Note 622 — Chapter V

This I have already touched upon in the first volume, pp. 808, 809. Hereafter, and in my special history of the English mind, I shall examine it carefully and in detail. The revival of the old logic is a great symptom of it. Works like those of Whately, De Morgan, and Mansel, could not have been produced in tho eighteenth century, or, at all events, if by some extraordinary combination of events they had been produced, they would have found no readers. As it is, they have exercised a very extensive and very salutary influence; and, although Archbishop Whately was not well acquainted with the history of formal logic, his exposition of its ordinary processes is so admirably clear, that he has probably contributed more than any other man towards impressing his contemporaries with a sense of the value of deductive reasoning. He has, however, not done sufficient justice to the opposite school, and has, indeed, fallen into the old academical error of supposing that all reasoning is by syllogism. We might just as well say that all movement is by descent.