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