NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF INFERENCE 403 



From a consideration of those examples we shall be able to 

 determine whether the so called &quot;syllogism&quot; with a collective 

 major is typical of the ordinary syllogism. Is the concrete, 

 collective, enumerative judgment, typical of the ordinary universal ? 

 Or, is the only way of establishing a universal judgment, and of 

 reaching certitude about its truth, the method of complete 

 enumeration of all the instances that constitute its extension? 

 Mill s attitude would suggest an affirmative answer to these 

 questions ; but, surely, the correct answer to them is the negative 

 one. The concrete, enumerative universal, is not the real, genuine 

 universal judgment at all ; for this latter is abstract and. necessary , 

 and is grounded not on any enumeration of instances, but on an 

 analysis of the nature and properties of the object which it 

 represents in thought. The examples given above are not typical 

 of the real syllogism ; for this latter must contain as one of its pre 

 misses, not a mere collective judgment reached by an actual and 

 exhaustive enumeration of instances, but a judgment which 

 announces some abstract principle, or law, or truth, which has 

 been reached otherwise than by enumeration, and which is seen 

 to apply necessarily, and therefore always, to all actual and 

 possible instances under it. 1 In regard to such genuine syllogisms, 

 the question, therefore, is, whether the abstract, universal premiss 

 can be established, assented to, and formulated with certitude, 

 independently of any enumeration of instances. Now, Mill s 

 fundamental error an error common to the whole Empirical 

 school of philosophers was to assume that we can never be 

 certain of the universal unless we are already certain of all the 

 individual instances under it : mistaking the unimportant collec 

 tive judgment for the genuine abstract universal. 



&quot;When we say, he writes, 2 All men are mortal, Socrates is a 

 man, therefore Socrates is mortal ; it is unanswerably urged by 

 the adversaries of the syllogistic theory, that the proposition, 

 Socrates is mortal is presupposed in the more general assump 

 tion, All men are mortal: that we cannot be assured of the mor 

 tality of all men, unless we are already certain of the mortality of 

 every individual man&quot; 



1 The universal premiss of the syllogism would therefore be more suitably 

 expressed in the abstract form &quot; P as such is Q&quot; or &quot; It is the nature of P to be 

 Q&quot; or &quot; Whatever is P is Q&quot; or in the conditional form &quot; If anything is P it is Q&quot; 

 rather than in the enumerative categorical form &quot;All P s are @V. KEYNES, p. 

 427, and n. i ; cf. supra, 161. 



2 Logic, ii., c. 3, 2 (italics ours). 



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