31 July 1814

Logic

Ch. │ │ Aristotle's Præcognita

'.1

6

2

Even before that definition - before even this sort of definition - is compleated, comes a parenthesis by which, of the narrowness of the extent attributed to the art by these its cultivators, intimation is already given. - Logic, says the Bishop, which according to the figure of Synecdoche is also called Dialectica: the figure of Synecdoche, it is that figure of the Rhetorician, by which the part is put instead of the whole.

A very inauspicious commencement this for a treatise on an art which in one of its most useful branches is the art of correct expression, true representation. Before so much as the definition of it is compleated, in comes a formulary taken from that art which with little impropriety might be termed the art of misrepresentation.

The art called Logic is the same art say they as the art called Dialectics which being interpreted is the art of disputation, viz. in mood and figure. What is true of the art of logic is that this art of disputation forms a part. But is it thence also true that Logic and the art of disputation are one and the same object? names for one and the same thing? If so, then so is a tree and a branch of that same tree.

 Quære whether quite[?] finished 31 July 1814.

77