FUNCTIONS AND VALUE OF THE SYLLOGISM. 207 



inferences, and instructions for making innumerable infe 

 rences in unforeseen cases, are compressed into one short 

 sentence. 



When, therefore, we conclude from the death of John and 

 Thomas, and every other person we ever heard of in whose 

 case the experiment had been fairly tried, that the Duke of 

 Wellington is mortal like the rest; we may, indeed, pass 

 through the generalization, All men are mortal, as an inter 

 mediate stage ; but it is not in the latter half of the process, 

 the descent from all men to the Duke of Wellington, that 

 the inference resides. The inference is finished when we 

 have asserted that all men are mortal. What remains to 

 be performed afterwards is merely decyphering our own 

 notes. 



Archbishop Whately has contended that syllogizing, or 

 reasoning from generals to particulars, is not, agreeably to 

 the vulgar idea, a peculiar mode of reasoning, but the philo 

 sophical analysis of the mode in which all men reason, and 

 must do so if they reason at all. With the deference due 

 to so high an authority, I cannot help thinking that the 

 vulgar notion is, in this case, the more correct. If, from our 

 experience of John, Thomas, &c., who once were living, but 

 are now dead, we are entitled to conclude that all human 

 beings are mortal, we might surely without any logical incon 

 sequence have concluded at once from those instances, 

 that the Duke of Wellington is mortal. The mortality of 

 John, Thomas, and company is, after all, the whole evidence 

 we have for the mortality of the Duke of Wellington. Not 

 one iota is added to the proof by interpolating a general pro 

 position. Since the individual cases are all the evidence we 

 can possess, evidence which no logical form into which we 

 choose to throw it can make greater than it is ; and since 

 that evidence is either sufficient in itself, or, if insufficient 

 for the one purpose, cannot be sufficient for the other ; I am 

 unable to see why we should be forbidden to take the shortest 

 cut from these sufficient premises to the conclusion, and con 

 strained to travel the &quot; high priori road,&quot; by the arbitral-) 

 fiat of logicians. I cannot perceive why it should be impos- 



