216 SYLLOGISM AS AN ENGINE OF CONTROVERSY.

But, while I reprobate the syllogistic method, for being nugatory and insignificant as an instrument of reasoning, I admit its high merit as an engine of wrangling and controversy. It was the happiest contrivance that could have been devised for conducting those public disputations and trials of skill which for ages prevailed in Europe, and in which the discovery of truth was no part of the ambition of the combatants. The most ready and acute framer of syllogisms was sure to retire triumphant. The grand contest was not whether the syllogism contained any useful truth. The object of one party was to maintain its legitimacy; of the other, to controvert or deny one of its propositions. Wrangling thus became a science; and the mind of man, apparently enthusiastic in the discovery of truth and knowledge, never wandered further from their paths.

[Dr. George Campbell (in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 86), observes:

In the ordinary application of the syllogistic art to matters with which we can be made acquainted only by experience, it can be of little or no utility. So far from leading the mind, agreeably to the design of all argument and investigation, from things known to things unknown, and by things evident to things obscure, its usual progress is, on the contrary, from things less known to things better known, and by things obscure to things evident. When, in the way of induction, the mind proceeds from individual instances to the discovery of such truths as regard a species, and from these, again, to such as comprehend a genus, we may say, with reason, that as we advance, there may be in every succeeding step, and commonly is, less certainty than in the preceding; but in no instance whatever can there be more.

DR. CAMPBELL'S REMARKS.

217

Now the customary procedure in the syllogistic science, is from general to special, and consequently from less to more obvious. In scientific reasoning the case is very different, as the axioms or universal truths from which the mathematician argues, are so far from being the slow result of induction and experience, that they are self-evident. They are no sooner apprehended than they are necessarily assented to.

But to illustrate the matter by an example, take the following specimen in Barbara, the first mode of the first figure:

All animals feel;

All horses are animals;

Therefore, all horses feel.

It is impossible that any reasonable man who really doubts whether a horse has feeling, or is a mere automaton, should be convinced by this argument; for, supposing he uses the names horse and animal as stand:ng in the same relation of species and genus which they bear in the common acceptation of the words, the argument you employ is, in effect, but an affirmation of the point which he denies, couched in such terms as include a multitude of other similar affirmations, which, whether true or false, are nothing to the purpose. Thus all animals feel is only a compendious expression for all horses feel, all dogs feel, all eagles feel, and so through the whole animal creation. I affirm, besides, that the procedure here is from things less known to things better known. It is possible that one may believe the conclusion who denies the major: but the reverse is not possible; for, to express myself in the language of the art, that may be predicated of the species. which is not predicable of the genus, but that can never be predicated of the genus which is not predicable of the species. If one, therefore, were under such an error

218 BROWN'S ANALYSIS OF THE SCHOLASTIC LOGIC.

in regard to the brutes, true logic, which is always coincident with good sense, would lead our reflections to the indications of perception and feeling given by those animals, and the remarkable conformity which in this respect, and in respect of their bodily organs, they bear to our own species.]

CONCLUDING CHAPTER.

DR. THOMAS BROWN'S ANALYSIS OF THE SCHOLASTIC LOGIC.

[THE retardation of the progress of reasoning, is one circumstance which distinguishes the syllogism; but the absurdity, which is implied in the very theory of it, distinguishes it still more. It constantly assumes, as the first stage of that reasoning by which we are to arrive at a particular truth, our previous knowledge of that particular truth. The major is the very conclusion itself under another form, and its truth is not more felt than that which it professes to develop. Thus, to take one of the trifling examples which, in books of logic, are usually given, with a most appropriate selection, to illustrate this worse than trifling art-when, in order to prove that "John is a sinner," I do not adduce any particular sin of which he has been guilty, but draw up my accusation more irresistibly by the major of a syllogism—“All men are sinners;" "John is a man ;" "therefore, John is a sinner." If I really attached any meaning to my major proposition, "all men are sinners," I must at that very moment have felt as completely that John was a sinner, as after I had persued him technically through the minor and conclusion. The great error of the theory of the syllogism con

BROWN'S ANALYSIS OF THE SCHOLASTIC LOGIC. 219

sisted in supposing that because all our knowledge may be technically reduced, in some measure, to general maxims, these maxims have naturally a prior and paramount existence in our thoughts, and give rise to those very reasonings which, on the contrary, give rise to them.

It is not on account of our previous assent to the maxim, "a whole is greater than a part," that we believe any particular whole to be greater than any part of it; but we feel this truth in every particular case by its own intuitive evidence, and the axiom only expresses briefly our various feelings of this kind without giving occasion to them. The general axiom, then, is in every case posterior to the separate feelings of which it is only the brief expression, or, at least, without which, as prior to our verbal statement of the axiom, the axiom itself never could have formed a part of our system of knowledge. The syllogism, therefore, which proceeds from the axiom to the demonstration of particulars, reverses completely the order of reasoning, and begins with the conclusion, in order to teach us how we may arrive at it.

The natural process of reasoning by two propositions instead of the three which the syllogism would force us to use, has been allowed indeed by logicians to have a place in their system; because, with all their fondness for their own technical modes, they had not sufficient hardihood to deny, that it is at least possible for us to reason sometimes, as in truth we always reason. Their only resource, therefore, was to reduce this natural process under their own artificial method, and to give it a name which might imply the necessity of this reduction, before the reasoning itself could be worthy of that honorable title. They supposed, accordingly, the proposition which was technically wanting to be understood

220 BROWN'S ANALYSIS OF THE SCHOLASTIC LOGIC.

in the mind of the thinker or hearer, and termed the reasoning, therefore, an enthymeme. It was, they said, a truncated or imperfect syllogism. They would have expressed themselves more accurately if they had described their own syllogism, as, in relation to the natural analytic process of our thought, a cumbrous and overloaded enthymeme.

A very little attention to the nature of the different propositions of the syllogism, will be sufficient to show that the same fundamental error which renders it useless for discovering truth, renders it equally useless for the communication of it to others; and that as our internal reasoning is only a series of enthymemes, it is only by such a series of enthymemes as that by which truth unfolds itself to our own minds, that it can be successfully unfolded to the minds of others. In the attempt to communicate knowledge by the technical forms of reasoning, the major proposition, as already stated, must of course have been supposed to be understood and admitted when stated, since, if not admitted by the hearer or reader, as soon as stated, it would itself stand in need of proof; and if it was so understood and admitted, of what use would the remaining propositions of the syllogism be, since they could communicate no truth that was not communicated and felt before?

The whole question relates to the feeling of the truth of the major proposition; for if it be true, and felt to be true, all the rest is already allowed; and yet this most important of all propositions, which, if the conclusion be of a kind that demands proof, must itself demand proof still more, is the very proposition which is most preposterously submitted to us in the first place for our assent, without any proof whatever, the honor of a proof being reserved only for a proposition which, if the major require no proof, must be itself too clear to stand