It does not follow, however, that the laws asserted by the formal
logicians are invalid or unimportant. There is a permissible
abstraction, and in general they practise this, and although they narrow
its range unduly, it is legitimately to be applied to certain characters
of thinking. As the living organism includes something of mechanism--the
skeleton, for example--so an organic logic doubtless includes
determinations of formal consistency. The skeleton is meaningless apart
from reference to its function in the life of an organism, yet there are
laws of skeleton structure which can be studied with most advantage if
other characters of the organism are relegated to the background. To
allow, however, that abstraction admits of degrees, and that it never
obliterates all reference to that from which it is abstracted, is to
take a step forward in the direction of the correlation of logical forms
with the concrete processes of actual thinking. What was true in formal
logic tended to be absorbed in the correlationist theories.
Those formal logicians of the Kantian school, then, may be summarily
dismissed, though their undertaking was a necessary one, who failed to
raise the epistemological issue at all, or who, raising it, acquiesced
in a naïve dualism agnostic of the real world as Kant's essential
lesson. They failed to develop any view which could serve either in fact
or in theory as a corrective to the effect of their formalism. What they
said with justice was said as well or better elsewhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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