250 REASONING. 



process, the descent from all men to the Duke of 

 Wellington, that the inference resides. The inference 

 is finished when we have asserted that all men are 

 mortal. What remains to be performed afterwards is 

 merely deciphering our own notes. 



Archbishop Whately has contended that syllo- 

 gising, or reasoning from generals to particulars, is 

 not, agreeably to the vulgar idea, a peculiar mode of 

 reasoning, but the philosophical analysis of the mode 

 in which all men reason, and must do so if they 

 reason at all. With the deference due to so high an 

 authority, I cannot help thinking that the vulgar 

 notion is, in this case, the more correct. If, from our 

 experience of John, Thomas, &c., who once were 

 living, but are now dead, we are entitled to conclude 

 that all human beings are mortal, we might surely 

 without any logical inconsequence have concluded 

 at once from those instances, that the Duke of Wel- 

 lington is mortal. The mortality of John, Thomas, 

 and company is, after all, the whole evidence we have 

 for the mortality of the Duke of Wellington. Not 

 one iota is added to the proof by interpolating a 

 general proposition. Since the individual cases are 

 all the evidence we can possess, evidence which no 

 logical form into which we choose to throw it can 

 make greater than it is ; and since that evidence is 

 either sufficient in itself, or, if insufficient for one pur- 

 pose, cannot be sufficient for the other ; I am unable 

 to see why we should be forbidden to take the 

 shortest cut from these sufficient premisses to the 

 conclusion, and constrained to travel the " high priori 

 road" by the arbitrary fiat of logicians. I cannot 

 perceive why it should be impossible to journey from 

 one place to another unless we " march up a hill, and 

 then march down again.'' It may be the safest road, 



