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In the meantime they surrender their understandings, with a facility found in no other party, to the meanest and most abject sophisms, provided those sophisms come before them disguised with the externals of demonstration. They do not seem to know that logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric, that a fallacy may lurk in a syllogism as well as in a metaphor.
The members of his preconceived syllogism seem to be somewhat as follows: the money-making and comfort-loving classes in England are essentially Philistine; the United States as a nation is given over to money-making; ergo, its inhabitants must all be Philistines.
On the syllogism in its various forms deductive logic has built up an imposing structure of rules and conclusions. In practice the value of the syllogism is largely indirect.
The dictum de omni et nullo, viz. that whatever can be affirmed or denied of a class can be affirmed or denied of everything included in the class, which is a true account generalised of the constituent parts of the syllogism in the first figure, was thought the basis of the syllogistic theory.
I have already spoken of some of the dangers to which reasoning is subject false analogy, faulty generalization of various kinds, and various sins against the rules of the syllogism. There are still a few general dangers to speak about.
If Hobbes was right; if no further account than this could be given of the import of propositions; no theory could be given but the commonly received one, of the combination of propositions in a syllogism.
There is an upright stock in a man's own heart that is trustier than any syllogism; and the eyes, and the sympathies, and appetites know a thing or two that have never yet been stated in controversy. Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and, like fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides.
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?
That which was knitted together on the 2d December, 1851, came apart on the 2d September, 1870; the carnage on the Boulevard Montmartre, and the capitulation of Sedan are, we maintain, the two parts of a syllogism; logic and justice have the same balance; it was Louis Bonaparte's dismal destiny to begin with the black flag of massacres and to end with the white flag of disgrace.
To establish, therefore, the ultimate conclusion, The substance before me is poisonous, requires a process, which, in order to be syllogistically expressed, stands in need of two syllogisms; and we have a Train of Reasoning. When, however, we thus add syllogism to syllogism, we are really adding induction to induction.
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