RATIOCINATION, OR SYLLOGISM. 239 



commonly received one, of the combination of propo- 

 sitions in a syllogism. If the minor premiss asserted 

 nothing more than that something belongs to a class, 

 and if, as consistency would require us to suppose, 

 the major premiss asserted nothing of that class 

 except that it is included in another class, the conclu- 

 sion would only be, that what was included in the 

 lower class is included in the higher, and the result, 

 therefore, nothing except that the classification is 

 consistent with itself. But we have seen that it is no 

 sufficient account of the meaning of a proposition, to 

 say that it refers something to, or excludes something 

 from, a class. Every proposition which conveys real 

 information asserts a matter of fact, dependent upon 

 the laws of nature and not upon artificial classifica- 

 tion. It asserts that a given object does or does not 

 possess a given attribute ; or it asserts that two attri- 

 butes, or sets of attributes, do or do not (constantly 

 or occasionally) coexist. Since such is the purport of 

 all propositions which convey any real knowledge, 

 and since ratiocination is a mode of acquiring real 

 knowledge, any theory of ratiocination which does not 

 recognize this import of propositions, cannot, we may 

 be sure, be the true one. 



Applying this view of propositions to the two 

 premisses of a syllogism, we obtain the following 

 results. The major premiss, which, as already 

 remarked, is always universal, asserts, that all things 

 which have a certain attribute (or attributes) have or 

 have not along with it, a certain other attribute (or 

 attributes). The minor premiss asserts that the 

 thing or set of things which are the subject of that 

 premiss, have the first-mentioned attribute ; and the 

 conclusion is, that they have (or that they have not) 

 the second. Thus in our former example, 



