CHAPTER III. 



OF THE FUNCTIONS AND LOGICAL VALUE OF THE 

 SYLLOGISM. 



1. WE have shown what is the real nature of the truths 

 with which the Syllogism is conversant, in contradistinction 

 to the more superficial manner in which their import is con 

 ceived in the common theory; and what are the fundamental 

 axioms on which its probative force or conclusiveness depends. 

 We have now to inquire, whether the syllogistic process, that 

 of reasoning from generals to particulars, is, or is not, a pro 

 cess of inference ; a progress from the known to the unknown : 

 a means of coming to a knowledge of something which we did 

 not know before. 



Logicians have been remarkably unanimous in their mode 

 of answering this question. It is universally allowed that a 

 syllogism is vicious if there be anything more in the conclu 

 sion than was assumed in the premises. But this is, in fact, 

 to say, that nothing ever was, or can be, proved by syllogism, 

 which was not known, or assumed to be known, before. Is 

 ratiocination, then, not a process of inference ? And is the 

 syllogism, to which the word reasoning has so often been 

 represented to be exclusively appropriate, not really entitled 

 to be called reasoning at all ? This seems an inevitable con 

 sequence of the doctrine, admitted by all writers on the 

 subject, that a syllogism can prove no more than is involved 

 in the premises. Yet the acknowledgment so explicitly made, 

 has not prevented one set of writers from continuing to repre 

 sent the syllogism as the correct analysis of what the mind 

 actually performs in discovering and proving the larger half 

 of the truths, whether of science or of daily life, which we 

 believe ; while those who have avoided this inconsistency, and 

 followed out the general theorem respecting the logical value 



