ABSTRACT
This Part is, for a number of reasons, more tentative than the 299 others. The ground it explores seems, at first sight, less promis ing as an exercise field for relatively unambitious teaching — Milton’s complaint that the Universities presented to ‘unlearned novices, at their first coming, the most intellective abstracts of Logic and Metaphysics’ returns warningly to the mind. I have to present things that are hardly distinguishable from these, and all will depend upon how it is done. Can they be presented in a way that is tolerable to the pupils — not as mere ‘intellective abstracts’, but as urgent, necessary, unavoida ble, and fruitful questions? That is the teachers’ problem. I need, I think, spend little time insisting that they are such. These questions are no recondite things to be left to sheltered academic experts. They concern the warp and woof of all our thinking. Without some practical mastery of them thought goes 300 astray every hour. But thought is not the same thing as deliber ate reflection; it commonly succeeds in practice with problems
which baffle it at once when they are explicitly set for reflection. ‘Should we not then’, someone will ask, ‘be content to let thought, in practice, be as logical as it can; and not bother our pupils with these abstruse puzzles which they — and more emi nent logicians - are quite unable to settle?’ The answer is that they will bother themselves, the more hopeful of them, in any case. A point must come, in all education, and often comes early, at which these matters are forced into prominence in and through the other things we are endeavouring to teach. And we could teach these other things much better if we could find good ways of making the logical troubles less perplexing. The difficulty of finding good ways will not be underestimated. Neglect of the subject, all but universal in modern teaching, witnesses to it. I hope to show that this neglect is unjustified, and I believe it to be most unfortunate. Some of the difficulty would vanish if the subject became more familiar. It will be soon enough to be sure that Logic is unsuitable in school-use when it has been tried out by modern-minded teachers. But the worst part of the difficulty would remain. It needs a preliminary word here.
