ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter we have seen how we pass from concrete to abstract reasoning by discovering in varying objects or phenomena, even in those which from a perceptual point of view appear most different one from another, the qualities or attributes which render them equivalent as far as the production of given phenomena is concerned. To this we tend by means of a series of merely imagined operations or experiments which constitute what we call reasoning itself. And we said that, parallel with and as a result of development from concrete forms to ever increasingly abstract forms, reasoning also progresses in acquiring a continually greater complexity and an ever increasing applicability which from the simplest primitive intuitions leads it in the end to the most complicated deductive processes of science. It is under this second aspect that we are going to examine the evolution of reasoning in this chapter.
