physics; if they
give us a more comprehensive or a more definite view of the different
spheres of knowledge they are to be studied; if not, not. The better
part of ancient logic appears hardly in our own day to have a separate
existence; it is absorbed in two other sciences: (1) rhetoric, if indeed
this ancient art be not also fading away into literary criticism; (2)
the science of language, under which all questions relating to words and
propositions and the combinations of them may properly be included.

To continue dead or imaginary sciences, which make no signs of progress
and have no definite sphere, tends to interfere with the prosecution
of living ones. The study of them is apt to blind the judgment and
to render men incapable of seeing the value of evidence, and even of
appreciating the nature of truth. Nor should we allow the living science
to become confused with the dead by an ambiguity of language. The term
logic has two different meanings, an ancient and a modern one, and
we vainly try to bridge the gulf between them. Many perplexities are
avoided by keeping them apart. There might certainly be a new science of
logic; it would not however be built up out of the fragments of the
old, but would be distinct from them--relative to the state of knowledge
which exists at the present time, and based chiefly on the methods of
Modern Inductive philosophy. Such a science might have two legitimate
fields: first, the refutation and explanation of false philosophies
still hovering in the air as they appear from the point of view of later
experience or are comprehended in the history of the human mind, as in
a larger horizon: secondly, it might furnish new forms of thought more
adequate to the expression of all the diversities and oppositions
of knowledge which have grown up in these latter days; it might also
suggest new methods of enquiry derived from the comparison of the
sciences. Few will deny that the introduction of the words 'subject' and
'object' and the Hegelian reconciliation of opposites have been 'most
gracious aids' to psychology, or that the methods of Bacon and Mill have
shed a light far and wide on the realms of knowledge. These two
great studies, the one destructive and corrective of error, the other
conservative and constructive of truth, might be a first and second part
of logic. Ancient logic would be the propaedeutic or gate of approach to
logical science,--nothing more. But to pursue such speculatio