Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And those who merit them can bestow these merits upon others." Stop, reader; you have not the whole of this sorites. These are the real questions regarding these matters; if consciences are not rightly instructed concerning these, they can have no certain comfort.
This was happily expressed by him who had heard of a text brought for proof of the Trinity, which in an ancient manuscript was differently read; he thereupon immediately took the hint, and by a sudden deduction of a long sorites, most logically concluded; "Why, if it be as you say, I may safely whore and drink on, and defy the parson."
The next day my verse-making faculties returned to me, and I proceeded successfully, till my poem grew so long, and in Wordsworth's opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume, as disproportionate both in size and merit, and as discordant in its character. In the mean time I had gotten myself entangled in the old sorites of the old sophist, procrastination.
But what if I show you that I am both the beginning and end of this so great good also? Nor shall I go about to prove it by fallacies, sorites, dilemmas, or other the like subtleties of logicians, but after my blunt way point out the thing as clearly as it were with my finger.
They illustrate what I once wrote of as the 'will to believe. In some of my lectures at Harvard I have spoken of what I call the 'faith-ladder, as something quite different from the sorites of the logic-books, yet seeming to have an analogous form. I think you will quickly recognize in yourselves, as I describe it, the mental process to which I give this name.
I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams.
The omnipotence of governments to mould the destinies of peoples, the possibility of the creation of enlightened governments, and the indefinite progress of enlightenment all articles of his belief were the terms of an argument of the sorites form, which it was a simple matter to develop in his brief treatise. But we must not do him injustice.
As to the argument contained in the logical Sorites which I have been drawing out, I anticipated just now what I should say to it in reply.
Out of the little logic I had picked up at Oxford I tried to explain to him the process known as sorites; and suggested that Captain Pomery, while tolerant of "I attempt from Love's sickness to fly" up to the hundredth repetition, might conceivably show signs of tiring at the hundred-and-first.
Take for instance the syllogism wherewith Zeno advocated the cause of temperance One does not commit a secret to a man who is drunk. One does commit a secret to a good man. A good man will not get drunk. The chain argument which we wrongly call the Sorites was also a favorite resource with the Stoics.
Word Of The Day