[Gutenberg 38430] • The Philosophy of Mr. B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll

Excerpt from The Philosophy of Mr. B *rtr* nd R *ss* ll: With an Appendix of Leading Passages From Certain Other Works

The quaint name of Laws of Thought, which is often applied to the principles of Logic, has given rise to confusion in two ways: in the first place, the Laws, unlike other laws, cannot be broken, even in thought and, in the second place, people think that the Laws have something to do with holding for the Operations of their minds, just as laws of nature hold for events in the world around us.i6 But that the laws are not psychological laws follows from the facts that a thing may be true even if nobody believes it, and something else may be false if everybody believes it. Such, it may be remarked, is usually the case.

Perhaps the most frequent instance of the assumption that the laws of logic are mental is the treatment of an identity as if its validity were an affair of our permission. Some people suggest to others that they should let bygones be bygones. Another important piece of evidence that the truth of propositions has nothing to do with mind is given by the phrase it is morally certain that such-and such a proposition is true. Now, in the first place, morality, curiously enough, seems to be closely associated with mental acts: we have professorships and lectureships of, and examinations in, mental and moral philosophy. In the second place, it is plain that a morally certain propo sition is a highly doubtful one. Thus it is as vain to expect any information about our minds from a study of the Laws of Thought as it would be to expect a description of a certain social event from Miss E. E. C. Jones's book An Introduction to General Logic.

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