Logic: Deductive and Inductive

by Carveth Read

(1) The Principles of Contradiction and Excluded Middle ([ch. vi. § 3]) declare that in a given relation to a given phenomenon any two or more other phenomena are incompatible (B is not A and a); whilst the given phenomenon either stands related to another phenomenon or not (B is either A or a). It is not only a matter of Logic but of fact that, if a leaf is green, it is not under the same conditions red or blue, and that if it is not green it is some other colour.

(2) Certain Axioms of Mediate Evidence: as, in Mathematics, 'that magnitudes equal to the same magnitude are equal to one another'; and, in Logic, the Dictum or its material equivalent.

(3) That all Times and all Spaces are commensurable; although in certain relations of space (as π) the unit of measurement must be infinitely small.—If Time really trotted with one man and galloped with another, as it seems to; if space really swelled in places, as De Quincey dreamed that it did; life could not be regulated, experience could not be compared and science would be impossible. The Mathematical Axioms would then never be applicable to space or time, or to the objects or processes that fill them.

(4) The Persistence of Matter and Energy: the physical principle that, in all changes of the universe, the quantities of Matter and Energy (actual and potential, so-called) remain the same.—For example, as to matter, although dew is found on the grass at morning without any apparent cause, and although a candle seems to burn away to a scrap of blackened wick, yet every one knows that the dew has been condensed from vapour in the air, and that the candle has only turned into gas and smoke. As to energy, although a stone thrown up to the housetop and resting there has lost actual energy, it has gained such a position that the slightest touch may bring it to the earth again in the same time as it took to travel upwards; so on the house-top it is said to have potential energy. When a boiler works an engine, every time the piston is thrust forward (mechanical energy), an equivalent in heat (molecular energy) is lost. But for the elucidation of these principles, readers must refer to treatises of Chemistry and Physics.

(5) Causation, a special form of the foregoing principles of the persistence of matter and energy, we shall discuss in the next chapter. It is not to be conceived of as anything occult or noumenal, but merely as a special mode of the uniformity of Nature or experience.

(6) Certain Uniformities of Co-existence; but for want of a general principle of Co-existence, corresponding to Causation (the principle of Succession), we can only classify these uniformities as follows:

(a) The Geometrical; as that, in a four-sided figure, if the opposite angles are equal, the opposite sides are equal and parallel.—Countless similar uniformities of co-existence are disclosed by Geometry. The co-existent facts do not cause one another, nor are they jointly caused by something else; they are mutually involved: such is the nature of space.

(b) Universal co-inherences among the properties of concrete things.—The chief example is the co-inherence of gravity with inertia in all material bodies. There is, I believe, no other entirely satisfactory case; but some good approximations to such uniformity are known to physical science.

(c) Co-existence due to Causation; such as the positions of objects in space at any time.—The houses of a town are where they are, because they were put there; and they remain in their place as long as no other causes arise strong enough to remove or destroy them. Similarly, the relative positions of rocks in geological strata, and of trees in a forest, are due to causes.

(d) The co-inherence of properties in Natural Kinds; which we call the constitution, defining characters, or specific nature of such things.—Oxygen, platinum, sulphur and the other elements; water, common salt, alcohol and other compounds; the various species of plants and animals: all these are known to us as different groups of co-inherent properties. It may be conjectured that these groupings of properties are also due to causation, and sometimes the causes can be traced: but very often the causes are still unknown; and, until resolved into their causes, they must be taken as necessary data in the investigation of nature. Laws of the co-inherence of the properties of Kinds do not, like laws of causation, admit of methodical proof upon their own principles, but only by constancy in experience and statistical probability ([c. xix, § 4]).