My own case is as peculiar as his: I have proposed to introduce mathematical _thought_ into logic to an extent which makes the old stagers cry:
"St. Aristotle! what wild notions! Serve a _ne exeat regno_[710] on him!"
Hard upon twenty years ago, a friend and opponent who stands high in these matters, and who is not nearly such a sectary of Aristotle and establishment as most, wrote to me as follows: "It is said that next to the man who forms the taste of the nation, the greatest genius is the man who corrupts it. I mean therefore no disrespect, but very much the reverse, when I say that I have hitherto always considered you as a great logical heresiarch." Coleridge says he thinks that it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who made the remark: which, to copy a bull I once heard, I cannot deny, because I was not there when he said it. My friend did not call me to repentance and reconciliation with the church: I think he had a guess that I was a reprobate sinner. My offences at that time were but small: I went on spinning syllogism systems, all alien from the common logic, until I had six, the initial letters of which, put together, from the { 334} names I gave before I saw what they would make, bar all repentance by the words
leaving to the followers of the old school the comfortable option of placing the letters thus:
It should however be stated that the question is not about absolute truth or falsehood. No one denies that anything I call an inference is an inference: they say that my alterations are _extra-logical_; that they are _material_, not _formal_; and that logic is a _formal_ science.
The distinction between material and formal is easily made, where the usual perversions are not required. A _form_ is an empty machine, such as "Every X is Y"; it may be supplied with _matter_, as in "Every _man_ is _animal_." The logicians will not see that their _formal_ proposition, "Every X is Y," is material in three points, the degree of assertion, the quantity of the proposition, and the copula. The purely formal proposition is "There is the probability [alpha] that X stands in the relation L to Y." The time will come when it will be regretted that logic went without paradoxers for two thousand years: and when much that has been said on the distinction of form and matter will breed jokes.