Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Pierce

3. The Fixation of Belief

CHAPTERI T H R E E The Fixation ofBelief I Text I 1. Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himselfto be proficient enough in the art ofreasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination, and does not extend to that ofother men. We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art. The history of its practice would make a grand subject for a book. The mediaeval schoolmen, following the Romans, made logic the earliest ofa boy's studies after grammar, as being very easy. So it was, as they understood it. Its fundamental principle, according to them, was, that all knowledge rests on either authority or reason; but that whatever is deduced by reason depends ultimately on a premise derived from authority. Accordingly, as soon as a boy was perfect in the syllogistic procedure, his intellectual kit oftools was held to be complete. To Roger Bacon, that remarkable mind who in the middle ofthe thirteenth century was almost a scientific man, the schoolmen's conception ofreasoning appeared only an obstacle to truth. He saw that experience alone teaches anything-a proposition which to us seems easy to understand, because a distinct conception of experience has been handed down to us from former generations; which to him also seemed perfectly clear, because its difficulties had not yet unfolded· themselves. Of all kinds ofexperience, the best, he thought, was interior illumination, which teaches many things about Nature which I 68 69 I The Fixation of Belief the external senses could never discover, such as the transubstantiation ofbread. Four centuries later, the more celebrated Bacon, in the first book ofhis "Novum Organum," gave his clear account ofexperience as something which must be open to verification and reexamination. But, superior as Lord Bacon's conception is to earlier notions, a modern reader who is not in awe ofhis grandiloquence is chiefly struck by the inadequacy ofhis view of scientific procedure. That we have only to make some crude experiments, to draw up briefs of the results in certain blank forms, to go through these by rule, checking off everything disproved and setting down the alternatives, and that thus in a few years physical science would be finished up-what an idea! "He wrote on science like a Lord Chancellor," indeed. The early scientists, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Gilbert, had methods more like those oftheir modern brethren. Kepler undertook to draw a curve through the places ofMars;! and his greatest service to science was in impressing on men's minds that this was the thing to be done if they wished to improve astronomy ; that they were not to content themselves with inquiring whether one system of epicycles was better than another, but that they were to sit down to the figures and find out what the curve, in truth, was. He accomplished this by his incomparable energy and courage, blundering along in the most inconceivable way (to us), from one irrational hypothesis to another, until, after trying twentytwo ofthese, he fell, by the mere exhaustion ofhis invention, upon the orbit which a mind well furnished with the weapons ofmodern logic would have tried almost at the outset. In the same way, every work of science great enough to be remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification ofthe defective state ofthe art ofreasoning ofthe time when it was written ; and_each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic. It was so when Lavoisier and his contemporaries took up the study of chemistry. The old chemist's maxim had been, "Lege, lege, lege, labora, ora, et relege." Lavoisier's method was not to read and pray, [but] to dream that some long and complicated chemical process would have a certain effect, to put it into practice with dull patience, after its inevitable failure to dream that with some modification it would have another result, and to end by publishing the last dream as a fact: his way was to carry his mind into his laboratory, and to make ofhis alembics and cucurbits instruments ofthought, giving a new conception of reasoning, as something which was to be done with one's eyes open, by manipulating real things instead ofwords and fancies. 70 I C HAP T...