capable of scientific treatment without reference to the wider problems—e.g., the relation of knowledge to reality, and the ultimate nature of things—which come within the scope of the larger philosophical sciences. The claim is at first sight supported by actual achievement: text-books are numberless; they are written by men of the most diverse views on epistemology and metaphysics; and yet there seems to be established a certain consensus gentium regarding the substance of the science. Closer examination, however, disturbs this superficial appearance. The average text-book professes to be merely an introduction; it repeats the traditional views on the traditional topics with little attempt to weave the material into a whole. A concluding chapter sometimes takes up the problems which have been slurred over in the actual exposition itself, and points to epistemology and metaphysics as the proper field for their fuller treatment. The disagreement between the writers becomes acute at this stage; the nature of the ‘reference’ of thought to reality is variously interpreted, the relation between the ‘laws of thought’—probably briefly mentioned at an early stage, and postponed for discussion until the end—and the minor laws of inference is treated in many mutually exclusive ways, and many solutions are given of the problem of the meaning of the ‘form of thought’. The problems are not pressed home until the body of logic has been laid forth, and yet it is the solution of these and other similar questions which should mark off the subject-matter and determine the treatment. The apparent unanimity is due rather to vis inertiae, to the acceptance of a traditional logical datum, than to a genuine harmony concerning the nature of right reasoning. If a student seeks to go beyond these introductions, he speedily discovers that the postponed logical problems contain the very substance of logic, and that the boundary wall between logic and metaphysics falls when he approaches it.
It may be taken for granted that logic deals with true thought. If so, is it possible to analyse the nature of true thinking without reference to the object of knowledge? The word, thought, is without doubt an ambiguous one, and covers a fatal tendency to confuse the act of thinking, a psychological subject-matter, with the object or content known. The question of a distinction between ‘object’ and ‘content’
