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The principles of empirical or inductive logic
The principles of empirical or inductive logic Author:John Venn Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: assigned time and place at which the thinker may be supposed to appeal to his Logic, unless he proposes to set to work to discuss the rational development of the... more » human race from its first commencement: in other words to make his Logic a chapter in evolutionary Psychology. We can no more evade this necessity than we can conceive our reaching a last possible subdivision of space. Whatever example of a proposition we select contains a subject and a predicate, and one, if not both of these, will consist of an object of some kind. This remains true however far back we may insist on pushing our analysis. To sum up, then; before the logician can set to work he must have his materials before him, and his materials, unlike those of the psychologist, must always be terms, or the notions corresponding to these terms. These presuppose a considerable amount of that analysis and synthesis which has been indicated above. The psychologist may afford to start with simple impressions, but the logician's starting-point must always be a stage further on. It must be the stage in which we stand in possession of' objects', distinctly recognized as such. II. A world of objects having thus been, if one may use the expression, roughly put together with sufficient stability and distinctness of detail for the logician to commence to exercise his art upon it, and to investigate to the utmost its unity, homogeneity and inferribility; we have next to pass in review some of the general characteristics which we must postulate in addition if that world of objects is to answer the demands we are entitled to make. The principal claim of this description which we have to urge is best indicated by the demand that the world must be supposed to be pervaded throughout by one and the same uniform characteristic o...« less