Since Schiller indignantly repudiates the formula often ascribed to pragmatism that "All that works is true", and since Mr. Bradley has come to say[10] "I agree that any idea which in any way 'works' has in some degree truth", it would seem that these old antagonists are really not so far apart in their opinions as their words would indicate.
For classical authority for his Humanism Schiller goes back to the famous dictum of Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things." In Plato's "Dialogues", Protagoras is represented as having been argued quite out of court by Socrates, but Schiller appeals to posterity against this decision, and he has written several supplemental dialogues of his own to prove that Protagoras was really in the right.[11]
Schiller's most serious work so far is his destructive criticism of the Aristotelian logic. Since my own study of logic came to an abrupt end as soon as I had secured a passing mark on Jevons, I shall not attempt to express an opinion upon the value of Schiller's "Formal Logic", but will instead quote from the review of the volume by Professor Dewey of Columbia.[12]
In substance, the volume (a large octavo of about four hundred pages) is an unrelenting, dogged pursuit of the traditional logic, chapter by chapter, section by section. Not a single doctrine, nor, I think, a single distinction of the official textbooks escapes Schiller's demolishing hand.... A vital and wholesome sense of the realities of actual thinking pervades the whole book; it supplies the background against which the criticisms of formal doctrine are projected. Mr. Schiller brings out, in case after case, with a cumulative effect which is fairly deadly, that at the crucial point each formal distinction is saved from complete meaninglessness only by an unacknowledged and surreptitious appeal to some matter of context, need, aim, and use. Why not, then, frankly recognize the indispensableness of such volitional and emotional factors, and instead of pretending to a logic that excludes them, build up a logic that corresponds to human intellectual endeavor and achievement. It is difficult to see how even the most hardened devotee of a purely theoretical intellectualism can lay down the book without such questions haunting him....
While traditional logic has much to say about truth, the truth it talks about is mere formal consistency, since it declines to consider the material application of its premises. Relevance—a fundamental conception of concrete thought—is excluded because it goes with selection, with selection of the part that is useful, while formal logic professes an all-inclusive ideal. Selection, moreover, is a voluntary and hence arbitrary act, and so is shut out from a doctrine that acknowledges only what is purely theoretical. Finally, formal logic, with its creed of absolute certitude, abhors the very mention of adventure and risk, the life blood of actual human thinking, which is aroused by doubts and questions, and proceeds by guesses, hypotheses, and experiments, to a decision which is always somewhat arbitrary and subject to the risk of later revision.
Much of the criticism of "Formal Logic" contained in this large volume is too technical for any save professionals to follow, but at my request Mr. Schiller was kind enough to write an article for The Independent putting the main points of it in a form "understanded of the common people." From this I quote the passage in which he shows that the syllogism cannot lead unerringly to new truth:
The peculiar aim of logic hitherto has been to discover a form of "valid inference." By this was meant a form of words so fool-proof that it could not be misapplied, and that the use of it would absolutely guarantee the soundness of the conclusion if only the reasoning had been fortunate enough to start from true premises. In the syllogism it was supposed that such a form had been found. From all swans are white and this bird is a swan it was to follow inevitably that this bird is white, and the course of nature would eternally conform to the prophetic demonstrations of logic.
Yet logicians also had soon to note that even formally there was something wrong about this syllogistic form. It seemed to "prove" what was either nothing new or nothing known. To justify the "major premise" "all swans are white", must not its assert or have already seen this swan and know that it is white? Or, if he did not know this, is he not risking an assertion about some "swans" on the strength of what he knows about others? And what right had he thus to argue from the known to the unknown? Can an "inference" be "valid" if it involves a risk?
When therefore black swans arrive from Australia to upset his dogmatizing, what is he to do? Will he say his major premise was a definition, and no bird, however swan-like, shall be called a "swan" if it cannot pass his color-test? If so, his reasoning is still caught in the old dilemma, that he either "proves" nothing new or begs the question in another way. For he then had no right to assert his "minor premise", this bird is a swan, if he knew not it was white. Or will he, desperately, say "in both of these interpretations the syllogistic form is fatuous; but kindly understand it as asserting a law of nature which is immutable, and applied to the particular case in the minor premise." But, if so, how does he know that his "law" applies to the "case"? that the "case" is such as he takes it to be? that he has picked out the right "law" to deal with the case and formulated it correctly? If it is quite certain that the "law" applies to the "case", his conclusion proves nothing new; if it is not, he runs the risk that the case of which he is trying to predict the behavior may be so exceptional as to break or modify his law. And if he runs that risk, is he not renouncing his ideal of reaching fool-proof certainty?
There seems to be no way, therefore, of saving "valid inference", of so interpreting the syllogism that it is both formally valid and humanly instructive. If it is to be instructive, it can only enlighten human ignorance, and then its premises cannot be certainly true.[13]
Some critics, having in mind how little attention is paid to formal logic in American schools, have expressed the opinion that Schiller was wasting his powder on dead game. But however little it may be used in reasoning, formal logic is still the object of formal reverence everywhere, and in Oxford it is strongly entrenched and heavily subsidized as Schiller says in the passage:
That the same doctrine, in perfect verbal continuity, should have been taught and examined on for over two thousand years would be the most stupendous fact in education, were it not surpassed by the still more surprising fact that during all this time no one has arisen to call it nonsense through and through, and that every would-be improvement has been countered by the retort that it was "not in Aristotle." ... The great mass of logicians have always been true to their salt. For Aristotle is still very heavily endowed.
In the University of Oxford alone three philosophy professors, twenty-eight literae humaniores tutors, and about 460 classical scholars and exhibitioners are paid, at an annual cost of over £50,000, to believe that the theory of thought has stood still, or stumbled into error when it tried to move, ever since the composition of the "Organon", and that all modern science may be read into and out of the obscurities of the "Posterior Analytics." The Secret Doctrine in which this is taught has never been divulged in print, but examiners know that there are passages in the ordinary Oxford Logic Lecture which must have been copied down by two hundred generations of students ever since the twelfth century.
Like James and Bergson and unlike Dewey, Schiller has interested himself in psychical research as a possible way of proving personal immortality.[14] He does not seem from his published work to have yet obtained any satisfactory experimental evidence of a future life, but he regards immortality as an ethical postulate, necessary to the conceptions of a moral universe, for if we reject it "we should be plunged in that unfathomable abyss where Scepticism fraternizes with Pessimism and they hug their miseries in chaos undisguised."
But in his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx" he expressed the opinion that nowadays few people took a real interest in the question of immortality and that it had little influence upon conduct. This unconventional opinion was confirmed many years later when the Society for Psychical Research conducted a questionnaire on the subject and found that of the many thousand persons interrogated a large proportion did not regard a future life as of practical importance to them.[15]