UN I FOR MIT Y OF NA TURE 1 1 5 



A s will produce a&quot;) that the principle finds a partial applica 

 tion ; just as in applying this generalized truth to particular cases 

 by the syllogism, the Aristotelean Dictum de omni is partially 

 applied. There is, therefore, a sense in which the law of unifor 

 mity bears a relation to the mental ascent from particular to 

 universal, analogous to that which the axiom of the Aristotelean 

 syllogism, the Dictum de omni, bears to the descent from universal 

 to particular (170, 191). 



Every deductive syllogism in the first figure is a special or 

 narrower application of the Dictum. For instance, the syllogism 

 &quot;Man is mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal &quot; 

 may be thus expressed : &quot; Mortality, which is predicated of the 

 class man, can be similarly predicated of Socrates, who belongs 

 to that class &quot; ; from which it appears, too, that the Dictum cannot 

 be regarded as an ultimate major premiss of all syllogisms in 

 the first figure, but rather as a fundamental, standard syllogism 

 (?All M is P; S is M ; therefore S is P&quot;} symbolizing that 

 type of mental process, and by its self-evidence justifying the 

 latter (I92). 1 



So, too, induction is a distinct mental process of ascent from 

 particular to universal ; and every such ascent is a narrower and 

 more special exercise of the fundamental, standard, typical in 

 duction, by which we reach the widest law of physical nature, viz. 

 that natural causes act uniformly that whatever (a) has been dis 

 covered to be really due to a physical cause (A] in any observed 

 instance or instances, will be always and everywhere produced by 

 that cause. And, just as the Dictum de omni is not a principle 

 whose truth must be consciously grasped by the mind beforehand, 

 as a condition for reasoning validly by the syllogism, but is rather 

 a generalization of the syllogistic process, implicitly involved in 

 every syllogism and explicitly grasped only by a deliberate, 

 reflex analysis of this process itself, so the principle of the uni 

 formity of nature is not a truth which must be grasped as a 

 logical antecedent to justify the generalization made in each 

 separate induction, but is rather itself a wider induction partially 

 involved in every special induction, and explicitly grasped and 

 formulated in its fulness only when the mind comes to analyse 

 those special inductions afterwards. 2 



1 C/. VENN, op. cit., p. 126 : &quot; When the Dictum was assigned as the ground of 

 the individual inference, all that we were doing was to generalize this latter &quot;. 



a Mr. JOSEPH (op. cit., pp. 407, 408) rightly rejects the view that uniformity of 



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