HISTORY OF BOOK observer. Every wrong opinion that we adopt preVI. cludes a correct judgment, as far as that can operate; LITERARY but logic is as often allied to wrong opinions as to ENGLAND. right ones, and leads us astray from truth more frequently than it conducts us to it. It makes definitions to suit its inferences, and then argues triumphantly on the fetters which it imposes. Ill effects of logical Nothing is a greater blessing than sound judgment; no quality is more rare; none is less likely to be artificially made; no one is more injured by factitious argumentation. Logic may fabricate a wrangler, but not a judge. The definitions of logic are much valued and redefinitions. Commended, but no part of logic is more productive of deception and sophistry, nor more applicable to them, than these have been, and can be always made to become. When any thing is reduced into a definition, it is, in fact, dwindled and cut down into so many words as compose the definition. In these words the thing defined is afterwards contemplated; on these it is discussed; and the attack and the defence become entirely on them. The actual thing is seen no more, but in the defining terms; and the debate upon it, after they are submitted to, becomes a conflict of words against words; and as equivocations, subtleties, distinctions, disputes, arguments and phrases may be pursued on words without any end, all logical definitions are themes of perpetual battle, and defences of all sorts of sophistry. The sophist, who has a peculiar result to establish, has only to frame his definition so as to suit best the verbal deduction of the inference he contemplates; and if he can persuade his antagonist to adopt his definition, he begins XII. his discussion with an assurance of victory, tho, in CHAP. fact, his victorious inference is the victory of his definition, not of the truth. HISTORY OF THE SCHOLAS- : LOSOPHY. Definitions are thus the inventions of logicians seeking victory in a controversy; not the discoverers TIC PHIof truth. They are the weapons of battle, not the instruments of judgment. A definition can only be a just one, when it is a full description of all that relates to the thing defined; less than this, is but a selection of a part, and the substitution of that for the whole. It cannot, therefore, be used without delusion; for it withdraws the mind from the totality to the fragment; and confines the consideration to an imperfect, narrow, partial and interested view of a small portion of the subject, that ought to be seen and treated of in all its fulness and reality, unbroken and unchained. But on this statement it is obvious, that as far as truth is the object, no definitions would be ever used as limitations of the reasoning; for as soon as they are applied to limit, they begin to hoodwink and deceive. A logical definition is a controversial device, creating a battle of words, and used principally for the purpose of a personal triumph. Hence, the verbal wrangler always seeks to get his questions reduced to definitions; because, after that, the dispute ceases to be an investigation of the truths of the thing defined, and becomes a battle of words on the terms to which it has been contracted, and on which the most ingenious verbal debater is most sure of the argumentative triumph. The true use of definitions is that for which they are used in the natural sciences; that is, as names, marks, tickets or indexes, pointing the attention to what is alluded to, and thereby separating it from HISTORY OF BOOK other things. The first order of the mammalia is de.VI. fined by Linnæus, to be fore-teeth cutting, upper LITERARY four parallel, two pectoral teats;' and the monandria class of vegetables is also defined to be those ' with one stamen,' and its first order to have one style.' But if we were absurd enough to suppose all the qualities of the plants and animals in these orders to be included in these brief definitions, and to argue upon them as such, we should do what is done by disputers, who reduce great subjects of thought to petty definitions, and then govern all the reasonings within the artificial circle, which has been thus made the mind's voluntary prison. If any of the combatants attempt to take a larger field, as soon as they perceive the undue confinement of the boundary they have chosen, the adversary, whose advantages rest upon their being so restricted, denies their right to have it; and insists upon their remaining in it till he has extinguished their vitality, or made them his captives. Hence the character of the discussions of the schoolmen, and the radical defect of logic, and of all argumentation, may be stated to be, that the mind is turned by them from truth to words. It is not the thought of the speaker which is studied or reflected on, but the terms in which he expresses it. To confute him by the words he uses, becomes the object; these only are looked at, or adverted to; and