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Updated: June 21, 2025
But this fallacy is not a consciously devised one, but a perfectly natural illusion of the common reason of man. For, when a thing is given as conditioned, we presuppose in the major its conditions and their series, unperceived, as it were, and unseen; because this is nothing more than the logical requirement of complete and satisfactory premisses for a given conclusion.
There must be something very wrong going on in the instrument of logic, if it turns out such conclusions from such premisses. The student now enters at once upon several sciences physics, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, botany, pharmacy, therapeutics all these, the facts and the language and the laws of each, to be mastered in eighteen months.
It is a ratiocination; and when our knowledge of the causes is so perfect, as to extend to the exact numerical laws which they observe in producing their effects, the ratiocination may reckon among its premisses the theorems of the science of number, in the whole immense extent of that science.
Here the conclusion is true, and also the premisses; but the premisses are not definitions. They are propositions affirming that an idea existing in the mind, includes certain ideal elements. The truth of the conclusion follows from the existence of the psychological phenomenon called the idea of a dragon; and therefore still from the tacit assumption of a matter of fact.
Out of this definition we may carve the premisses of the following syllogism: A dragon is a thing which breathes flame: A dragon is a serpent: From which the conclusion is, Therefore some serpent or serpents breathe flame:—
We have but one way of thinking derived from what we know, and we incontinently apply it to things of which we can know nothing, and then we quarrel with the result, which is a mere reductio ad absurdum, showing how utterly false and meagre are our hypotheses, premisses, and so-called axioms.
If any one denies the conclusion notwithstanding his admission of the premisses, he is not involved in any direct and express contradiction until he is compelled to deny some premiss; and he can only be forced to do this by a reductio ad absurdum, that is, by another ratiocination: now, if he denies the validity of the reasoning process itself, he can no more be forced to assent to the second syllogism than to the first.
It may be the case, that upon the side of the conditions the series of premisses has a first or highest condition, or it may not possess this, and so be a parte priori unlimited; but it must, nevertheless, contain totality of conditions, even admitting that we never could succeed in completely apprehending it; and the whole series must be unconditionally true, if the conditioned, which is considered as an inference resulting from it, is to be held as true.
In other forms of so-called 'knowledge' we can sever the conclusion from its premisses, and the result can be given without the process, but with self-knowledge it is not so and no generation, or individual, can communicate it ready-made to another, but can only point the way and bid others help themselves.
But, now that the principles of deduction are better understood, it is rapidly reverting from experimental to deductive. Only it must not be supposed that the inductive part of the process is yet complete. Probably, few of the great generalisations fitted to be the premisses for future deductions will be found among truths now known.
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