1

Lecture I to the Adirondack Summer School 1905

I have a difficult task before me to render
these four lectures profitable to you. It would be
less so if you came without a single idea on the
subject. But everybody, every butcher and baker, has
ideas of logic and even used the technical terminology
of the subject. He says he deals in articles of "prime
necessity." Perhaps he would be surprised to learn that the
phrase "prime necessity" was inserted by logicians to
express a logical conception which has now become
in common mouths very vague, it is true; but which
still has a little of the original concept in a vague form
clinging to it.

If I had a class in logic to conduct for a year, I should
harp still, as I used to do at the Johns Hopkins, upon my the

Lecture I to the Adirondack Summer School 1905

I have a difficult task before me to render
these four lectures profitable to you. It would be
less so if you came without a single idea on the
subject. But everybody, every butcher and backer, has
ideas of logic and even used the technical terminology
of the subject. He says he deals in articles of "prime
necessity." Perhaps he would be surprised to learn that the
phrase "prime necessity" was inserted by logicians to
express a logical conception which has now become
in common mouths very vague, it is true; but which
still has a little of the original concept in a vague form
clinging to it.

If I had a class in logic to conduct for a year, I would
harp still, as I used to do at the Johns Hopkins, upon my the