Chapter II: Objective Validity of the "laws of Thought"

I once inquired of a maid-servant whether her mistress was at home. She replied, in a doubtful fashion, that she _thought_ that her mistress was in unless she was out. I concluded that the maid was uncertain as to the objective validity of the law of excluded middle, and remarked that to her mistress. But since I used the phrase "laws of thought," the mistress perhaps supposed that a "law of thought" has something to do with thinking and seemed to imagine that I wished to impute to the maid some moral defect of an unimportant nature. Thus she remonstrated with me in an amused way, since she probably imagined that I meant to find fault with the maid's capacity for thinking.