Note 24 — PART I. LOGIC

Gassendi uses this example to explain the distinction between logica utens and docens. To learn to count is merely to learn a method, good enough in itself but useless by itself, and only acquired in order that it may be applied to things. To go on with thought-processes in abstraction is like multiplying a number by itself ad infinitum; the result is true but true of nothing: hence he insists on the return to experience as being a process of verification. The inner significance of mathematical reasoning does not seem to have struck Gassendi; he merely sees that the assertion ‘twice two is four’ means that if two things have been given me twice I ought to have four; whether I have or not is a contingent fact that requires immediate experience for its verification. In both cases, mathematics and logic, we seem primarily to work with ideas divorced from things; but does this divorce extend to the ideas which are intuitively guaranteed? Gassendi apparently thinks it does, for even the idea of God is ‘verified’ in the content of experience.