavour to exorcise considerations of language from the
contrasted side. They offer pure categories arising in series, each
successive one presupposing those that have gone before. Yet the
substance, quality, condition absolute ([Greek: pôs echon]) and
condition relative of Stoicism have no enduring influence outside the
school, though they recur with eclectics like Galen. The Stoics were
too "scholastic" in their speculations.

Epicureans.

In Epicureanism logic is still less in honour. The practical end,
freedom from the bondage of things with the peace it brings, is all in
all, and even scientific inquiry is only in place as a means to this
end. Of the apparatus of method the less the better. We are in the
presence of a necessary evil. Yet, in falling back, with a difference,
upon the atomism of Democritus, Epicurus had to face some questions of
logic. In the inference from phenomena to further phenomena positive
verification must be insisted on. In the inference from phenomena to
their non-phenomenal causes, the atoms with their inaccessibility to
sense, a different canon of validity obtains, that of
non-contradiction.[88] He distinguishes too between the inference to
combination of atoms as universal cause, and inference to special
causes beyond the range of sense. In the latter case alternatives may
be acquiesced in.[89] The practical aim of science is as well achieved
if we set forth possible causes as in showing the actual cause. This
pococurantism might easily be interpreted as an insight into the
limitations of inverse method as such or as a belief in the plurality
of causes in Mill's sense of the phrase. More probably it reflects the
fact that Epicurus was, according to tradition through Nausiphanes, on
the whole dominated by the influences that produced Pyrrhonism.
Democritean physics without a calculus had necessarily proved sterile
of determinate concrete results, and this was more than enough to
ripen the naturalism of the utilitarian school into scepticism. Some
reading between the lines of Lucretius has led the "logic" of Epicurus
to have an effect on the modern world, but scarcely because of its
deserts.

The Sceptics.

The school of Pyrrho has exercised a more legitimate influence. Many
of the arguments by which the Sceptics enforced their advocacy of a
suspense of judgment are antiquated in type, but many also are, within
the limits of the individualistic theory of knowledge, quite
unanswerable. Hume had constant recourse to this armoury. The major
premise of syllogism, says the Pyrrhonist, is established inductively
from the particular instances. If there be but one of these uncovered
by the generalization, this cannot be sound. If the crocodile moves
its upper, not its lower, jaw, we may not say that all animals move
the lower jaw. The conclusion then is really used to establish the
major premise, and if we still will infer it therefrom we fall into
the circular proof.[90] Could Mill say more? But again. The inductive
enumeration is either of all cases or of some only. The former is in
an indeterminate or infinite subject-matter impossible. The latter is
invalid.[91] Less familiar to modern ears is the contention that proof
needs a standard or criterion, while this standard or criterion in
turn needs proof. Or still more the dialectical device by which the
sceptic claims to escape the riposte that his very argument presumes
the validity of this or that principle, viz. the doctrine of the
equipollence of counter-arguments. Of course the counter-contention is
no less valid! So too when the reflection is made that scepticism is
after all a medicine that purges out itself with the disease, the
disciple of Pyrrho and Aenesidemus bows and says, Precisely! The
sceptical suspension of judgment has its limits, however. The
Pyrrhonist will act upon a basis of probabilities. Nay, he even treats
the idea of cause[92] as probable enough so long as nothing more than
action upon expectation is in question. He adds, however, that any
attempt to establish it is involved in some sort of dilemma. That, for
instance, cause as the correlate of effect only exists with it, and
accordingly, cause which is come while effect is still to come is
inconceivable.[93] From the subjectivist point of view, which is
manifestly fundamental through most of this, such arguments suasory of
the Pyrrhonist suspense of judgment ([Greek: epochê]) are indeed hard
to answer. It is natural, then, that the central contribution of the
Sceptics to the knowledge controversy lies in the modes ([Greek:
tropoi]) in which the relativity of phenomena is made good, that these
are elaborated with extreme care, and that they have a modern ring and
are full of instruction even to-day. Scepticism, it must be confessed,
was at the least well equipped to expose the bankruptcy of the
post-Aristotelian dogmatism.

