NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF INFERENCE 407 



are supposed to have reached by having established the minor premiss. None 

 of those condensed syllogistic proofs, which we meet in philosophy, purport 

 to give us anything more than this final step. The previous work of es 

 tablishing the minor premiss is the most laborious part of the whole process. 

 And it is from an impartial estimate of the value of the evidence brought 

 forward in support of such minor premisses that we must weigh the worth of 

 such proofs. 



The consideration of a major premiss which is a definition, or its converse, 

 will at once show the importance of a question already raised in connexion 

 with Definition : Does a definition necessarily imply the existence of the 

 objects denoted by the term defined ? (54). What, for instance, would be the 

 attitude of one who denied or doubted the spirituality of the soul, towards 

 the major premiss of the syllogism given above ? He would, presumably, 

 admit and accept it as an intensive nominal definition of what himself and 

 his opponent understood by &quot; spiritual substance,&quot; and would then immediately 

 question its existential import ; i.e. he would not admit (without proof) that 

 there are de facto any such things in existence at all as &quot; spiritual substances &quot; 

 any objects to correspond to this concept. Or, possibly, admitting that 

 there are substances endowed with such properties, he might deny the minor 

 that the human soul is endowed with these properties. 



197. THE APPREHENSION OF THE UNIVERSAL JUDGMENT 

 AND ITS APPLICATION. It will be opportune here to compare 

 the mental process by which we &quot; ascend &quot; from particular facts 

 to universal truths with the process by which we &quot; apply &quot; the 

 latter to cases brought under them, and draw out by inference 

 other truths involved in them. The mental labour will be found 

 to lie not exclusively on the &quot; ascending &quot; or &quot;inductive&quot; side. 



The truth embodied in the universal premiss &quot;All men are 

 mortal,&quot; to which we referred above, is one which lies on the 

 border line (85) between those more abstract and evident analytic 

 truths which are got by a simple process of intuitive abstraction 

 and universalization, such as, for example, &quot;The whole is greater 

 than its part,&quot; &quot;Virtue is praiseworthy,&quot; &quot;Whatever happens has 

 a cause,&quot; and the generalizations which we reach only after 

 long and laborious processes of observation, experiment, hypo 

 thesis, and verification, processes comprised under the general title 

 of Induction, as, for example, &quot; Water reaches its maximum 

 density at four degrees centigrade,&quot; &quot;All bodies in the universe 

 tend to move towards one another with an acceleration which 

 varies directly as the product of their masses and inversely as 

 the squares of their respective distances asunder &quot;. 



The nature of the Induction, by which so many of our general 

 truths are established, will occupy our attention later on (cf. 212). 

 It is a process by which we start from particular facts and 



