Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Principles of Logic
It is with mixed feelings that this reissue of an old work is offered to the public. I am happy to find that a book of mine is still alive, and that after some forty years it has seemed worthy to reappear. On the other hand I regret that, while Logic during this interval has lived and moved, I myself have failed, except partially, to follow its advance. My available energy has been expended mainly in fields which more or less fall outside Logic proper. And it is too late for me now to make good my shortcoming, and to endeavour to master those more recent works which have succeeded in throwing, at the lowest estimate, much light on their subject.
Hence I could not rewrite my book so as to offer it as an adequate account of contemporary Logic. And on the other hand simply to reprint it, or again, so far as I am concerned, to let it die, seemed alike open to objection. I therefore decided, while reissuing the old volume, to add to it some notes and an appendix with a view to correct and supplement some part of its defects. At the same time I saw clearly that any such addition would still leave the book largely incomplete.
The course which I have followed may even perhaps result in some gain to the reader. He can, if he pleases, now verify any advance which in 1883 may have been made by my work. And its faults both of manner and matter - faults which recall to me those days when I was young - may possibly with some readers themselves be of service. They may be more than excused if anywhere they help in any way to excite a more living and personal interest in logical problems.
It is not that in this book or elsewhere I lay a claim to original discovery. In these pages there is perhaps no result which I do not owe, and where, if my memory served me better, I could not acknowledge my debt.
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