Authors/mill

(In progress)

This commenced with Logic, in which I began at once with the Organon and read it to the Analytics inclusive, but profited little by the Posterior Analytics, which belong to a branch of speculation I was not yet ripe for. Contemporaneously with the Organon my father made me read the whole or parts of several of the Latin treatises on the scholastic logic; giving each day to him, in our walks, a minute account of the portion I had read and answering his numerous and searching questions. After this I went through in the same manner the “Computatio sive Logica” of Hobbes, a work of a much higher order of thought than the books of the school logicians and which he estimated very highly; in my opinion beyond its merits great as these are. It was his invariable practice, whatever studies he exacted from me, to make me as far as possible understand and feel the utility of them: and this he deemed peculiarly fitting in the case of the syllogistic logic, its usefulness having been impugned by so many writers of authority. Accordingly I well remember how, in his usual manner, he first attempted by questions to make me think on the subject, and frame some conception of what constituted the utility of the syllogistic logic, and when I had failed in this, to make me understand it by explanations. I do not believe that the explanations made the matter at all clear to me at the time; but they were not therefore useless; they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflexions to crystallize upon: his general remarks being interpreted to me by the particular instances which occurred to myself afterwards. My own consciousness and experience ultimately led me to appreciate quite as highly as he did the value of an early practical familiarity with the school logic. I know of nothing, in my education, to which I think myself more indebted for whatever capacity of thinking I have attained. The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any skill was dissecting a bad argument and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever success I had in this I owed entirely to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father; yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments of this drilling. I am persuaded that nothing, in modern education, tends so much when properly used, to form exact thinkers, who attach a definite meaning to words and propositions, and are not imposed on by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of students in philosophy, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.