It was only gradually that the Sceptic's art of fence was developed.
From the time of Pyrrho overlapping Aristotle himself, who seems to
have been well content to use the feints of more than one school among
his predecessors, while showing that none of them could claim to get
past his guard, down through a period in which the decadent academy
under Carneades, otherwise dogmatic in its negations, supplied new
thrusts and parries, to Aenesidemus in the late Ciceronian age, and
again to Sextus Empiricus, there seems to have been something of
plasticity and continuous progress. In this matter the dogmatic
schools offer a marked contrast. In especial it is an outstanding
characteristic of the younger rivals to Aristotelianism that as they
sprang up suddenly into being to contest the claims of the
Aristotelian system in the moment of its triumph, so they reached
maturity very suddenly, and thereafter persisted for the most part in
a stereotyped tradition, modified only when convicted of indefensible
weakness. The 3rd century B.C. saw in its first half the close of
Epicurus' activity, and the life-work of Chrysippus, the refounder of
Stoicism, is complete before its close. And subsequent variations seem
to have been of a negligible where not of an eclectic character. In
the case of Epicureanism we can happily judge of the tyranny of the
literal tradition by a comparison of Lucretius with the recorded
doctrine of the master. But the rule apparently obtains throughout
that stereotype and compromise offer themselves as the exhaustive
alternative. This is perhaps fortunate for the history of doctrine,
for it produces the commentator, your Aspasius or Alexander of
Aphrodisias, and the substitute for the critic, your Cicero, or your
Galen with his attempt at comprehension of the Stoic categories and
the like while starting from Aristotelianism. Cicero in particular is
important as showing the effect or philosophical eclecticism upon
Roman cultivation, and as the often author and always popularizer of
the Latin terminology of philosophy.

The cause of the stereotyping of the systems, apart from political
conditions, seems to have been the barrenness of science. Logic and
theory of knowledge go together, and without living science, theory of
knowledge loses touch with life, and logic becomes a perfunctory
thing. Under such circumstances speculative interest fritters itself
and sooner or later the sceptic has his way. Plato is full of the
faith of mathematical physics. Aristotle is optimistic of achievement
over the whole range of the sciences. But the divorce of science of
nature from mathematics, the failure of biological inquiry to reach so
elementary a conception as that of the nerves, the absence of
chemistry from the circle of the sciences, disappointed the promise of
the dawn and the relative achievement of the noon-day. There is no
development. Physical science remains dialectical, and a physical
experiment is as rare in the age of Lucretius as in that of
Empedocles. The cause of eclecticism is the unsatisfying character of
the creeds of such science, in conjunction with the familiar law that,
in triangular or plusquam-triangular controversies a common hatred
will produce an alliance based on compromise. A bastard Platonism
through hostility to Stoicism may become agnostic. Stoicism through
hostility to its sceptical critics may prefer to accept some of the
positions of the dogmatic nihilist.

Neoplatonism.

Of the later schools the last to arise was Neoplatonism. The
mathematical sciences, at least, had not proved disappointing. For
those of the school of Plato who refused the apostasy of the new
academy, there was hope either in the mathematical side of the
Pythagoreo-Platonic tradition, or in its ritual and theological side.
Neoplatonism is philosophy become theosophy, or it is the sermon on
the text that God geometrizes. It is of significance in the general
history of thought as the one great school that developed after the
decadence had set in. In its metaphysic it showed no failure in
dialectical constructiveness. In the history of logic it is of
importance because of its production of a whole series of commentators
on the Aristotelian logic. Not only the _Introduction_ of Porphyry,
which had lasting effects on the Scholastic tradition, but the
commentaries of Themistius, and Simplicius. It was the acceptance of
the Aristotelian logic by Neoplatonism that determined the
Aristotelian complexion of the logic of the next age. If Alexander is
responsible for such doctrines as that of the _intellectus
acquisitus_, it is to Porphyry, with his characteristically Platonist
preference for the doctrine of universals, and for classification,
that we owe the scholastic preoccupation with the realist controversy,
and with the _quinque voces_, i.e. the Aristotelian predicables as
restated by Porphyry.