instead of being taken as the mere finger-posts to his ideas, are confounded with them, and supposed to be no other. But words can be eternally debated on; and therefore logical disputants can maintain an everlasting controversy. The works and conflicts of the schoolmen completely illustrate this fact, and a speci XII. men of their debates on the Universals may be ad- CHAP. duced as elucidating how really useless most of their discussions were. HISTORY OF THE SCHOLAS LOSOPHY. From the disputes on what universals were, arose that great division of the schoolmen, which dis- TIC PHItinguished them into the two classes of Realists and Nominalists. The first contending, that what they called an universal, was something really existing in nature; and the latter, that it had no such existence, but was only a name, and a creation of the mind. By these universals, they meant what have been since called general and abstract ideas; those which are alluded to in Martinus Scriblerus, when his father asked him if he could not frame the idea of an universal lord mayor,' abstracted from the individual lord mayor, and the fur gown and gold chain which he had seen. We will subjoin three specimens on the manner in which the subject was discussed, from the Arabian, AL-GAZEL," and from the two British 77 AL-GAZEL, ON THE UNIVERSALS. Or the intentio,' which is called an Universal, its being is in the intelligible things of the mind, not in singular existences. Some persons hearing what we say, that all men are one in humanity, and that all blackness is one in blackness, have thought that the universal, blackness, may be some thing from which any thing may be; and that an Universal man is something, and that an Universal soul is some being, one in number, and existing in all nominals; as one father in many sons-one soil in many fields. This is the first error; for if the Universal soul be one in number, and be actually in Peter and John, and others, and Peter were wise and John foolish, it would follow that one soul may be at the same time skilled and ignorant in the same thing, which is incongruous. So if an Universal animal be one thing in number, and be actually in many individuals, it would follow that the same animal may be, at the same time, swimming in the water and walking on two feet; or may be running on four legs and flying in the air, which is also incongruous. BOOK schoolmen, JOANNES DUNS SCOTUS" and WILLIAM VI. LITERARY Universal being is, therefore, only in the intellect of the thing which has the sensitivity. This intellect receives the form of man, and the certitude of it, when some one individual thing is proposed to it; afterwards, if it should see another, a new impression does not take place, but remains the same as before; so if he saw three or four. Men, singly taken, do not differ from each other in any way in humanity; but if one should afterwards see a wolf, then some quidditas and another image (depictio,) different from the first, would be made in him. An Universal, therefore, so far as it is universal, exists in the intellect, and not in any individual thing; therefore, in exterior or actual being, there is no Universal man. An Universal cannot have many singulars, unless each is distinguished from the other by some difference or accident; for if universality be taken nakedly by itself, without any super-addition which may be joined to it, then number and singularity cannot be imagined in it. There cannot be two blacknesses in the same subject, though there may be two kinds of blackness in different subjects, or in the same thing at different times. Al-Gazel Logica et Philos. Venice, 1506. 78 Of our British schoolmen, the two most famous were, the Most Subtle Doctor, and the Invincible Doctor: of these, Duns Scotus thinks Universals to be real things, and Occham has been called the prince of the antagonist party. DUNS SCOTUS, The most Subtle Doctor. THE Universal, like other concrete things, is taken in three ways. Sometimes it is taken for the subjectum (the upokeimenon) that is, for the thing of the first meaning, to which the universal meaning is applicable; and in this mode the Universal is the first object of the intellect. Sometimes it is taken for the form, to wit, for the thing of the second meaning; caused by the intellect, and applicable to things of the first meaning: and thus the logician properly speaks of the Universal. Thirdly, for the aggregate from the subject and the form; and that is a being by accident, because it aggregates different natures from which there is not one by itself; and so it is not from the consideration of any artificer; because of a being by accident there is no science, according to Aristotle in his sixth metaphysics; because, also, it is not definable. Our discourse will, therefore, be only of one of these, to wit, of the Universal taken in the second mode: not of the others. It is first inquired, whether the Universal is a being? which |