CHAPTER VII. 

 NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF INFERENCE. 



191. ARE THERE OTHER MEDIATE INFERENCES BESIDES THE 

 SYLLOGISM ? The answer to this question will evidently depend 

 on the definitions we accept of mediate inference, and of the 

 syllogism (147) ; and, ultimately, on the interpretation we give to 

 the act of judgment (83, 99, 132, 141). The essential feature of 

 mediate reasoning, as opposed to mere immediate inference, 

 seems to be that it leads us mediately to a relation between two 

 concepts or objects of thought, i.e. by the introduction of a third 

 concept with which the two former are successively compared. 

 Were we, therefore, to define the syllogism as &quot; any combination 

 of two judgments from which a third necessarily follows &quot; (147), 

 this wide definition would include all possible kinds of mediate 

 inference. For the only reason why a third judgment necessarily 

 follows from two others is because in the latter the mind estab 

 lishes two mental relations in which it sees the third relation to 

 be necessarily involved. This implies that in all mediate in 

 ference there must be three mutually related elements or objects 

 of thought ; and we have, therefore, to decide whether it is not 

 possible for the mind to establish, between three such elements, 

 relations of a different kind from those with which the syllogism 

 deals, and by an inferential process which is not reducible to the 

 syllogism. 



Now, if we examine all the arguments which have hf=en treated 

 as categorical x syllogisms in former chapters, we shall find that 

 each and every one of them not merely (i) relates two objects of 

 thought with a third ; but, furthermore, that (2) these relations 

 are all relations of extension and intension between the three 

 objective concepts compared ; that in every such inference (3) 

 one of the antecedent comparisons reveals a universal and neces- 



1 The remarks that follow in the text apply to hypothetical and disjunctive 

 arguments not directly, but only in so far as they may be reduced to categorical 

 form (182). 



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