200 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



length upon what is so nearly self-evident ; but when 

 a distinction, obvious as it may appear, has been 

 confounded, and by men of the most powerful intel- 

 lect, it is better to say too much than too little for 

 the purpose of rendering such mistakes impossible in 

 future. We will, therefore, detain the reader while 

 we point out one of the absurd consequences flowing 

 from the supposition that definitions, as such, are the 

 premisses in any of our reasonings, except such as 

 relate to words only. If this supposition were true, 

 we might argue correctly from true premisses, and 

 arrive at a false conclusion. We should only have to 

 assume as a premiss the definition of a non-entity: 

 or rather of a name which has no entity corresponding 

 to it. Let this, for instance, be our definition: 



A dragon is a serpent breathing flame. 

 This proposition, considered only as a definition, is 

 indisputably correct. A dragon is a serpent breathing 

 flame : the word means that. The tacit assumption, 

 indeed, (if there were any such understood assertion,) 

 of the existence of an object with properties cor- 

 responding to the definition, would, in the present 

 instance, be false. Out of this definition we may 

 carve the premisses of the following syllogism : 



A dragon is a thing which breathes flame : 



But a dragon is a serpent : 

 From which the conclusion is, 



Therefore some serpent or serpents breathe 



flame : 



an unexceptionable syllogism, in the first mode of 

 the third figure, in which both premisses are true and 

 yet the conclusion false ; which every logician knows 

 to be an absurdity. The conclusion being false and 

 the syllogism correct, the premisses cannot be true. 

 But the premisses, considered as parts of a definition, 



