In Logic, so regarded, thought is no longer merely our thought. It is the constructive, relational, unifying element of reality. Without it reality would not articulately be anything for us: and such thoughts seem to be its net extract, its quintessence, its concentrated meaning. But really they are only the potent _form_ of reality. Or, more exactly, in its limits, under its phases, must come all reality if it is to be part and parcel of our intelligent possession, our certified property. Such a thought is the frame-work, the shape-giver of our world, of our communicable experience. It is the formative principle of our intelligent life, as it is the principle through which things have meaning for us, and we have meaning for and fellowship with others. It is not so rich as religion and art, perhaps it does not have the intensity of feeling and faith: but it is at the very basis of all of these, or it is the concentrated essence of what in them is explicated and developed. Humanity in these its highest energies is more than mere thought--more than mere logic: but it is still at the root thought, and it is still governed by the laws and movement of this higher logic. For this is a logic which is no mere instrument of technical reasoning, for proof or disproof: no mere code of rules for the evaluation of testimony. It is a logic which deals with a thought--or an Idea in thought-form--which is the principle of all life and reality: the way of self-criticism which leads to truth: a thought which is at home in all the phases and provinces of experience.
Under the same name, Logic, therefore, we find something quite different from what the example of Aristotle and his ancient and modern followers had accustomed us to.[8] Under the auspices of Kant and his 'Transcendental logic' there has emerged the need of something more corresponding to the title. For the word itself was not used either by Aristotle or the Stoics. Neither the Analytics and Topics of the one, nor the Dialectic of the other, exhaust the conception of the science, or, to put it more accurately, they are only inceptions of a science, the fulfilment of which was reserved for a later time. Bacon and Locke, Descartes and Spinoza, all the thinkers of modern Europe call for a deeper probing of the logical problem: for a grasp of it which shall be more worthy of its conventional name, Logic, the theory of Reason. And we may even say that what is wanted is a unification of the problem of the Organon with that of the first philosophy, a unification of Logic with Metaphysics: a recognition that the problem of reason is not merely the method of reasoning, but the whole theory as to the correlations of perception and conception, of thinking and reality.