B. SCHOLASTICISM

The living force in the spiritual life of the Roman empire was, after all, not philosophy, but religion, and specifically Christianity. With the extension of Christianity to the Gentile world it at length became necessary for it to orientate itself towards what was best in Greek culture. There is a Stoic element in the ethic of the Pauline epistles, but the theological affinity that the Johannine gospel, with its background of philosophic ideas, exhibits to Platonic and Neoplatonist teaching caused the effort at absorption to be directed rather in that direction. Neoplatonism had accepted the Aristotelian logic with its sharper definition than anything handed down from Plato, and, except the logic of the Sceptics, there was no longer any rival discipline of the like prestige. The logic of the Stoics had been discredited by the sceptical onset, but in any case there was no organon of a fitness even comparable to Aristotle's for the task of drawing out the implications of dogmatic premises. Aristotelian logic secured the imprimatur of the revived Platonism, and it was primarily because of this that it passed into the service of Christian theology. The contact of the Church with Platonism was on the mystical side. Orthodoxy needed to counter heretical logic not with mysticism, itself the fruitful mother of heresies, but with argument. Aristotelianism approved itself as the controversial instrument, and in due course held the field alone. The upshot is what is called Scholasticism. Scholasticism is the Aristotelianism of medieval orthodoxy as taught in the "schools" or universities of Western Europe. It takes form as a body of doctrine drawing its premises from authority, sometimes in secular matters from that of Aristotle, but normally from that of the documents and traditions of systematic theology, while its method it draws from Aristotle, as known in the Latin versions,[94] mainly by Boethius, of some few treatises of the _Organon_ together with the _Isagoge_ of Porphyry. It dominates the centres of intellectual life in the West because, despite its claim to finality in its principles or premises, and to universality for its method, it represents the only culture of a philosophic kind available to the adolescent peoples of the Western nations just becoming conscious of their ignorance. Christianity was the one organizing principle that pulsed with spiritual life. The vocation of the student could find fulfilment only in the religious orders. Scholasticism embodied what the Christian community had saved from the wreckage of Greek dialectic. Yet with all its effective manipulation of the formal technique of its translated and mutilated Aristotle, Scholasticism would have gone under long before it did through the weakness intrinsic to its divorce of the form and the matter of knowledge, but for two reasons. The first is the filtering through of some science and some new Aristotelian learning from the Arabs. The second is the spread of Greek scholarship and Greek manuscripts westward, which was consequent on the Latin occupation of Constantinople in 1204. It was respited by the opportunity which was afforded it of fresh draughts from the Aristotle of a less partial and purer tradition, and we have, accordingly, a golden age of revived Scholasticism beginning in the 13th century, admitting now within itself more differences than before. It is to the schoolmen of the two centuries preceding the Turkish capture of Constantinople that the controversial refinements usually associated with the name of Scholasticism are attributable. The _Analytics_ of Aristotle now entered quite definitely into the logical thought of Scholasticism and we have the contrast of a _logica vetus_ and _logica nova_. That other matters, the _parva logicalia_ and Mnemonics adapted from Psellus and possibly of Stoic origin, entered too did not outweigh this advantage. Confrontation with the historical Aristotle may have brought but little comfort to the orthodox system, but it was a stimulus to dialectical activity within the schools. It provoked the distinction of what was true _secundum fidem_ and what was true _secundum rationem_ among even sincere champions of orthodoxy, and their opponents accepted with a smile so admirable a mask for that thinking for themselves to which the revival of hope of progress had spurred them. The pioneers of the Renaissance owe something of their strength to their training in the developments which the system that they overthrew underwent during this period. The respite, however, was short. The flight of Byzantine scholarship westward in the 15th century revealed, and finally, that the philosophic content of the Scholastic teaching was as alien from Aristotle as from the spirit of the contemporary revolt of science, with its cry for a new medicine, a new nautical astronomy and the like. The doom of the Scholastic Aristotle was nevertheless not the rehabilitation of the Greek Aristotle. Between him and the tide of feeling at the Renaissance lay the whole achievement of Arab science. That impatience of authority to which we owe the Renaissance, the Reformation and the birth of Nationalism, is not stilled by the downfall of Aristotle as the _nomen appellativum_ of the schools. The appeal is to experience, somewhat vaguely defined, as against all authority, to the book of nature and no other. At last the world undertakes to enlarge the circle of its ideas.