ABSTRACT
Sigwart, like almost all the stronger logicians of today, present company excepted, makes the fundamental mistake of confounding the logical question with the psychological question. The psychological question is what processes the mind goes through. But the logical question is whether the conclusion that will be reached, by applying this or that maxim, will or will not accord with the fact. It may be that the mind is so constituted that that which our intellectual instinct approves will be true to the extent to which that instinct approves of it. If so, that is an interesting fact about the human mind; but it has no relevancy for logic whatsoever. Sigwart says that the question of what is good logic and what bad must in the last resort come down to a question of how we feel; it is a matter of Gefühl, that is, a Quality of Feeling. And this he undertakes to demonstrate. For he says if any other criterion be employed, the correctness of this criterion has to be established by reasoning, and in this reasoning antecedent to the establishment of any rational criterion we must rely upon Gefühl; so that Gefühl is that to which any other criterion must ultimately be referred. Good! This is good intelligent work, such as advances philosophy—a good, square, explicit fallacy that can be squarely met and definitively refuted. It is the more valuable because it is a form of argument of very wide applicability. It is precisely analogous to the reasoning by which the hedonist in ethics, the subjectivist in esthetics, the idealist in metaphysics, attacks the category of reaction. You perceive the analogy between their arguments. The hedonist says that the question of what is good morals and what bad must ultimately come down to a question of pleasure. For, he says, suppose we desire anything but our own pleasure. Then whatever it may be that we desire, we take satisfaction in; and if we did not take satisfaction in it we should not desire it. But this satisfaction is that very Quality of Feeling that we call pleasure; and thus the only thing we ever can desire is pleasure, and all deliberate action must be performed for the sake of our own pleasure.
