The Essentials of Logic: Being Ten Lectures on Judgment and Inference

There is no science more difficult than that on which we are entering in these lectures. It is worth while to discuss the nature of this difficulty. It is a question of interest rather than of intricacy. All sciences have, perhaps, much the same possibilities of broad theory and subtle analysis. But Logic stands alone in the difficulty with which the student sustains his persuasion that its point of view is worth applying.

In most other sciences, even in the philosophical sciences, there is a continual stimulus to sense-perception, to curiosity, to human interest. The learner is called upon to dissect animals or plants, to undertake delicate manipulations with beautifully contrived instruments, to acquaint himself with the history of nations, with the genesis of worlds, with strange and novel speculations upon the nature of space, or with the industry and well-being of various classes among mankind at the present day. And these elements of novelty, these stimulations of sense-perception or of practical interest, carry us forward imperceptibly, and sustain our eagerness to analyse and combine in theoretic completeness the novel matter thus constantly impinging upon us.

In Philosophy, and more especially in Logic, we can promise little or nothing of this kind. The teacher of Philosophy, from Socrates downwards, has talked about common things, things already familiar to his hearers. And although he calls upon them to think of these things in a peculiar way, and from an unaccustomed point of view, yet it is likely to be felt that he is demanding a new effort, without supplying a new interest. And it is a common experience, that after a time the mind rebels against this artificial attitude, which fatigues without instructing, if we have accustomed ourselves to understand by instruction the accumulation of new sense-perceptions and the extension of historical or scientific vision over a wider superficial area.

Now this I cannot help, and I will not disguise. In Philosophy, and in Logic above all, it must be so. The whole point and meaning of the study is that in it we re-traverse familiar ground, and survey it by unfamiliar processes. We do not, except accidentally, so much as widen our mental horizon. For those who care to understand, to trace the connecting principles and functions that permeate our intellectual world, there is indeed an interest of a peculiar kind. But even experienced students will occasionally feel the strain of attending to difficult distinctions, entirely without the excitement of novelty in sense-perception or of a practical bearing upon human life. It is this that makes Logic probably the hardest of all the sciences.