There are several grounds for hope in the logic of our day. In the first
place, it tends to take up an intermediate position between the extremes
of Kant and Hegel. It does not, with the former, regard logic as purely
formal in the sense of abstracting thought from being, nor does it
follow the latter in amalgamating metaphysics with logic by identifying
being with thought. Secondly, it does not content itself with the mere
formulae of thinking, but pushes forward to theories of method,
knowledge and science; and it is a hopeful sign to find this
epistemological spirit, to which England was accustomed by Mill,
animating German logicians such as Lotze, Dühring, Schuppe, Sigwart and
Wundt. Thirdly, there is a determination to reveal the psychological
basis of logical processes, and not merely to describe them as they are
in adult reasoning, but to explain also how they arise from simpler
mental operations and primarily from sense. This attempt is connected
with the psychological turn given to recent philosophy by Wundt and
others, and is dangerous only so far as psychology itself is
hypothetical. Unfortunately, however, these merits are usually connected
with a less admirable characteristic--contempt for tradition, Writing
his preface to his second edition in 1888, Sigwart says: "Important
works have appeared by Lotze, Schuppe, Wundt and Bradley, to name only
the most eminent; and all start from the conception which has guided
this attempt. That is, logic is grounded by them, not upon an effete
tradition but upon a new investigation of thought as it actually is in
its psychological foundations, in its significance for knowledge, and
its actual operation in scientific methods." How strange! The spirit of
every one of the three reforms above enumerated is an unconscious return
to Aristotle's _Organon_. Aristotle's was a logic which steered, as
Trendelenburg has shown, between Kantian formalism and Hegelian
metaphysics; it was a logic which in the Analytics investigated the
syllogism as a means to understanding knowledge and science: it was a
logic which, starting from the psychological foundations of sense,
memory and experience, built up the logical structure of induction and
deduction on the profoundly Aristotelian principle that "there is no
process from universals without induction, and none by induction without
sense." Wundt's comprehensive view that logic looks backwards to
psychology and forward to epistemology was hundreds of years ago one of
the many discoveries of Aristotle.