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THE ESSENTIALS OF LOGIC
being
TEN LECTURES ON JUDGMENT AND INFERENCE
by
MACMILLAN AND CO.LONDON AND NEW YORK1895
The right of Translation is reserved
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.
Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been placed under the paragraphs towhich they relate. A few added footnotes and additions to Bosanquet'sfootnotes, giving the equivalents of Greek words in the text, are insquare brackets. Bosanquet's marginal notes have been used assubheadings. Page numbers from the original are in braces {}.
{v}
In this course of lectures I have attempted to carry out, underthe freer conditions of the University Extension system, a purposeconceived many years ago at Oxford. It was suggested to me by theanswer of a friend, engaged like myself from time to time in teachingelementary Logic, to the question which I put to him, “What do you aimat in teaching Logic to beginners? What do you think can reasonably behoped for?” “If the men could learn what an Inference is, it would besomething,” was the reply.
The course of lectures which I now publish was projected in the spiritthus indicated. Though only the two last discourses deal explicitlywith Inference, yet those which precede them contribute, I hope, noless essentially, to explain the nature of that single developmentwhich in some stages we call Judgment, and in others Inference. So faras I could see, the attempt to go to the heart of the subject, howeverimperfectly executed, was appreciated by the students, and was rewardedwith a serious attention which would not have been commanded by thetrivialities of formal Logic, although more entertaining and lessabstruse.
The details of traditional terminology may be found in Jevons’sElementary Lessons in Logic (Macmillan). Those {vi} who desire topursue the study more in the sense of the present work, may be referredabove all to Bradley’s Principles of Logic, and also to Lotze’sLogic (E. Tr.), and to Sigwart’s great work on Logic, the Englishtranslation of which, just completed, opens a storehouse of knowledgeand robust good sense to the English student. My own larger Logicexpresses in extenso the views which these lectures set out in ashorter form.
I hope it will be admitted by my critics that this experiment, whethersuccessful or unsuccessful, was worth making, and that except in theUniversity Extension system, it could not easily have been made.
Bernard Bosanquet.
London, January 1895.
{vii}
1. Difficulty of the Science 1
2. The Problem stated 3
3. World as Idea 4
4. “World” 5
5. The Animal’s World 6
6. The World as “Objective” 7 i. Common sense 8 ii. Common-sense Theory 8 iii. Philosophic Theory 11
7. Our separate “Worlds” 14
8. Subjective Idealism