Article March 10, 1951 Issue

PURE LOGIC

MARGARET GERALDINE GODEFROI

Logic , the science of reasoning, or the act of thinking clearly, is of great service in clarifying the thought of the individual. Aristotle was the first to conceive of reasoning itself as a science, and, though many elaborations have since been added, his version is known as Traditional or Aristotelian logic. In the age of Plato and Aristotle, logic took no account of the relations asserted in propositions except those of substance, attributes, and individual identity; it dealt solely with the form, or skeleton, of the reasoning process itself. Its object was to establish a method which would ensure consistency in argument.

It is apparent, then, that this form of logic guarantees that the conclusion is true only if the premises from which one started are true. A syllogism is treated under the three heads of subject, predicate, and conclusion, which may be illustrated by the following classic example: All fishes are coldblooded. The whale is not coldblooded. Therefore the whale is not a fish.

Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 128, 129): "If both the major and the minor propositions of a syllogism are correct, the conclusion, if properly drawn, cannot be false. So in Christian Science there are no discords nor contradictions, because its logic is as harmonious as the reasoning of an accurately stated syllogism or of a properly computed sum in arithmetic. Truth is ever truthful, and can tolerate no error in premise or conclusion."

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