FUNCTIONS AND VALUE OF THE SYLLOGISM. 271 



every person who admits Socrates to be a man, the 

 idea of man must include the idea of mortality ? Dr. 

 Brown could not help seeing this difficulty, and in 

 order to avoid it, was led, contrary to his intention, 

 to re-establish, under another name, that step in the 

 argument which corresponds to the major, by affirming 

 the necessity of previously perceiving the relation 

 between the idea of man and the idea of mortal. If 

 the reasoner has not previously perceived this rela- 

 tion, he will not, says Dr. Brown, infer because 

 Socrates is a man, that Socrates is mortal. But even 

 this admission, though amounting to a surrender of 

 the doctrine that an argument consists of the minor 

 and the conclusion alone, will not save the remainder 

 of Dr. Brown's theory. The failure of assent to the 

 argument does not take place merely because the 

 reasoner, for want of due analysis, does not perceive 

 that his idea of man includes the idea of mortality ; it 

 takes place, much more commonly, because in his 

 mind that relation between the two ideas has never 

 existed. And in truth it never does exist, except as 

 the result of experience. Consenting, for the sake of 

 the argument, to discuss the question upon a suppo- 

 sition of which we have recognised the radical incor- 

 rectness, namely, that the meaning of a proposition 

 relates to the ideas of the things spoken of, and not 

 to the things themselves ; and conceding for a mo- 

 ment the existence of abstract ideas, I must yet 

 observe, that the idea of man, as an universal idea, 

 the common property of all rational creatures, cannot 

 involve anything but what is strictly implied in the 

 name. If any one includes in his own private idea of 

 man, as no doubt is almost always the case, some 

 other attributes, such for instance as mortality, he 

 does so only as the consequence of experience, after 



