2. For the form of Knowledge depends in some degree upon its matter. It is very important to realise this truth; for if Logic is swamped by being identified with the whole range of special sciences, it is killed by being emptied of all adaptation to living intelligence. What is called Formal Logic _par excellence_ in all its shapes, whether antiquated as in Hamilton’s or Thomson’s Formal Laws of Thought, or freshly worked out on a symbolic basis as by Boole and others, has, it appears to me, this initial defect, _when considered as a general theory of Logic_. As a contribution to such a theory, every method which will work undoubtedly has its place, and indicates and depends upon some characteristic of real thought. But in the central theory itself, and especially in so short an account of it as must be attempted in these lectures, I should be inclined to condemn all attempts to employ symbols for anything more than the most passing illustration of points in logical processes. All such attempts, I must maintain, share with the old-fashioned laws of Identity, Contradiction, and Excluded Middle the initial fallacy of representing a judgment by something which is not and cannot be in any way an adequate symbol of one. If, in order to get at the pure form of Knowledge, we restrict ourselves to very abstract characteristics in which all knowledge appears, very roughly speaking, to agree, and which can be symbolized for working purposes by combinations of signs which have not the essential properties of ideal contents, then we have _ab initio_ substituted for the judgment something which is a very {50} abstract corollary from the nature of judgment, and may or not for certain purposes and within certain limits be a fair representative of it. We cannot and must not exclude from the form of Knowledge its modifications according to “matter,” and its nature as existing only in “matter.” In fact, the peculiar “form” of _everything_ depends in some degree on its “matter.” A statue in marble is a little differently treated if it is copied in bronze. A knife is properly made of steel; you can only make a bad one of iron, or copper, or flint, and you cannot make one at all of wax. Different matters will more or less take the same form, but only within certain limits. So it is in Knowledge. The _nature of objects as Knowledge_--for we _must_ remember that “form” in our sense is not something put into the “matter,” something alien or indifferent to it, but is simply its own inmost character revealed by the structural relations in which it is found capable of standing [1]--depends on the way in which their parts are connected together. [1] The example of the marble statue may seem to contradict this idea; and no doubt the indifference of matter to form is a question of degree. But the feeling for material is a most important element in fine art; and in knowledge there is only a relative distinction between formal and material relations.