302 Modality. [CHAP. xm. 



reasons here ; but it may merely be remarked that his 

 criticism demands the acceptance of the Kantian doctrines 

 as to the nature of arithmetical judgments, and that it would 

 be better to base the rejection not on the ground that the 

 syllogism is not formal, but on the ground that it is not 

 analytical. 



7. There is another and practical way of getting rid 

 of the perplexities of modal reasoning which must be noticed 

 here. It is the resource of ordinary reasoners rather than the 

 decision of professed logicians 1 , and, like the first method of 

 evasion already pointed out in this chapter, is of very partial 

 application. It consists in treating the premises, during the 

 process of reasoning, as if they were pure, and then re- 

 introducing the modality into the conclusion, as a sort of 

 qualification of its full certainty. When each of the pre 

 mises is nearly certain, or when from any cause we are not 

 concerned with the extent of their departure from full cer 

 tainty, this rough expedient will answer well enough. It is, 

 I apprehend, the process which passes through the minds of 

 most persons in such cases, in so far as they reason consciously. 

 They would, presumably, in such an example as that pre 

 viously given ( 4), proceed as if the premises that &amp;lt; those 

 who take arsenic will die, and that the man in question 

 has taken it, were quite true, instead of being only probably 

 true, and they would consequently draw the conclusion that 

 4 he would die/ But bearing in mind that the premises are 

 not certain, they would remember that the conclusion was 

 only to be held with a qualified assent. This they would 



1 I consider however, as I have this, though they looked at the mat- 

 said further on (p. 320), that the treat- ter from a different point of view, 

 ment in the older logics of Probable and expressed it in very different 

 syllogisms, and Dialectic syllogisms, language, 

 came to somewhat the same thing as 



