186 Mr DE morgan, ON THE SYLLOGISM, No. Ill, 



pattern, having previously stretched or shortened himself to the pattern of Aristotle, Plato, 

 Kant, or another. 



I believe men in general to be true realists, post rem at least. They speak attributively : 

 they allow the same feeling to different persons, the same quality to different things. This 

 many affirm to be an incorrect mode of speaking : they aver that two persons cannot have the 

 same feeling in the sense in which they can sit at the same table. This assumes that a table i^ 

 more than a collection of feelings. For myself, if I may not say that two persons who die of 

 a stroke of the sun, or two strokes of the sun, are killed by the same disorder, neither will I 

 be inveigled by the usual hypothesis of matter into saying that they were killed by the same 

 sun. It would be easy to frame hypotheses which no one can, of knowledge, deny, under which 

 attributes in the brain should be as real as the sun in the heavens or the rocks on the 

 earth : and this without denying either the existence of matter, or the separate existence of 

 mind ; and so that the question whether A gives the same attribute, roundness, to both sun 

 and moon, should be the very same question as whether A and B both see the same sun. 



VII. A man may be allowed to ignore, as a logician, what he admits as a metaphysician: 

 but he must not deny it. Some logicians have controverted the plurality in unity, in order 

 to base logic wholly on what I shall presently describe as the m,athematical notion. One 

 chief object of this paper is to reinforce the assertion that the mathematical branch of logic, 

 the part which has a mathematical principle, has been allowed to overgrow the metaphysical 

 part, and deprive it of light and air. This begins to be admitted, though not in my words : 

 but those who make the admission seem to be trying to grow another branch of the mathe- 

 matical : which is most conspicuous in the attempt to introduce, by postulation of its uni- 

 versal existence in thought, a complete quantification of the predicate, as a part of the notion 

 of enunciation. It is said that all that enters into the predicate notion is denied of the 

 subject when the predicate is denied, and that in this matter there is no difference between 

 tile constitutive and the attributive. This is a hard saying, so long as that which enters 

 a notion enters in the way of the world at large. Man is denied of Bucephalus, and animal 

 enters the notion of man ; is animal denied of Bucephalus ? No, answers the pluralist, only 

 that part of the notion which belongs to man. The truth is that, to make the whole fit 

 on the mathematical abacus, the unity of attribution is denied, and there is left but a class 

 of qualities, distributed, one a piece, among the individual class objects. Alexander of 

 Macedon, Newton, and Leibnitz, have three human natures. Leibnitz is not Newton : there- 

 fore every attribute comprehended in our thought of Newton is virtually denied of Leibnitz, 

 be it his humanity, be it the wearing of his wig aivry. Now all this is in the form of 

 thougiit, because it can be thought: it is therefore a part of logic. The qualities of Newton 

 are not the qualities of Leibnitz, because Newton is not Leibnitz. It is however a part of 

 the mathematical side. The class may be divided into individuals, the attribute, or class- 

 mark, may be made to give thought of a class of individual qualities, as much separated 

 as the individuals of the class of objects in which they inhere. Nay, even the perception of 

 the desirableness of putting on the right class-mark may be made to generate a class, a class 

 of desirablenesses : one perception of the propriety of placing Newton in the class man ; another 

 for Leibnitz ; and so on. But the very logician who thus lays down all thought on a meagre 



