It is better, therefore, to recognize that every act of knowing must involve risks, just as every act of living does; and this for the simple reason that knowing is an activity comprised in living, and every judgement is an _act_, which might have been left undone, or for which another might have been substituted. The readiness of the new conception of logic to emphasize the existence of risks in all reasoning, and to sanction the willingness to take them, contrasts markedly with the vain efforts of the old logic to play for safety, and to make no move that was not absolutely necessary (cf. § 10). This was why it postulated absolutely certain premisses, and would contemplate nothing but ‘valid’ forms of reasoning. In its desire to elevate its proofs above the perplexities and vicissitudes of mundane problems, the old logic was expressing and comforting a deep-seated human craving: for life is so replete with the most hideous risks that it is a natural instinct to clutch at any promise of security. Hence the passionate and almost religious reverence with which formal logic has been regarded for over 2,000 years. Many philosophers still worship the syllogism, because it seems to them an incomparable exemplar of absolute security firmly fixed in the sphere of immutable necessity far above the flux of phenomena, which it illumines with its steady radiance. But to exalt in this way its ideal of proof, the old logic had to pay a heavy price. The price was cutting the ideal wholly adrift from the actual, contemplating exclusively a situation which could never occur in real life, and leaving all actual inquiry to its devices, unstudied, uncriticized, and unaided. Thus, the splendid aloofness of the logical ideal was purchased by a total repudiation of actual science. To many philosophic minds this price does not seem excessive. The more useless truth is made to appear, the purer and more admirable it seems to them. An ideal, they think, should be like Aristotle’s ‘god’; it should attract, without uplifting, and without running the risk of contamination by the dirty work of life. These philosophers have always claimed for their attitude that it is philosophic _par excellence_. But their claim, besides being based on a somewhat rare personal idiosyncrasy, is not really sound. It is neither self-consistent nor a sound policy for life. An ideal which repudiates the actual, and yet professes somehow to be its exemplar, is left in the impossible condition of the Platonic ‘Idea’. If it were as superhuman as it claims to be, no human mind could even speculate about it. And we have seen (§ 13) that it is not in the end possible to devise a form of proof which is bomb-proof against the attacks of experience and superior to verification.