The chief cause is that superstition which still holds enthralled so much of modern thought—I mean formal logic. And if this seems like applying a hard name to what, at best and at worst, is only an intellectual gymnastic, I can only say that formal logic seems to me to be, at present, _fons et origo malorum_ in philosophy. It is true enough that nobody now takes the technical subject of formal logic very seriously—unless here and there some belated “professor.” It is true that it is generally relegated to the position of a subject which, for some unclear reason, is regarded as “disciplinary” in a young man’s education; just as certain other branches are regarded as elegant accomplishments in a young woman’s finishing. But while the subject itself as a doctrine or science hardly ranks very high, the conception of thought which is at the bottom of formal logic still dominates the _Zeitgeist_, and regulates the doctrine and the method of all those who draw their inspiration from the _Zeitgeist_. Any book of formal logic will tell us what this conception of thought is: that thought is a faculty or an entity existing in the mind, apart from facts, and that it has its own fixed forms, with which facts have nothing to do—except in so far as they pass under the yoke. Jevons puts it this way: “Just as we thus familiarly recognise the difference of form and substance in common tangible things, so we may observe in logic, that the form of an argument is one thing, quite distinct from the various subjects or matter which may be treated in that form.”[1] Professor Stock varies the good old tune in this way: “In every act of thought we may distinguish two things—(1) the object thought about, (2) the way in which the mind thinks of it. The first is called the Matter; the second the Form of Thought. Now formal ... logic is concerned only with the way in which the mind thinks, and has nothing to do with the particular objects thought about.”[2] It is assumed, in fine, that thought has a nature of its own independent of facts or subject-matter; that this thought, _per se_, has certain forms, and that these forms are not forms which the facts themselves take, varying with the facts, but are rigid frames, into which the facts are to be set.