276 REASONING. 



major ; and provided the induction of which that 

 premiss is the expression was correctly performed, 

 the conclusion respecting the animal now present 

 will be instantly drawn ; because as soon as she is 

 compared with the formula, she will be identified as 

 being included in it. But suppose the syllogism to 

 be the following : All arsenic is poisonous, the sub- 

 stance which is before me is arsenic, therefore it is 

 poisonous. The truth of the minor may not here be 

 obvious at first sight ; it may not be intuitively evi- 

 dent, but may itself be known only by inference. It 

 may be the conclusion of another argument, which, 

 thrown into the syllogistic form, would stand thus : 

 Whatever forms a compound with hydrogen, which 

 yields a black precipitate with nitrate of silver, is 

 arsenic ; the substance before me conforms to this 

 condition ; therefore it is arsenic. To establish, 

 therefore, the ultimate conclusion, The substance 

 before me is poisonous, requires a process which, in 

 order to be syllogistically expressed, stands in need 

 of two syllogisms ; and we have a Train of Reasoning. 

 When, however, we thus add syllogism to syllo- 

 gism, we are really adding induction to induction. 

 Two separate inductions must have taken place to 

 render this chain of inference possible ; inductions 

 founded, probably, on different sets of individual 

 instances, but which converge in their results, so that 

 the instance which is the subject of inquiry comes 

 within the range of them both. The record of these 

 inductions is contained in the majors of the two syllo- 

 gisms. First, we, or others before us, have examined 

 various objects which yielded under the given circum- 

 stances the given precipitate, and found that they 

 possessed the properties connoted by the word arsenic; 

 they were metallic, volatile, their vapour had a smell 



