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It is not a syllogism that turns the heart towards purification of life and aim; it is not the logically enchained propositions of a sorites, but the flash of illumination, the indefinable accent, that attracts masses of men to a new teacher and a high doctrine. The teasing ergoteur is always right, but he never leads nor improves nor inspires.
You cry out, he would say, we are a ruined, undone people. Why? he would ask, making use of the sorites or syllogism of Zeno and Chrysippus, without knowing it belonged to them. Why? why are we a ruined people? Because we are corrupted. Whence is it, dear Sir, that we are corrupted? Because we are needy; our poverty, and not our wills, consent. And wherefore, he would add, are we needy?
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.
The beliefs of an ordinary man are a complex structure of very subtle materials, all compacted into a whole, not by logic, but by lack of logic; not by syllogism or sorites, but by the vague. As a plain matter of fact and observation, we may all perceive that dissent from religious opinion less and less implies reproach in any serious sense.
'Stephen major, he once said to my brother, 'if you do not take more pains, how can you ever expect to write good longs and shorts? If you do not write good longs and shorts, how can you ever be a man of taste? If you are not a man of taste, how can you ever hope to be of use in the world? a sorites, says my brother, which must, he thinks, be somewhere defective.
By a solitary glance of his eye he could look a man into a dilemma, and practise a sorites, or a homemade syllogism, by the various shiftings of his countenance, as clearly as if he had risen to the full flight of his former bombast.
There is more deep love of humanity in this than in giving many alms, and it was not the less deep for being the product of impulse and sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites. Another scene in a café is worth referring to, because it shows in the same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it.
Kindly observe the neat gradations, the artistic sorites of Mpongwe lies. At 7.30 A.M. on the next day the loads were placed upon the crew's heads, and we made for the village, where the boat was still drawn up. The "monoxyle" was full of green-brown rain water, the oar-pins were represented by bits of stick, and all the furniture was wanting.
And yet this most lying sentence, a congeries or sorites of untruths, hastily penned by some dyspeptic scribe, who perhaps had barely dipped into the book, was at the moment circulating in every library of the kingdom, proclaiming our poor barrister a fool!
His teachings were not very extended, and formed a species of sorites in the style of the Koran, which, joined together, afterward composed those long discourses which were written by Matthew. No transition united these diverse pieces; generally, however, the same inspiration penetrated them and made them one. It was, above all, in parable that the master excelled.
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