But it does not limit itself to acting simply as an empirical description, nor even as a simple technique; it usurps a much more lofty office. Just as Rhetoric and Grammar, innocent and useful so long as they limit themselves to the functions of convenient grouping and convenient terminology, become false and harmful when they assume the attitude of sciences of absolute values, and must then be resolved into, and replaced by Æsthetic; so empirical or verbal Logic becomes transformed into error when it claims to give the laws of thought, or the thought of thought, which cannot be other than the concept of the concept. It is not, then, _formal,_ as it boasts itself to be, because the only logical form is the universal, and this alone is the object of logical investigation; but it is falsely formal, since it relies upon contingencies, and must, therefore, be called _formalist._ We reject it here exclusively in its formalist aspect; that is to say, in so far as it is a complex of empirical distinctions that wish to pass as rational and usurp the place of true rationality. [Sidenote: _Its traditional constitution._] Several of such empirical distinctions, such as the distinction between thought and principle of thought, truth and reason of truth, judgments and syllogisms, and such-like, have been recorded and criticized; we shall proceed to mention others, when suitable opportunities occur. Here it will be well to refer to the general physiognomy and structure of that Logic, as it was embodied for centuries in the schools and still persists in treatises. [Sidenote: _The three logical forms._] Its point of departure is the external distinction between words and connections of words, which belongs properly to Grammar. But words are then treated by it as concepts, and connections of words, as judgments. Thus it obtains the identification of the concept with the abstract and mutilated grammatical word and arrives at the monstrous determination of the concepts as things which are not in themselves either true or false. Thus, again, by constantly calling upon the connections of the concepts for succour, it succeeds in distinguishing the judgment from the mere proposition. A double criterion is constantly adopted in establishing these and other fundamental forms: the verbal and the logical; and formalist Logic oscillates equivocally between the two different determinations; whence the alternating appearance of truth and of falsehood, with which its distinctions present themselves. The syllogism, which should be the third fundamental form, is conceived as the connection of three distinct judgments; but if it yet retains its importance and preponderance over two-membered forms or over serial forms of more than three propositions and judgments, this is really because to the distinction and enumeration of the three propositions there is added the criterion of the concept as a nexus, or as a triunity of universal, particular and singular.