Excerpt from Formal Logic: A Scientific and Social Problem

For over two thousand years Formal Logic has been a stock subject of academic instruction. It has been established and endowed with a multitude of official defenders chosen from the ablest and acutest intelligences the human race has produced. Its subject-matter, moreover, is so far from being recondite that it should be familiar to every rational being. It professes to study an operation every one professes to perform habitually, viz. thinking, and to explain how we ought to think. It might be supposed, therefore, that by this time the subject of Logic was completely explored, that every embellishment of technicality had been added, and every logical question settled beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Instead of this, what do we find? Not only that ordinary human thinking continues to pay scant respect to Logic, but that the logicians themselves continue to differ widely as to the nature, the function, the value, and even the existence, of their science. Nor has Formal Logic, despite its establishment, ever quite been able to silence the voice of the critic. Of late criticisms have so multiplied in number and increased in severity, and that among the very professionals who seemed pledged to uphold the doctrines on which their dignity and livelihood depended, that it is hard to see how a study which labours under such imputations can be called scientific.

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