Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things...

Greek thought impresses me as being over much obsessed by an objective treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human thought—­number and definition and class and abstract form!  But these things,—­number, definition, class and abstract form,—­I hold, are merely unavoidable conditions of mental activity—­regrettable conditions rather than essential facts.  The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the truth A little in taking hold of it...

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this first attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms.  You have seen the result of those various methods of black and white reproduction that involve the use of a rectangular net.  You know the sort of process picture I mean—­it used to be employed very frequently in reproducing photographs.  At a little distance you really seem to have a faithful reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closely you find not the unique form and masses of the original, but a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shape and size.  The more earnestly you go into the thing, the closelier you look, the more the picture is lost in reticulations.  I submit, the world of reasoned inquiry has a very similar relation to the world of fact.  For the rough purposes of every day the network picture will do, but the finer your purpose the less it will serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and general knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance with a telescope as for a man with a microscope, it will not serve at all.

It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer and finer, you can fine your classification more and more—­up to a certain limit.  But essentially you are working in limits, and as you come closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave the practical purpose for which the method exists, the element of error increases.  Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges; and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for a stupidity—­for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness.  If you push a philosophical or metaphysical inquiry through a series of valid syllogisms—­never committing any generally recognised fallacy—­you nevertheless leave behind you at each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth, and you get deflections that are difficult to trace at each phase in the process.  Every species waggles about in its definition, every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale has its individual error.  So long as you are reasoning for practical purposes about finite things of experience you can every now and then check your process and correct your adjustments.  But not when you make what are called philosophical and theological inquiries, when you turn your implement towards the final absolute truth of things.