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CHAPTER III. 



OF THE FUNCTIONS, AND LOGICAL VALUE, 

 OF THE SYLLOGISM. 



1 . WE have shown what is the real nature of 

 the truths with which the Syllogism is conversant, 

 in contradistinction to the more superficial manner 

 in which their import is conceived in the common 

 theory; and what are the fundamental axioms on 

 which its probative force or conclusiveness depends. 

 We have . now to inquire, whether the syllogistic 

 process, that of reasoning from generals to particu- 

 lars, is, or is not, a process of inference; a progress 

 from the known to the unknown ; a means of coming 

 to a knowledge of something which we did not know 

 before. 



Logicians have been remarkably unanimous in 

 their mode of answering this question. It is univer- 

 sally allowed that a syllogism is vicious if there be 

 anything more in the conclusion than was assumed in 

 the premisses. But this is, in fact, to say, that 

 nothing ever was, or can be, proved by syllogism, 

 which was not known, or assumed to be known, 

 before. Is ratiocination, then, not a process of infer- 

 ence? And is the syllogism, to which the word 

 reasoning has so often been represented to be exclu- 

 sively appropriate, not really entitled to be called 

 reasoning at all ? This seems an inevitable conse- 

 quence of the doctrine, admitted by all writers on the 

 subject, that a syllogism can prove no more than is 

 involved in the premisses. Yet the acknowledgment 



