With Hobbes logic is a calculus of marks and signs in the form of names.
Naming is what distinguishes man from the brutes. It enables him to fix
fleeting memories and to communicate with his fellows. He alone is
capable of truth in the due conjunction or disjunction of names in
propositions. Syllogism is simply summation of propositions, its
function being communication merely. Analysis is the sole way of
invention or discovery. There is more, however, in Hobbes, than the
paradox of nominalism. Spinoza could draw upon him for the notion of
genetic definition.[103] Leibnitz probably owes to him the thought of a
calculus of symbols, and the conception of demonstration as essentially
a chain of definitions.[104] His psychological account of syllogism[105]
is taken over by Locke. Hume derived from him the explanatory formula of
the association of ideas,[106] which is, however, still with Hobbes a
fact to be accounted for, not a theory to account for facts, being
grounded physically in "coherence of the matter moved." Finally Mill
took from him his definition of cause as sum of conditions,[107] which
played no small part in the applied logic of the 19th century.
Locke.
Locke is of more importance, if not for his logical doctrine, at least
for the theory of knowledge from which it flows. With Locke the mind is
comparable to white paper on which the world of things records itself in
ideas of sensation. Simple ideas of sensation are the only points of
contact we have with things. They are the atomic elements which "the
workmanship of the understanding" can thereafter do no more than
systematically compound and the like. It is Locke's initial attribution
of the primary rôle in mental process to the simple ideas of sensation
that precludes him from the development of the conception of another
sort of ideas, or mental contents that he notes, which are produced by
reflection on "the operations of our own mind within us." It is in the
latter group that we have the explanation of all that marks Locke as a
forerunner of the critical philosophy. It contains in germ a doctrine of
categories discovered but not generated in the psychological processes
of the individual. Locke, however, fails to "deduce" his categories. He
has read Plato's _Theaetetus_ in the light of Baconian and individualist
preconceptions. Reflection remains a sort of "internal sense," whose
ideas are of later origin than those of the external sense. His
successors emphasize the sensationist elements, not the workmanship of
the mind. When Berkeley has eliminated the literal materialism of
Locke's metaphors of sense-perception, Hume finds no difficulty in
accepting the sensations as present virtually in their own right, any
nonsensible ground being altogether unknown. From a point of view purely
subjectivist he is prepared to explain all that is to be left standing
of what Locke ascribes to the workmanship of the mind by the principle
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