RATIOCINATION. OR SYLLOGISM. 



"5 



common attributes indicated by the 

 name ; what, I should be glad to know, 

 do we learn by being told, that what- 

 ever can be affirmed of a class may 

 be affirmed of every object contained 

 in the class ? The class is nothing 

 but the objects contained in it : and 

 the dictum de omni merely amounts 

 to the identical proposition, that 

 whatever is true of certain objects is 

 true of each of those objects. If all 

 ratiocination were no more than the 

 application of this maxim to particular 

 cases, the syllogism would indeed be, 

 what it has so often been declared to 

 be, solemn trifling. The dictum de 

 omni is on a par with another truth, 

 which in its time was also reckoned 

 of great importance, "Whatever is, 

 is." To give any real meaning to the 

 dictum de omni, we must consider it 

 not as an axiom, but as a definiticm ; 

 we must look upon it as intended to 

 explain, in a circuitous and para- 

 phrastic manner, the meaning of the 

 word class. 



An error which seemed finally re- 

 futed and dislodged from thought, 

 often needs only put on a new suit of 

 phrases, to be welcomed back to its 

 old quarters, and allowed to repose 

 unquestioned for another cycle of ages. 

 Modern philosophers have not been 

 sparing in their contempt for the 

 scholastic dogma that genera and 

 species are a peculiar kind of sub- 

 stances, which general substances 

 being the only permanent things, 

 while the individual substances com- 

 prehended under them are in a per- 

 petual flux, knowledge, which neces- 

 sarily imports stability, can only have 

 relation to those general substances or 

 universals, and not to the facts or 

 particulars included under them. 

 Yet, though nominally rejected, this 

 very doctrine, whether disguised under 

 the Abstract Ideas of Locke, whose 

 speculations, however, it has less 

 vitiated than those of perhaps any 

 other writer who has been infected 

 with it,) under the ultra-nominalism 

 of Hobbes and Condillac, or the onto- 

 logy of the later German schools, has 



never ceased to poison philosophy. 

 Once accustomed to consider scientific 

 investigation as essentially consisting 

 in the study of universals. men did 

 not drop this habit of thought when 

 they ceased to regard universals as 

 possessing an independent existence : 

 and even those who went the length 

 of considering them as mere names, 

 could not free themselves from the 

 notion that the investigation of truth 

 consisted entirely or partly in some 

 kind of conjuration or juggle with 

 those names. When a philosopher 

 adopted fully the Nominalist view of 

 the signification of general language, 

 retaining along with it the dictum de 

 omni as the foundation of all reason- 

 ing, two such premises fairl}- put to- 

 gether were likely, if he was a consis- 

 tent thinker, to land him in rather 

 startling conclusions. Accordingly it 

 has been seriously held, by writers 

 of deserved celebrity, that the process 

 of arriving at new truths by reasoning 

 consists in the mere substitution of 

 one set of arbitrary signs for another ; 

 a doctrine which they suppose to de- 

 rive irresistible confirmation from the 

 example of algebra. Jf there were 

 any process in sorcery or necromancy 

 more preternatural than this, I should 

 be much surprised. The culminating 

 point of this philosophy is the noted 

 aphorism of Condillac, that a science 

 is nothing, or scarcely anything, but 

 une langue bienfaite; in other words 

 that the one sufficient rule for dis- 

 covering the nature and properties of 

 objects is to name them properly : as 

 if the reverse were not the truth, that 

 it is impossible to name them properly 

 except in propo; tion as we are already 

 acquainted with their nature and pro- 

 perties. Can it be necessary to say, 

 that none, not even the most trivial 

 knowledge with respect to Things, 

 ever was or could be originally got at 

 by any conceivable manipulation of 

 mere names, as such ; and that what 

 can be learned from names, is only 

 what somebody who used the names 

 knew before ? Philo>ophical analysis 

 confirms the indication of common 



