A remnant of these worshippers of antiquity still holds its seances at Concord, Mass., and publishes its amazingly dry Journal of Speculative Philosophy. With the unconscious solemnity of earnestness, it still digs into Aristotle’s logic and speculations—the dryest material that was ever used to benumb the brains of young collegians, and teach them how not to reason, for Aristotle never had a glimmering conception of what the process of reasoning is. Yet all Concordians are not Aristotelians; some of them have more modern ideas, and a vigorous, though misdirected, mentality.
Prof. W. T. Harris, the leader of the Concordians, to whose lucubrations the newspapers give ample space, as those of the representative man, made a second attempt to explore the Aristotelian darkness, in which his first essay was totally lost.
If there is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is not even a step from the absurd to the ludicrous and amusing. The professional wit or joker is never so richly amusing as the man who is utterly unconscious that he is in the least funny, while heroically in earnest. The professed comedian never furnishes so much amusement as the would-be heroic tragedian, who, like the Count Joannes, furnishes uproarious merriment for the whole evening.
I have seen nothing in our Boston newspapers quite so amusing as the very friendly and sympathetic report of Prof. Harris’ most elaborate and laborious comments on the SYLLOGISMS, which reminds one of Hopkinson’s metaphysical and elaborate disquisition on the nature, properties, relations, and essential entity of a salt-box. We do not laugh at the professor as we did at Daniel Pratt, the “Great American Traveller,” whose travels are now ended; for, aside from his metaphysical follies, Prof. Harris is a man of real merit and great intellectual industry, whose services in education will entitle him to be remembered; but when the metaphysical impulse seizes him,
“Who would not laugh if such a fool there be,
Who would not weep if Atticus were he.”
The lecture of Prof. Harris was reported in the Boston Herald, in the style of a gushing girl with her first lover, as a “New Step in the History of Philosophy,” attended by a full audience as “a rare treat” “like buckwheat-cakes fresh from the griddle,” for “Prof. Harris took a decidedly new step in Philosophy,” giving “an insight which no philosopher, ancient or modern, has attained.” Again, speaking of it privately, Prof. Harris said, “I got hold of the idea three or four years ago, and I have been trying to work it out since. I regard it as my best contribution to philosophy.” “Montes parturiunt,” What do they bring forth? Is it a mouse of respectable size? The Boston Herald, which is generally smart, though never profound, says of the symposium, “It has set up Aristotle this year as its golden calf to be worshipped.” “But when you ask the question, what does all this talk amount to, it is difficult to give an affirmative answer.” “It is simply threshing straw over, again and again.” But it is not aware that the Concord straw is merely the dried weeds that Lord Bacon cut up and threw out of the field of respectable literature over two hundred and sixty years ago. “What man (says the Herald), with any serious purpose in life, has any time to waste over what somebody thinks Aristotle ought to have thought or said.” And my readers may ask, why give the valuable space of the Journal of Man to examining such trash? Precisely because it is trash, and yet occupies a place of honor, standing in the way of progress and representing the tendencies of education for centuries, which still survive, though they may be said to have gone to seed. Concord represents University philosophy, as a dude represents fashion, and as University philosophy is a haughty antagonist of all genuine philosophy, it is important to illustrate its worthlessness.
The subject of Prof. Harris’ lecture was “Aristotle’s Theory of the Syllogism, Compared with that of Hegel.” As these two were the great masters of obscurantism, the lecture should have been, of course, as perfect a specimen as either of darkness and emptiness. Omitting the definitions of syllogisms, which are familiar to all collegians, but too intolerably tedious to be inflicted on my readers, we find a very unexpected specimen of common sense following the talk about syllogisms, which embodied Aristotle’s ideas of Reason. Here it is: “Logic is often called the art of reasoning, and many people study it with a view to mastering an art of correct thinking, hoping thereby to get an instrument useful in the acquirement of truth. It may be doubted, however, whether the mind gets much aid in the pursuit of truth by studying logic.” There is no doubt at all about it,—not one rational individual out of a hundred thousand collegians will confess that he ever got any benefit in reasoning or in pursuing truth from Aristotle’s syllogistic formula. “All men are mortal—Socrates is a man, and therefore Socrates is mortal.”
Why, then, such a flourish of trumpets over some new trick in playing with syllogism, when the whole thing is utterly worthless? And the Professor upsets himself in his own lecture, thus: “If the middle tub is contained in the big tub, and the little tub is contained in the middle tub, then the little tub is contained in the big tub.” Hegel says: “Common sense in its reaction against such logical formality and artificiality turned away in disgust, and was of the opinion that it could do without such a science as logic.” Most true, Philosopher Hegel, you have absurdities of your own on a gigantic scale, but you do well to reject the petty absurdities of Aristotle.
How does Prof. Harris rise up from Hegel’s fatal blow? He rises like Antæus from touching the earth, and triumphantly shows that syllogisms are the most necessary of all things to humanity in its mundane existence; that, in fact, we have all been syllogizing ever since we left the maternal bosom to look at the cradle, the cat, and the dog. In fact we never could have grown up to manhood, much less to be Concordian philosophers, if we had not been syllogizing all the days of our life, and, indeed, it is probable we shall continue syllogizing to all eternity, in the next life, if we have any growth in knowledge at all. Blessed be the memory of Aristotle, the great original and unrivalled discoverer of the syllogism, by means of which all human knowledge has been built up, and “blessed be the man (as Sancho Panza said) who first invented sleep,” by which we are relieved, to rest after the mighty labors of the syllogism.