NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF INFERENCE 391 



north of Cork ; Belfast is north of Dublin ; therefore Belfast is north 

 of Cork &quot; / &amp;lt;( A died five years before B ; B died the same year as C ; 

 therefore A died five years before C&quot;. These inferences, too, are 

 based, each upon some intuitively evident, abstract, universal truth 

 concerning the nature of the relation in question i.e. concerning 

 relations of space or of time some principle, of which every 

 valid inference of that particular kind is merely an application. 



The three classes of inferences, (B), (C), and (D), do not by any 

 means exhaust all the types of mediate inference actually em 

 ployed by the mind, but they are the most familiar and important 

 classes. In each of them the copula employed in the constituent 

 judgments is not the logical copula, &quot; is, are&quot; but, rather, some such 

 connecting link as &quot; is greater or less than, or equal to &quot; ; &quot; is related 

 in some special way to &quot; / &quot; is prior or posterior in time to, or simul 

 taneous with&quot; ; &quot; is related in space to,&quot; etc. The investigation 

 and classification of all such logical relations, other than that ex 

 pressed by the logical copula, &quot; is, are&quot; belongs to a department 

 of research known as the Logic of Relatives. 



Many logicians contend that all the above inferences and in 

 fact all mediate inferences are syllogistic ; but these logicians 

 either explicitly or implicitly so widen the definition of syllogism 

 that, in this wider acceptation, it does include all of them (cf. 147, 



Professor Welton, 1 who holds that they are not syllogistic, points out, 

 further, that &quot; neither are they deductive ; for in them [there] is no subordina 

 tion of a special case under a general principle, but an inference of co 

 ordination from particular to particular &quot;. Apparently, he here uses the term 

 &quot; particular &quot; not in the technical sense of &quot; indefinite,&quot; but rather as meaning 

 a &quot; singular &quot; or &quot; individual &quot; judgment. The examples he gives are com 

 posed of singular judgments. He himself ably opposes Mill s contention 

 that in the syllogism we reason from &quot; particulars &quot;. We shall see presently 

 (193) that there can be no mediate reasoning from particulars, whether 

 definite or indefinite, without the aid of a universal. And Professor Welton 

 admits this, for he continues : &quot; No doubt, the validity of the inferences rests 

 upon material considerations of degree, time, space, etc., which are univers 

 ally applicable ; but these considerations stand in the same relation to the 

 special arguments as the dicta of the four figures do to the syllogisms in 

 those figures ; and are not, therefore, the implied major premisses of the 

 arguments. The syllogism remains, then, as the one type of deductive 

 reasoning, and should not be discarded on account of the existence of these 

 other valid inferences, whose scope is not very great, and whose want of 

 generality must always make them of but little importance.&quot; 2 



1 op. cit., i., p. 411. 



a ibid, (italics ours). Cf. JOSEPH, Logic, p. 319, n. 2, where the author evidently 



