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should mean contrary to reason, and you are unable to formulate
this reason. Why not give up this kind of logic and
adopt that of all mathematicians? But it is all in vain.
More ineradicable with them than reason itself is that tendency of
theirs to consider the general, the law, as an existent thing.
I do not see what remains to us, to whom the whole matter is
perfectly clear, but to say that they are minds congenitally
incapable of a necessary form of thought. Certainly a logic
which leads one from true premisses to admittedly false conclusions
appears to us to be a poor form of logic; and when that
logic is unable to formulate itself we are tempted to call it
mental incapacity. Yet they base their whole philosophy
up[on] this unhesitatingly. I for my part prefer to cast my
lot with the mathematicians, whose logic does not kick
up such capers, and is able to give an account of itself.