Accordingly what is in one sense the revival of classical learning is in
another a recourse to what inspired that learning, and so is a new
beginning. There is no place for a reformed Aristotelian logic, though
the genius of Zabarella was there to attempt it. Nor for revivals of the
competing systems, though all have their advocates. Scientific discovery
was in the air. The tradition of the old world was too heavily weighted
with the Ptolemaic astronomy and the like to be regarded as other than a
bar to progress. But from the new point of view its method was
inadequate too, its contentment with an induction that merely leaves an
opponent silent, when experiment and the application of a calculus were
within the possibilities. The transformation of logic lay with the man
of science, hindered though he might be by the enthusiasm of some of the
philosophers of nature. Henceforth the Aristotelian logic, the genuine
no less than the traditional, was to lie on the other side of the
Copernican change.
The demand is for a new organon, a scientific method which shall face
the facts of experience and justify itself by its achievement in the
reduction of them to control. It is a notable feature of the new
movement, that except verbally, in a certain licence of nominalist
expression, due to the swing of the pendulum away from the realist
doctrine of universals, there is little that we can characterize as
Empiricism. Facts are opposed to abstract universals. Yes. Particulars
to controlling formulae. No. Experience is appealed to as fruitful where
the formal employment of syllogism is barren. But it is not mere
induction, with its "unanalysed concretes taken as ultimate" that is set
up as the substitute for deduction. Rather a scientific process, which
as experiential may be called inductive, but which is to other regards
deductive as syllogism, is set up in contrast to syllogism and
enumeration alike. This is to be seen in Zabarella,[95] in Galilei,[96]
and in Bacon. The reformed Aristotelian logic of the first-named with
its _inductio demonstrativa_, the mathematico-physical analysis followed
by synthesis of the second, the _exclusiva_, or method of exclusions of
the last, agree at least in this, that the method of science is one and
indivisible, while containing both an inductive and a deductive moment.
That what, e.g., Bacon says of his method may run counter to this is an
accident of the tradition of the quarrel with realism. So, too, with the
scholastic universals. Aristotle's forms had been correlated, though
inadequately, with the idea of function. Divorced from this they are
fairly stigmatized as mental figments or branded as ghostly entities
that can but block the path. But consider Bacon's own doctrine of forms.
Or watch the mathematical physicist with his formulae. The faith of
science looks outward as in the dawn of Greek philosophy, and
subjectivism such as Hume's has as yet no hold. Bacon summing up the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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