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The critic ought therefore not to be too sharp and logic-chopping in his dealings with it, but should weigh it as a whole, and especially weigh it against its possible alternatives. One should also try to apply it first to one instance, and then to another to see how it will work.
It was not that he was much more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was the kind of bad man whom bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sense subtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented long afterwards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong.
How far superior is all this to the cut-and-dried logic-chopping, the cold analysis to the eighteenth century! 'The Novel, say sententiously, 'is the Epic grown amusing. Instance Corinne, bring Mme. de Stael up to support your argument.
This looks like a painfully small result to have been reached by such long and laborious logic-chopping; so that one is reminded of Carlyle's cynical observation that the end and aim of the Kantian philosophy "seem not to make abstruse things simple, but to make simple things abstruse". It is to be remarked, however, that the real value of the 'Letters' is not to be found in the logic-chopping, for which their author apologizes again and again; not in the "dreadful array of first principles, the forest huge of terminology and definitions, where the panting intellect of weaker men wanders as in pathless thickets and at length sinks powerless to the earth, oppressed with fatigue and suffocated with scholastic miasma", but in the incidental flashes of luminous and suggestive comment.
It shows that they ought to be had." "You're logic-chopping this morning, Ned see that you don't get to man-chopping in the afternoon. You shall have the pistols, but do not use them rashly. I have kept them simply for defence against invasion; not for the purpose of quarrel, or revenge."
How far superior is all this to the cut-and-dried logic-chopping, the cold analysis to the eighteenth century! 'The Novel, say sententiously, 'is the Epic grown amusing. Instance Corinne, bring Mme. de Stael up to support your argument.
That is true; but it is no less true that the endeavour to sum up the world in a syllogism is one of the oldest and vainest habits of man. In the region of the unknown and unknowable, logic-chopping has its perils; and in the present case all our doubts would seem to arise from another hazardous syllogism.
Boileau detested and rightly detested the extravagant affectations of the précieux school, the feeble pomposities of Chapelain, the contorted, inflated, logic-chopping heroes of Corneille's later style; and the classical reaction against these errors appeared to him in the guise of a return to the fundamental principles of Nature, Reason, and Truth.
If it has produced only the "vile German race" which the writer so justly dislikes, unredeemed by any of the virtues which it "inculcates," then it has nothing to say for itself. It stands confessed as an unmixed evil. It is right to expose a logical fallacy, but I am not fond of the attempt to obscure by logic-chopping what is a writer's real meaning.
And then the affectations and conceits of that elegant circle, the sonnets and madrigals, the "bouts-rimes," the practical jokes, the logic-chopping and straw-splitting of those ultra-fine intellects, the romances where the personages of the day masqueraded under Greek or Roman or Oriental aliases, books written in a flowery language which the Cavalier did not understand, and full of allusions that were dark to him; while not to know and appreciate those master-works placed him outside the pale.
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