Analysis of Aristotle's Logic, with Remarks

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1806 edition. Excerpt: ... a great help both to memory and judgment. As the philosopher's province includes all things, human and divine, that can be objects of inquiry, he is naturaHy led to attempt some general division like that of the Categories. And the invention of a division of this kind, which the speculative part of mankind acquiesced in for two thousand years, marks a superiority of genius in the inventor, whoever he was. Nor does it appear that the general divisions which, since the decline of the Peripatetic philosophy, have been substituted in place of the ten categories, are more perfect. Locke has reduced all things to three categories; viz. substances, modes, and relations. In this division, time, space, and number, three great objects of human thought, are omitted. The author of the Treatise of Human Nature has reduced all things to two categories, viz. ideas and impressions: a division which is very well adapted to his system, and which puts me in mind of another made by a very excellent mathematician in a printed thesis I have seen. In it the author, after a severe censure of the ten categories of the Peripatetics, maintains that there neither are nor can be more than two categories of things, viz. data and quanta. There are two ends that may be proposed by such divisions. The first is, to methodize or digest in order what a man actually knows. This is neither unimportant nor impracticable > and in proportion to the solidity and accuracy of a man's judgment, his divisions of the things he knows will be elegant and useful. The same subject may admit, and even require, various divisions, according to the different points of view from which we contemplate it: nor does it follow, that because one division is good, therefore another is naught. To...