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Updated: June 18, 2025
Not that every sentence may not be legitimately called an enthymeme; but, as Homer on account of his preeminence has appropriated the general name of poet to himself as his own among all the Greeks; so, though every sentence is an enthymeme, still, because that which is made up of contraries appears the most acute argument of the kind, that alone has possessed itself of the general name as its own peculiar distinction.
We ought to procure such books as are likely to give the children a taste for the literature of the West; not books filled with idle distinctions and definitions, which every man who has learned them makes haste to forget. Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme?
It knows nothing of the rules of the dialecticians, of the syllogism, the dilemma, the enthymeme, or the sorites, but it recurs to the homely implements of its operative parent for its methods of instruction, and with the plumb-line it inculcates rectitude of conduct, and draws lessons of morality from the workman's square.
Logic used the demonstrative syllogism and the scientific induction, rhetoric used the enthymeme or rhetorical syllogism and the example or popular induction, poetic used the example alone. According to the renaissance developments of this last view, allegory was emphasized less and less as the example was felt to be more appropriate.
The debater who stated, without proving, that vast numbers of unskilled laborers were needed in the United States, and then urged this as a reason why no educational test should be applied to immigrants coming to this country, furnished an example of the same fallacy. The enthymeme constitutes a valid form of reasoning only when the suppressed premise is recognized as true.
Varchi says: Just as the logician uses for his means the noblest of all instruments, that is, demonstration or the demonstrative syllogism; so the dialectician, the topical syllogism; and the sophist, the sophistical, that is, the apparent and deceitful; the rhetorician, the enthymeme, and the poet, the example, which is the least worthy of all.
B. Lombardus, for instance, in his preface to Maggi's edition of Aristotle's Poetics , differentiates logic, rhetoric, and poetic by the same criteria. Logic, he says, proves by syllogism, and in this is different from both rhetoric and poetic, which use enthymeme and example as more appropriate to a popular audience, while poetic uses example almost entirely and scarcely ever enthymeme.
Gibbon, as advocatus diaboli, of course gives the doubt against Dietrich, by his usual enthymeme All men are likely to be rogues, ergo, Dietrich was one. Rather hard measure, when one remembers that the very men who tell the story are Dietrich's own enemies.
And that you may give the more credit to the validity of this opinion, consider how the cautelous and wily tempter did commemorate unto her, for an antecedent to his enthymeme, the prohibition which was made to taste it, as being desirous to infer from thence, It is forbidden thee; therefore thou shouldst eat of it, else thou canst not be a woman.
In practical argumentation it is not always necessary or desirable to express a deductive argument in full syllogistic form. One premise is frequently omitted; the syllogism thus shortened is called an enthymeme. The reasoning then takes some such form as, "This man will fail in business because he is incompetent."
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