Item 80 - Richard Jones to William Whewell

4 pp.

Collingwood - RJ is full of things to say to WW as he continues to read John S. Mill's book on Logic. John Herschel has not yet got through Mill's section on dialectics [see RJ to WW, 6 April 1843] - 'he likes them but thinks as you do of Comte - or more meanly still. Mill obviously struggles against light and would willingly like Whately [Richard Whately] first shew the real value of the syllogism and then represent the use of it as the best means of getting at new truths for inconsistent as this is what else can he mean by talking of a deductive method which is opposed to and better than and which is to supplant induction - on which induction it is after all to rest. Practically he prefers I presume the smallest possible quantity of induction and the greatest possible of ratiocination. It would serve him right to take some of the social science in the probable progress of which he discards induction and shew where ratiocination led in other days his Papa and himself. How moderate an induction would have been their observation and how little when reasoning had led them by the nose into a slough they were in any plight to save themselves by a verification of facts. There is not only the case but a little army of cases in which they might be shewn floundering and lost and their path traced back through this miserable logic. I must read the second vol. over again after I have finished it once. I find much of it very obscure'.