use of the understanding. The first contains the absolutely necessary laws of thought, without which no use whatever of the understanding is possible, and gives laws therefore to the understanding, without regard to the difference of objects on whieh it may be employed. The logic of the particular use of the understanding contains the laws of correct thinking upon a particular of objects. The former may be called elemental logic,—the latter, the organon of this or that particular science. The latter is for the most part employed in the schools, as a propsedeutic to the sciences, although, indeed, according to the course of human reason, it is the last thing we arrive at, when the science haa been already matured, and needs only the finishing touches towards its correction and completion; for our knowledge of the objects of our attempted science must be tolerably extensive and complete before we can indicate the laws by which a science of these objects can be established.
General logic is again either pure or applied. In the former, we abstract all the empirical conditions under which the understanding is exercised; for example, the influence of the senses, the play of the phantasy or imagination, the laws of the memory, the foree of habit, of inclination, &c., consequently also, the sources of prejudice,—in a word, we abstract all causes from which particular cognitions arise, because these causes regard the understanding under certain circum-
seded the Organon of Aristotle. But the one states the laws under which a knowledge of objects is possible; the other the subjective laws of thought. The spheres of the two are utterly distinct.
Kant very properly states that pure logic is alone properly science. Strictly speaking, applied logic cannot be a division of general logic. It is more correctly applied psychology;—psychology treating in a practical manner of the conditions under which thought is employed.It may be noted here, that what Kant calls Transcendental Logic is properly not logic at ail, but a division of metaphysics. For his Categories contain matter—as regards thought at least. Take, for example, the category of Existence. These categories, no doubt, are the forms of the matter given to us by experience. They are, according to Kant, not derived from experience, but purely à priori. But logic is concerned exclusively about the form of thought, and has nothing to do with this or that conception, whether à priori or à posteriori.See Sir William Hamilton’s Edition of Reid’s Works, passim. It is to Sir William Hamilton, one of the greatest logicians, perhaps the greatest, since Aristotle, and certainly one of the acutest thinkers of any time, that the Translator is indebted for the above view of the subject of logic.—Tr.