ONE:"Only about a month after the publication of my story about what happened at Landen, the German Government and military authorities considered that the time had come to contradict it, after ordering an inquiry which in reality cannot be called an inquiry at all. From their communiqus it is clear that some soldiers were heard who probably were privy to the act, and in any case benefited by a denial of the villainy committed at Landen. That is to say, men who were counsel in their own cause, and who were believed the sooner because their declarations were desirable for the support of German credit. But it does not appear from these communiqus that the German authorities also examined the wounded who were present, nor the two Netherlanders who travelled by that train: the young Miss de Bruin, from Amsterdam, and the present writer, as also the civilian witnesses at Landen. In opposition to the evidence of Stores-inspector Huebner and the landwehr-soldier Krueger, of226 which evidence it has not been stated that they gave it on oath, I declare myself prepared and willing, if a complete and impartial inquiry be instituted, to declare upon oath either to a properly qualified committee in The Netherlands or in Germany, or to a thereto-appointed arbiter, the following:
ONE:So also with Aristotle. As a naturalist, he is, indeed, purely objective; but when he offers a general explanation of the world, the subjective element introduced by Protagoras and Socrates at once reappears. Simple absolute self-consciousness is for him the highest good, the animating principle of Nature, the most complete reality, and the only one that would remain, were the element of nonentity to disappear from this world. The utter misconception of dynamic phenomena which marks his physics and astronomy can only be accounted for by his desire to give life the priority over mechanical motion, and reason the priority over life. Thus his metaphysical method is essentially identical with the introspective method recommended by Plotinus, and, if fully worked out, might have led to the same results.
ONE:"And how are they thanked for it? His [Aristotles] theory of syllogism is simply an explicit statement of the fact that all knowledge, all thought, rests on universal truths or general propositionsthat all knowledge, whether deductive or inductive, is arrived at by the aid, the indispensable aid, of general propositions. We in England have been almost charmed into the belief that reasoning is perpetually from particular to particular, and a village matron and her Lucy have been used to express the truth for us in the concrete form adapted to our weaker comprehension (Mills Logic, bk. ii. ch. 3). We shall next be told, forsooth, that oxygen and hydrogen do not enter into the composition of water, because our village matron perpetually drinks it without passing through either element, and the analysis of the chemist will be proved as great a fiction as the analysis of the logician. Aristotle has supplied the links which at once upset all such superficial389 analysis. He has shown that even in analogy or example, which apparently proceeds in this way from one particular instance to another particular instance, we are only justified in so proceeding in so far as we have transformed the particular instance into a general proposition.284
