United States or Egypt ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And, in truth, in persons of mean and low condition, it cannot perform its true and genuine office, being naturally more prompt to assist in the conduct of war, in the government of peoples, in negotiating the leagues and friendships of princes and foreign nations, than in forming a syllogism in logic, in pleading a process in law, or in prescribing a dose of pills in physic.
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:—
The realizing activity of which we have spoken is the middle term of the syllogism, one of whose extremes is the universal essence, the Idea, which reposes in the penetralia of Spirit; and the other, the complex of external things objective matter. That activity is the medium by which the universal latent principle is translated into the domain of objectivity.
The first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record and philosophise; his impulse is to act; life, to him, is an adventure, not a syllogism or an autopsy. Thus the writing of history is left to college professors, moralists, theorists, dunder-heads. Few historians, great or small, have shown any capacity for the affairs they presume to describe and interpret.
She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel Clare's remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him use when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of thinking aloud with her at his side. In delivering it she gave also Clare's accent and manner with reverential faithfulness.
There remain, therefore, as the only class of fallacies having properly their seat in deduction, those in which the premises of the ratiocination do not bear out its conclusion; the various cases, in short, of vicious argumentation, provided against by the rules of the syllogism. We shall call these, Fallacies of Ratiocination.
The proposition, Every poet is a man of genius, is confessedly æquipollent with “No one who is not a man of genius is a poet,” and in this the petitio principii, as regards A B, is no longer implied, but express, as in an ordinary syllogism of the first figure.
And since a large portion of our knowledge is thus acquired, logicians have persisted in representing the syllogism as a process of inference or proof; although none of them has cleared up the difficulty which arises from the inconsistency between that assertion, and the principle, that if there be anything in the conclusion which was not already asserted in the premisses, the argument is vicious.
He created an insect beyond belief, as one may say, by the force of logic; and such absolute confidence had he in his own syllogism that he declared, "If such great moths were to become extinct in Madagascar, assuredly this Angræcum would become extinct." I am not aware that Darwin's fine argument has yet been clinched by the discovery of that insect. But cavil has ceased.
It is certainly not my intention to defend the old syllogism: Every arrangement implies an ordaining intelligence; there is wonderful order in the world; then the world is the work of an intelligence. This syllogism, discussed so widely since the days of Job and Moses, very far from being a solution, is but the statement of the problem which it assumes to solve.
Word Of The Day