![]() And no doubt the young carry with them the hopes of their elder compeers on them rests the advance of the world and science. ![]() In all this it is not humility which holds back from the knowledge and study of the truth, but a conviction that we are already in full possession of it. ![]() They admit that the special sciences are something that certainly ought to be cultivated, but merely as the means to satisfy the needs of outer life. Youth, say these teachers, sees the bright light of dawn: but the older generation lies in the slough and mire of the common day. And in the same strain, those of riper years are declared to be sunk, petrified ossified in falsehood. The young have been flattered into the belief that they possess a natural birthright of moral and religious truth. And humility of this stamp is a poor thing.īut the time is past when people asked: How shall I, a poor worm of the dust, be able to know the truth ? And in its stead we find vanity and conceit: people claim, without any trouble on their part, to breathe the very atmosphere of truth. They want to justify themselves in living on contented with their petty, finite aims. Others who ask whether we can know the truth have a different purpose. God is truth: how shall we know Him? Such an undertaking appears to stand in contradiction with the graces of lowliness and humility. But immediately there steps in the objection - are we able to know truth ? There seems to be a disproportion between finite beings like ourselves and the truth which is absolute, and doubts suggest themselves whether there is any bridge between the finite and the infinite. So long as man is sound at heart and in spirit, the search for truth must awake all the enthusiasm of his nature. Truth is a noble word, and the thing is nobler still. (1) The first question is: What is the object of our science? The simplest and most intelligible answer to this question is that Truth is the object of Logic. Its utility must then be estimated at another rate than exercise in thought for the sake of the exercise. Yet if what is noblest, most liberal, and most independent is also most useful, Logic has some claim to the latter character. It is true that Logic, being the absolute form of truth, and another name for the very truth itself, is something more than merely useful. ![]() This logical training consists in the exercise in thinking which the student has to go through (this science is the thinking of thinking): and in the fact that he stores his head with thoughts, in their native unalloyed character. The utility of Logic is a matter which concerns its bearings upon the student, and the training it may give for other purposes. But such an acquaintance only adds to the difficulties of the study for while, on the one hand, we naturally think it is not worth our trouble to occupy ourselves any longer with things so familiar, on the other hand, the problem is to become acquainted with them in a new way, quite opposite to that in which we know them already. They are also what we are best acquainted with: such as ‘is’ and ‘is not’ quality and magnitude being potential and being actual one, many, and so on. Logic is easy, because its facts are nothing but our own thought and its familiar forms or terms: and these are the acme of simplicity, the ABC of everything else. Logic is hard, because it has to deal not with perceptions, nor, like geometry, with abstract representations of the senses, but with the pure abstractions and because it demands a force and facility of withdrawing into pure thought, of keeping firm hold on it, and of moving in such an element. ![]() These laws are the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.įrom different points of view, Logic is either the hardest or the easiest of the sciences. If we identify the Idea with thought, thought must not be taken in the sense of a method or form, but in the sense of the self-developing totality of its laws and peculiar terms. But thought, as thought, constitutes only the general medium, or qualifying circumstance, which renders the Idea distinctively logical. Logic might have been defined as the science of thought, and of its laws and characteristic forms. The same remark applies to all prefatory notions whatever about philosophy. This definition, and the others which occur in these introductory outlines, are derived from a survey of the whole system, to which accordingly they are subsequent. Logic is the science of the pure Idea pure, that is, because the Idea is in the abstract medium of Thought. Logic derived from a survey of the whole system Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830) Part One II: Preliminary Notion ![]()
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