REASON. 337 



registers of such inferences already made, and short formulae 

 for making more." Now although this doctrine is not 

 universally accepted by logicians — Whately, for instance, 

 having maintained the exact converse, and many minor 

 writers more or less agreeing with him, — I feel compelled to 

 fall in with it on purely logical grounds, or without reference 

 to any considerations drawn from the theory of evolution. 

 For it appears to me that Mill is completely successful in 

 showing that only by this doctrine can the syllogism be 

 shown to have any functions or any value. " It must be 

 granted that in every syllogism, considered as an argument 

 to prove the conclusion, there is a petitio principii. When 

 we say, All men are mortal ; Socrates is a man ; therefore 

 Socrates is mortal ; it is unanswerably urged by the adver- 

 saries of the syllogistic theory that the proposition, Socrates 

 is mortal, is presupposed in the more general assumption, All 

 men are mortal." Therefore, " no reasoning from generals to 

 particulars can, as such, prove anything : since from a general 

 proposition we cannot infer any particulars, but those which 

 the principle itself assumes as known." This is not a suit- 

 able place in which to discuss such a question of logic at 

 length, and therefore I shall merely refer to Mill's exposition 

 of it.* But as I can see no escape from the view which he 

 enforces that the major premiss of a syllogism is merely a 

 generalized memorandum of past particular experiences, and 

 therefore that all reasoning is, in the last resort, an infer- 

 ence from particulars to particulars ; I think that this con- 

 clusion (arrived at without reference to the theory of 

 evolution) is available to argue that there is no difference in 

 kind between the act of reason performed by the crab and 

 any act of reason performed by a man. 



It must be remembered that I am not now discussing the 

 larger question as to whether there is any distinction in kind 

 between the whole mental organization of an animal and the 

 whole mental organization of a man. This larger question I 

 shall fully discuss in my subsequent work. Here I am only 

 endeavouring to show that so far as the particular faculty of 

 mind is concerned which falls under my definition of reason, 

 there is no such distinction. A process of conscious infer-j 

 ence, considered merely as a process of conscious inference; 



* Logic, Tol. i, Chap. Ill, 



