Bibliography

Grand Logic 1893: Division III. Substantial Study of Logic Chapter VI. The Essence of Reasoning

…when the mind declares that what it sees now, or remembers to have seen yesterday, is like what it remembers to have seen last week, the likeness, which though accompanied like all mental processes with a peculiar and characteristic sensation, is mainly a fact, a mental fact, and the sensation of it is of no consequence except as an advertisement of that fact. That fact is that by virtue of the occult working of the depths within us, those two feelings coalesce into one notion. For the sake of calling this by a familiar name, I call this association by similarity. But the ideas united by virtue of an occult inward power, are not always regarded as similar.

…a belief is a controlled habit. Being formed, or continued, under control, there is an expectation and hope that it will last. Under the rational method of fixing belief, there is a hope that all men and rational beings will come to it, or would come to it, with sufficient workings of life.

A concept is not a mere jumble of particulars, – that is only its crudest species. A concept is the living influence upon us of a diagram, or icon, with whose several parts are connected in thought an equal number of feelings or ideas. The law of mind is that feelings and ideas attach themselves in thought so as to form systems. But the icon is not always clearly apprehended. We may not know at all what it is; or we may have learned it by the observation of nature.

The historic happenings which affect men’s beliefs [are] called experience. [—]

As for this experience under the influence of which beliefs are formed what is that? It is nothing but the forceful element in the course of life. Whatever it is that in our history wears out our attempts to resist it, that is experience. Its sanction is the best possible: victory. The maxim that we ought to be “guided” by experience means that we had better submit at once to that to which we must submit at last.

…there is a mysterious something determining a regularity in Inner Experience, analogous to that Nature which [is] our name for the corresponding mystery of the Outer World, No doubt, the two mysteries are in great measure at one. They must be so; for it is il lume naturale which, guiding the minds of Galileo and other inceptors of science, enabled them to make our first steps in dynamics, geometry, and in other branches of physics. There is no warrant for supposing that outward Nature and the inward Light are altogether at one. “Ten thousand pounds to one pennie” they are not so. But doubtless they are so nearly so that were the Light of Nature only strong enough, the Hegelian dialectic or something like it would be a sound method of investigation. Men have an unconquerable natural inclination to think so. The Light of Nature itself represents itself as able to show how the Outward World is. But experience shows its forecasts are untrustworthy.

A concept is the living influence upon us of a diagram, or icon, with whose several parts are connected in thought an equal number of feelings or ideas. The law of mind is that feelings and ideas attach themselves in thought so as to form systems. But the icon is not always clearly apprehended. We may not know at all what it is; or we may have learned it by the observation of nature.

Ratiocination is defined by St. Thomas as the operation by which reason proceeds from the known to the unknown.

St. Thomas Aquinas [Summa totius logicæ Aristotelis (Opusculum 48)] divides the operations of the Understanding in reference to the logical character of their products into
     Simple Apprehension,
     Judgment, and
     Ratiocination, or Reasoning. [—]

Ratiocination or reasoning produces inferences or reasonings, which are expressed by argumentations, as, ” I think, therefore I must exist,” “Enoch, being a man, must have died; and since the Bible says he did not die, not everything in the Bible can be true.”

Here […] is experience with its resisting power influencing belief in two ways, by a force of association by contiguity and by a force of association by similarity; and the art of reasoning is the art of abandoning oneself as unresistingly as one can possibly contrive to do those influences, so as to reach as speedily as possible the state of belief to which one absolutely must come, – so we hope, – at least. So we hope, for that is our salvation; the alternative is to be tossed backwards and forwards forever without repose.

The process of so seeking a belief-habit is called rational inquiry. It has two branches; one is inquiry into Outward Fact by experimentation and observation, and is called Inductive Investigation; the other is inquiry into Inner Truth by inward experimentation and observation, and is called Mathematical or Deductive Reasoning.

The commodious and compact representation in our minds, or icon of our hopes about beliefs[,] is that there is something fixed and not subject to our wills called the reality, and that our beliefs come to shape themselves more and more under experience in conformity to that reality. So far as they accord with it we call them true. This is a handy ideal –. this of reality; – but it represents nothing but a hope. We have no warrant for averring that belief of all kinds will get more and more fixed until its variations become indefinitely small. We simply try to fix belief, and trying to do anything implies a hope that we shall to some extent succeed. The pretense of some philosophers that there is any justification for a broader “presupposition” that that is unfounded.

St. Thomas Aquinas [Summa totius logicæ Aristotelis (Opusculum 48)] divides the operations of the Understanding in reference to the logical character of their products into
     Simple Apprehension,
     Judgment, and
     Ratiocination, or Reasoning. [—]

Ratiocination or reasoning produces inferences or reasonings, which are expressed by argumentations, as, ” I think, therefore I must exist,” “Enoch, being a man, must have died; and since the Bible says he did not die, not everything in the Bible can be true.”

The commodious and compact representation in our minds, or icon of our hopes about beliefs[,] is that there is something fixed and not subject to our wills called the reality, and that our beliefs come to shape themselves more and more under experience in conformity to that reality. So far as they accord with it we call them true. This is a handy ideal –. this of reality; – but it represents nothing but a hope.