absolute and not relative, it is all or nothing. Yet no actual thinking
has such transcendent aims. It is content with selections relative to a
concrete situation. If it were permissible to diversify a
debate--_e.g._, about the authorship of the _Odyssey_--by an irruption
of undisputed truths--_e.g._, a recitation of the multiplication
table--how would it be possible to distinguish a philosopher from a
lunatic?

Formal Logic is either a perennial source of errors about real thinking,
or at best an aimless dissection of a _caput mortuum--i.e._, of the
verbal husks of dead thoughts, whose value Formal Logic could neither
establish nor apprehend, A real Logic, therefore, would most anxiously
avoid all the initial abstractions which have reduced Formal Logic to
such impotence, and would abandon the insane attempt to eliminate the
thinker from the theory of thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote F: The descriptive science of thought, in its concrete
actuality in different minds.]

[Footnote G: The most popular contribution which Oxford makes just now
to the theory of Error is, 'A judgment which is erroneous is not really
a judgment.' So when a professor 'judges' he is infallible--by
definition!]




CHAPTER VII