5. Final Cause of Logical Order. -- The systematization of the process of reasoning has an ulterior aim: to make our knowledge true.

Before explaining how logic directs its operations towards the true, it must be recalled that truth and error are qualities of the judgment, and not of the concept. As long as we merely speak of some one object by itself -- e. g., the sun or a chimera -- no one can say that we speak truly or falsely. Truth or error belongs to the statement that the sun exists, that the chimera exists.^{1}

Now, how can a science, logic, lead us to the knowledge of the truth? Evidently, logic could not in this sense supply the place of all the particular sciences.

Each science enlightens the mind about the particular object with which it concerns itself; and consequently, anyone who had studied all of them would be marvellously equipped for always forming true judgments.

But, besides this initiation into the whole of truth by the successive and collective study of the particular sciences, there is an initiation of another kind, viz., the preparation afforded by a more general science. Thought naturally proceeds from the simple to the complex. Now simplicity and universality always go together in our knowledge. The most general sciences, then, are those the object of which is the most simple and, for that reason, best enables us to comprehend the more complex objects to which it is applicable.

Logic is a general science in the sense that it regulates the content of all other sciences and subjects them to its laws in their construction. Its object, of extreme simplicity and boundless in extent, is the being of reason.

{1} See General Criteriology, no. 6.