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LOGIC

IN ITS

APPLICATION TO LANGUAGE.

BY

R. G. LATHAM, M.A., M.D., F.R.S.,

LATE FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; LATE PROFESSOR OF THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.

LONDON:
WALTON AND MABERLY,

UPPER GOWER STREET, AND IVY LANE, PATERNOSTER ROW.

1856.

264. f.19.

LONDON: PRINTED BY WOODFALL AND KINDER, ANREL COURT, SKINNER STREET.

PREFACE.

THE title of the present work is by no means unexceptionable. So sensible, indeed, is the Author of the objections that lie against it, that he is the first to take notice of them.

Instead of passing for a work upon Logic as Applied to the Study of Language, the following pages should be considered as an exposition of that amount of Grammar and Philology which applies to Logic. In other words, the view suggested by the term should be reversed. The Language should lead to the Logic, and not the Logic to the Language. The true relations of the two subjects to each other make a certain amount of the one a preliminary or introduction to the other. This preliminary, however, lies in the phenomena of Speech. These lead to Logic, but not vice versa.

Why, then, does the present treatise give us, as far, at least, as its title goes, precisely the reverse of this doctrine? Why does it treat Logic as the preliminary and Language as the subject to which it conducts us?

"So much must be known of the elements of

Logic, in order that the common terms of Grammar may be understood." So runs the import of our

title-page.

"So much of the elementary facts of Language must be known before the study of Logic commences."-So runs the real fact.

So runs the real fact—at least, in the eyes of the present writer, and many like him who hold that, in strict language, Logic begins with the syllogism, and that the structure of single and unconnected propositions is no portion of that science-that science dealing less with propositions themselves than with the relations which, under certain circumstances, and with certain combinations, they bear to each other.

The nature of the single, or unconnected proposition must, of course, be known. It is submitted, however, that the knowledge of this is to be got from the study of Language as applied to Logic.

To this, however (as has been stated), the import of the present title-page runs directly contrary. Nor is the opposition difficult of explanation, provided the commonplace and practical character of the treatise be borne in mind. It is the wish of the writer to avail himself of an old name for a somewhat new study—the old name being Logic.

Now Grammar being taught early, and Logic (if taught at all) late, the effect of such a title as Language applied to Logic, would be to engender the notion that the work wherein the application was exhibited was for adults rather than boys and youths. Its real object is the reverse of this. Its real object is to get certain so-called points of Logic studied as early as the elements of Grammar.

If the term Logic be a misnomer, the reason for its use lies in the contrast between the practice of the ordinary grammarians and the logicians. Of the former, many admit that the nature of terms and copulas, along with the structure of the proposition, is a matter which lies within their own jurisdiction. On the other hand, there are plenty of logicians who treat everything anterior to the syllogism as phenomena, not of Logic, but of Language. The practice, however, nowhere, or but rarely, coincides with the theory. Look in an ordinary grammar for anything about propositions, and, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, you will look in vain. It is in the books upon Logic that you will find them. At the present moment I remember but one grammar written in English, and written for the practical purpose of teaching a foreign language rather than with a strictly scientific view, wherein the truly grammatical phenomena of the structure of propositions are exhibited. This is Dr. Lee's Hebrew Grammar; and even here the notice. is short, and appears no earlier than the first page of the Syntax. Throughout the Etymology no word about propositions is spoken. I repeat, however, that in thus limiting the grammars that treat of a proper grammatical Logic, I speak from memory. There may be many others. Nevertheless-whether many or few, they bear but a small proportion to those which relegate the subject to the domain of the logician.

And he always supplies them. Yet they are not his own wares; and he would manifestly and advantageously disencumber his subject of more than one unnecessary appendage if, presuming the gram

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