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Updated: June 21, 2025
From his hand comes the first hint of arbitrary power; the first small blot of a long dark stain of absolutism, which was to darken and deepen through centuries of tyranny and shame. But to plead the divine right of kings, in a country which has thrown off its allegiance to the pope, is to assert the conclusion of a syllogism, the major and minor premiss of which are both denied by the assertor.
I also look at the question abstractly from the side of the empirical ego, and correctly deduce a corresponding conclusion. Only then, you see, the terms of the minor premiss are luckily reversed. 'Well, my dear fellow, said the curate, 'the fact about the tea-things is this. You eat up your income, devour your substance in riotous living; I prefer to feast my eyes and ears to my grosser senses.
Even the scientific Bentham School based a general theory on one premiss, viz. that men's actions are always determined by their interests, meaning probably thereby, that the bulk of the conduct of any succession, or of the majority of any body of men, is determined by their private or worldly interests.
This resolves itself into the question, what is the nature of the minor premiss, and in what manner it contributes to establish the conclusion: for as to the major, we now fully understand, that the place which it nominally occupies in our reasonings, properly belongs to the individual facts or observations of which it expresses the general result; the major itself being no real part of the argument, but an intermediate halting place for the mind, interposed by an artifice of language between the real premisses and the conclusion, by way of a security, which it is in a most material degree, for the correctness of the process.
If this be actually done, the principle which we are now considering, that of the uniformity of the course of nature, will appear as the ultimate major premiss of all inductions, and will, therefore, stand to all inductions in the relation in which, as has been shown at so much length, the major proposition of a syllogism always stands to the conclusion; not contributing at all to prove it, but being a necessary condition of its being proved; since no conclusion is proved for which there cannot be found a true major premiss.
Syllogisms are divided by some logicians into three figures, by others into four, according to the position of the middleterm, which may either be the subject in both premisses, the predicate in both, or the subject in one and the predicate in the other. The most common case is that in which the middleterm is the subject of the major premiss and the predicate of the minor.
The argument is somewhat surprising in an eighteenth century thinker like Hume, but it did not prevent him from recognising the superiority of modern to ancient civilisation. This superiority forms indeed the minor premiss in the general argument by which he confuted the commonly received opinion as to the populousness of ancient nations.
When we say that all men are mortal, we make an assertion reaching beyond the sphere of our knowledge of individual cases; and when a new individual, Socrates, is brought within the field of our knowledge by means of the minor premiss, we learn that we have already made an assertion respecting Socrates without knowing it: our own general formula is, to that extent, for the first time interpreted to us.
Nor is it, in any sense, a premiss of science: it is an empirical generalisation from a number of laws which are themselves empirical generalisations. The law makes no difference between past and future: the future "determines" the past in exactly the same sense in which the past "determines" the future.
XXXII. And with reference to this kind of persuasion, it appears to me desirable to lay down a rule, in the first place, that the argument which we bring forward by way of simile, should be such that it is impossible to avoid admitting it. For the premiss on account of which we intend to demand that that point which is doubtful shall be conceded to us, ought not to be doubtful itself.
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