§ 16. Before, however, we attempt to delineate the logical ideal of the discoverer, it will be necessary to encounter a serious objection which protests on principle against such an undertaking, and urges that discovery by its very nature must elude logical treatment. It is contended, in the supposed interests of logic, that discovery is a process so inherently and incurably psychological that no logical account can ever be given of it. Discoveries are windfalls, and come as ‘happy thoughts’ to the gifted geniuses that make them, in a manner neither they nor any one else can account for or describe: they are therefore logically fortuitous, and to set forth the ideal of proof by which the truth of discoveries is tested is all that need, or can, be the concern of logic. Certainly the great majority of deductive logicians have taken up some such attitude towards the process of discovery. Aristotle contents himself with a bare mention of ‘sagacity’ (ἀγχίνοια), which is defined as the instantaneous apprehension of the suitable middle term for constructing a demonstrative syllogism.[390] When one recollects the weary centuries of painful effort and continual failure which elapsed while the _élite_ of the human race were seeking for clues to, e.g., the mysteries of disease and of physical happenings, before they hit upon the notions of microbes and the mechanical theory, this naïve underestimate of the most difficult and essential of scientific procedures sounds like a mockery. Yet the whole Aristotelian school pass over the problem as lightly. They all seem to believe that, while it is merely low cunning to make a discovery, it is a real proof of mental capacity to arrange it ‘in logical order’ after it has been made, and to show how far short it falls of the logical ideal. Even the inductive logicians may be said to have participated in this attitude. For they were not more anxious to propound methods of discovery than to contend that their conclusions were just as rigidly proved and just as formally valid as those of syllogisms. They did not see that they were thereby accepting the demonstrative ideal of proof and giving away their own; what they should have shown was that this ideal was utterly nugatory, and that their own methods could never conduct to ‘proof’, but only to something vastly superior.