1.5. THE CLASSIFICATORY ASSUMPTION.
After I had studied science and particularly biological science for some
years, I became a teacher in a school for boys. I found it necessary to
supplement my untutored conception of teaching method by a more
systematic knowledge of its principles and methods, and I took the
courses for the diplomas of Licentiate and Fellow of the London College
of Preceptors which happened to be convenient for me. These courses
included some of the more elementary aspects of psychology and logic and
set me thinking and reading further. From the first, Logic as it was
presented to me impressed me as a system of ideas and methods remote and
secluded from the world of fact in which I lived and with which I had to
deal. As it came to me in the ordinary textbooks, it presented itself as
the science of inference using the syllogism as its principal
instrument. Now I was first struck by the fact that while my teachers in
Logic seemed to be assuring me I always thought in this form;-
"M is P,
S is M,
S is P,"
the method of my reasoning was almost always in this form:--
"S1 is more or less P,
S2 is very similar to S1,
S2 is very probably but not certainly more or less P.
Let us go on that assumption and see how it works."
That is to say, I was constantly reasoning by analogy and applying
verification. So far from using the syllogistic form confidently, I
habitually distrusted it as anything more than a test of consistency in
statement. But I found the textbooks of logic disposed to ignore my
customary method of reasoning altogether or to recognise it only where
S1 and S2 could be lumped together under a common name. Then they put it
something after this form as Induction:-
"S1, S2, S3, and S4 are P
S1 + S2 + S3 + S4 + ... are all S
All S is P."
I looked into the laws of thought and into the postulates upon which the
syllogistic logic is based, and it slowly became clear to me that from
my point of view, the point of view of one who seeks truth and reality,
logic assumed a belief in the objective reality of classification of
which my studies in biology and mineralogy had largely disabused me.
Logic, it seemed to me, had taken a common innate error of the mind and
had emphasised it in order to develop a system of reasoning that should
be exact in its processes. I turned my attention to the examination of
that. For in common with the general run of men I had supposed that
logic professed to supply a trustworthy science and method for the
investigation and expression of reality.
A mind nourished on anatomical study is of course permeated with the
suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biological species. A
biological species is quite obviously a great number of unique
individuals which is separable from other biological species only by the
fact that an enormous number of other linking individuals are
inaccessible in time--are in other words dead and gone--and each new
individual in that species does, in the distinction of its own
individuality, break away in however infinitesimal degree from the
previous average properties of the species. There is no property of any
species, even the properties that constitute the specific definition,
that is not a matter of more or less.
If, for example, as species be distinguished by a single large red spot
on the back, you will find if you go over a great number of specimens
that red spot shrinking here to nothing, expanding there to a more
general redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and brown,
shading into crimson, and so on and so on. And this is true not only of
biological species. It is true of the mineral specimens constituting a
mineral species, and I remember as a constant refrain in the lectures of
Professor Judd upon rock classification, the words, "they pass into one
another by insensible gradations." It is true, I hold, of all things.
You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of
identically similar things, but these are things not of experience but
of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not
equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense
quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that masks by
the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom also has
its unique quality, its special individual difference.
This ideal of uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of the
classifications of material science; it is true and still more evidently
true of the species of common thought; it is true of common terms. Take
the word "Chair." When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average
chair. But collect individual instances; think of armchairs and
reading-chairs and dining-room chairs, and kitchen chairs, chairs that
pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees,
dentist's chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those
miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts
exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this
simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner
I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that
you gave me. Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much
as mineral and rock specimens, are unique things--if you know them well
enough you will find an individual difference even in a set of
machine-made chairs--and it is only because we do not possess minds of
unlimited capacity, because our brain has only a limited number of
pigeon-holes for our correspondence with an unlimited universe of
objective uniques, that we have to delude ourselves into the belief that
there is a chairishness in this species common to and distinctive of all
chairs.
Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of
objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon
things...
Greek thought impresses me as being over much obsessed by an objective
treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human
thought--number and definition and class and abstract form! But these
things,--number, definition, class and abstract form,--I hold, are
merely unavoidable conditions of mental activity--regrettable conditions
rather than essential facts. THE FORCEPS OF OUR MINDS ARE CLUMSY FORCEPS
AND CRUSH THE TRUTH A LITTLE IN TAKING HOLD OF IT...
Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this
first attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms. You have
seen the result of those various methods of black and white reproduction
that involve the use of a rectangular net. You know the sort of process
picture I mean--it used to be employed very frequently in reproducing
photographs. At a little distance you really seem to have a faithful
reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closely you find
not the unique form and masses of the original, but a multitude of
little rectangles, uniform in shape and size. The more earnestly you go
into the thing, the closelier you look, the more the picture is lost in
reticulations. I submit, the world of reasoned inquiry has a very
similar relation to the world of fact. For the rough purposes of every
day the network picture will do, but the finer your purpose the less it
will serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and general
knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance with a telescope
as for a man with a microscope, it will not serve at all.
It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer and
finer, you can fine your classification more and more--up to a certain
limit. But essentially you are working in limits, and as you come
closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave the
practical purpose for which the method exists, the element of error
increases. Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges;
and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for
a stupidity--for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a
philosophical or metaphysical inquiry through a series of valid
syllogisms--never committing any generally recognised fallacy--you
nevertheless leave behind you at each step a certain rubbing and
marginal loss of objective truth, and you get deflections that are
difficult to trace at each phase in the process. Every species waggles
about in its definition, every tool is a little loose in its handle,
every scale has its individual error. So long as you are reasoning for
practical purposes about finite things of experience you can every now
and then check your process and correct your adjustments. But not when
you make what are called philosophical and theological inquiries, when
you turn your implement towards the final absolute truth of things.
This real vagueness of class terms is equally true whether we consider
those terms used extensively or intensively, that is to say whether in
relation to all the members of the species or in relation to an
imaginary typical specimen. The logician begins by declaring that S is
either P or not P. In the world of fact it is the rarest thing to
encounter this absolute alternative; S1 is pink, but S2 is pinker, S3 is
scarcely pink at all, and one is in doubt whether S4 is not properly to
be called scarlet. The finest type specimen you can find simply has the
characteristic quality a little more rather than a little less. The neat
little circles the logician uses to convey his idea of P or not P to the
student are just pictures of boundaries in his mind, exaggerations of a
natural mental tendency. They are required for the purposes of his
science, but they are departures from the nature of fact.
