The New Word: 12. Logic: The Cipher

The Bottom of the Mind.—1. Pure Reason.—2. Burla Burla.—3. Perfect Certainty.—4. The Leak.—5. The Child's Prayer.

PURE Earthmeasure, instead of affording a true starting point, has turned out to be a mere balloon arising from the real earth. But there is another kind of measure which seems to come before earthmeasure, more truly than Euclid's point before his lines and flats. If measure be the handmaid of knowledge, number is the handmaid of measure. Here, surely, we touch bottom; if not the bottom of the All-Thing, at least the bottom of the mind, so often mistaken for the bottom of the All-Thing. Did not Pythagoras strive to build the All-Thing out of numbers? And did not the chief architect of the Roman school, Boethius, choose ciphering for his foundation stone; for the first tread of that curriculum which the imprisoned squirrels turned round so painfully in the Logical Age?

I

Because I shrank from using the Babu word Arithmetic, I cast about for the child's name for the same thing: and no sooner had I written it down than I

Here then is the ogre at last, in his true shape.

Pure Ciphering is the last word, or, verily speaking,

And so now, copying the pleasant vein of a distinguished Mediterranean cardinal, I am able to picture a Queensland Champion of Positivism calling his dusky congregation round him, and addressing them

III

There is a very famous art or mystery of ciphering in words which has been known for more than two thousand years as Logic.

Very many treatises have been, and are still being, written on this art, but when we look into them we find that no two of them are agreed as to what Logic is, or what it does, or how it ought to do it. The learned and distinguished writers have fared no better

My slight acquaintance with treatises on logic leads me to the conclusion that the art was invented by some one living among savages whose minds were incapable of distinguishing between puns and sense. The writers are all hard at work refuting the nursery riddle—When is a door not a door? When it is ajar. That riddle, I think, like other things one hears in the nursery, must be a relic, what Darwin calls a rudiment, of old cannibal metaphysics. It is the kind of thing that would have made the fortune of a Greek sophist, or a Roman theologian, or. a modern physicist. When is The Good not Good? When it is an abstract noun. When is bread not bread? When it is a grin. When is elastic not elastic? When it is a scientific conception.

In so far as the tidy arrangement of words helps us to tell sense from nonsense, logic is a useful part of grammar. If it pretended to be nothing more, I should not have found it in my path in this inquiry. The brazen serpent made by Moses in the wilderness,

Is there, then, nothing to be done? Surely there is.

Once when I was seated in one of our public pleasure-grounds a little fellow, whose hoop had got bent out of shape, ran up to me and asked, "Please, sir, will you make my hoop round?" I