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first. It is not concerned with anything more than consistency. Its conclusions will be correct in form and consistent; but whether they are true in fact is beyond its province. No doubt they will be true if the premises on which they are founded are true; but in the Aristotelian logic nobody pays any attention to the accuracy in point of fact of the implications of the premises.
FAITH KNOWLEDGE AND CONDUCT
The one rule of logic on which a logician might stake his reputation is this: whenever you have a fixed unalterable rule to go upon, you may base your deduction on the strength of it. If there be such a rule and you make a deduction to the contrary, that is, in defiance of it, the deduction will be wrong. If there be no such rule one way or the other to guide you, and you make a statement of some kind, it will be a pure guess and utterly unreliable.
For instance it is a fixed unalterable rule of nature that people are born small and then begin to grow up. Now, if some one says that he was born a thousand years old and is travelling backwards in regard to his years, the statement is opposed to a natural law, and must be false.
An instance of pure speculation will occur if one predict that a certain man will earn so much money in his fiftieth year; because there is no fixed rule about people's income-how much they should earn in any particular year or at a particular age.
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