"Syllogism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... practical turn of mind than Plato. While he introduced the formal syllogism in logic, he also introduced the inductive method. Perhaps Aristotle represented the wisest and most learned of the Greeks, because he advanced beyond the speculative philosophy to a point where he attempted to substantiate theory ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... denied the faculty for putting two and two together; and, like the monkeys, who very sensibly refrain from speech lest they should be set to earn their livings, we were careful to conceal our capabilities for a simple syllogism. Thus we were rarely taken by surprise, and so were considered by our disappointed elders to be apathetic and to lack ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... purpose, rationality, logic, account. Associated Words: dialectics, logic, syllogism, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... tissue-paper of former professions, nay, of recent pledges. And yet the skill of the managers had something greater still behind, in Massachusetts linked arm in arm with South Carolina. To be sure, a thoughtful mind might find something like a false syllogism in pairing off a Commonwealth whose greatest sin it has been to lead the van in freedom of opinion, and in those public methods of enlightenment which make it a safeguard of popular government, with an Oligarchy whose leadership ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... humanity that its history is chiefly written by third-rate men. 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. Gibbon was an inglorious failure as a ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... the provisions of those statutes? If the wisdom of Parliament had enacted on some occasion that Aldrich's Logic and the Elements of Euclid should be read in the Universities, would it follow that the rules of the syllogism and the axioms of geometry are to be interpreted by "the principles of construction which apply to statutes"? Or since geography is by statutory authority taught in our elementary schools, are we to infer that the world revolves on its axis subject ...
— The Acts of Uniformity - Their Scope and Effect • T.A. Lacey
... philosopher more easily satisfied than the mechanic? Evidently because the object of the mechanic was to mould things, whilst the object of the philosopher was only to mould words. Careful induction is not at all necessary to the making of a good syllogism. But it is indispensable to the making of a good shoe. Mechanics, therefore, have always been, as far as the range of their humble but useful callings extended, not anticipators but interpreters of nature. And when a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... verses is in the argument. The writer was not so ignorant or so dishonest as to affirm that nothing had been offered by the other side as proof; accordingly, his syllogism amounts to this: If your proposition were true, you could have given proof satisfactory to me; but this you have not done, therefore, your ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... considering them is subject to our will, they in their essential form are not subject to our will; for although we might will that heavy things should mount upwards naturally, they would not be able to ascend; and although we might will that the syllogism with false premisses should conclude with demonstration of the Truth, it could not so conclude; and although we might will that the house should stand as firmly when leaning forward as when upright, it could not be; since of those operations ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... scholastic | period, and were transformed, or | rather extended, by Ramus and others | in the sixteenth century. Whereas in | Aristotle they had expressed the | initial conditions of any conclusive | syllogism, in Ramus they became the | conditions of every systematic art: | within a system, methodically | organized for the exhibiting of | knowledge, any statement must be | taken in its full extension, ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... says to B, "You can't hit me, as I prove by this syllogism" (here followeth the syllogism), "and B, pour toute reponse, knocks A down such a whack that he rebounds into a sitting posture; and to him the man, the tree, the lamp-post and the fire-escape become not clearly ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... lecture was "Aristotle's Theory of the Syllogism, Compared with that of Hegel." As these two were the great masters of obscurantism, the lecture should have been, of course, as perfect a specimen as either of darkness and emptiness. Omitting the definitions of syllogisms, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... prove a mere younger brother, and not turn to any Profession, would you receive me, and supply me out of your stock, where you have such plenty? I have been so used to the delicate food of Parnassus, that I can never condescend to apply to the grosser studies of Alma Mater. Sober cloth of syllogism colour suits me ill; or, what's worse, I hate clothes that one must prove to be of no colour at all. If the Muses coelique vias et sidera monstrent, and qua vi maria alta lumescant. why accipiant: but 'tis thrashing, to study philosophy in the abstruse authors. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... order in thinking is what we are too apt to forget. 'Give us,' cry many, 'safety in our opinions, and let who will be logical. An Englishman's creed is compromise. His bete noir extravagance. We are not saved by syllogism.' Possibly not; but yet there can be no safety in an illogical position, and one's chances of snug quarters in eternity cannot surely be bettered by our believing at one and the same ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... horse; He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl, And that a lord may be an owl; A calf an alderman, a goose a justice, And rooks committee-men and trustees, He'd run in debt by disputation, And pay with ratiocination: All this by syllogism, true In mood and figure, he would do. For rhetoric, he could not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope; And when he happened to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to show why, And tell what rules he did ...
— English Satires • Various
... syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... eyebrows, and staring without sight, have the same misfortune that attended our first James—their tongues are rather too large. A figure in the left-hand corner has shut his eyes to think; and having, in his attempt to separate a syllogism, placed the forefinger of his right hand upon his forehead, has fallen asleep. The professor, a little above the book, endeavours by a projection of his under lip to assume importance; such characters are not uncommon: they are more solicitous to look wise, than to ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... child become expert in practical reckoning, until it can understand and explain at every step the rationale of the process,—who will not suffer a child to learn the multiplication table until it has mastered the metaphysics of the science of numbers, and can explain with the formalities of syllogism exactly how and why seven times nine ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... formal argument to prove that an ignorant man is a fool; but the Chevalier de Grammont, who was thoroughly acquainted with Matta saw very clearly that he would send the logician to the devil before he should arrive at the conclusion of his syllogism: for which reason, interposing as soon as they began to raise their voices, he told them it was ridiculous to quarrel about an affair in itself so trivial, and treated the matter in a serious light, that it might make the greater impression. Thus supper terminated peaceably, owing to the care ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... a heart, nevertheless, yearning after truth; and even full of faith, if that may be called faith which would instinctively lay hold upon a God and a hope of immortality; and, though beaten back once and again, by every form which the syllogism could assume, still keep ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... the reasoning which would place alcohol among the foods is very apparent when we put it in the form of a syllogism: All foods are oxidized in the body; alcohol is oxidized in the body; therefore alcohol is food. As logically we might say: 'All birds are bilaterally symmetrical; the earthworm is bilaterally symmetrical; ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... have believed" is the language of religion. For what is religion but a conscious identification of the self with One who is known to fulfil its needs and satisfy its aspirations? Agnosticism is thus directly destructive of it. We cannot, indeed, prove God as the conclusion of a syllogism, for He is the primary hypothesis of all proof. But, nevertheless, we cannot reach Him without knowledge. Emotion reveals no object, but is consequent upon the revelation of it; feeling yields no truth, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine: methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated, but maintained, by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation and Resurrection. I can answer all the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... it with the Rhetoric of Aristotle. It is undoubtedly genuine, perfect, and easily understood. But how does he there consider the oratorical art? As a sister of Logic: for as this produces conviction by its syllogism, so must Rhetoric in a kindred manner operate persuasion. This is about the same as to consider architecture simply as the art of building solidly and conveniently. This is, certainly, the first requisite, but a great deal more is still necessary ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... The Syllogism.—The logic of Induction, as that to which attention has been least devoted, which has been least reduced to systematic form, and which lies at the basis of all other modes of reasoning, constitutes the prominent subject of these volumes. Nevertheless, the old topic of logic proper, or deductive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... illusion. Everybody agrees that Great Britain has acted in a most blackguardly fashion towards Ireland; everybody assumes that blackguardism always succeeds in this world, therefore Ireland is a failure. The only flaw in this syllogism is that it is in direct conflict with every known fact. For the rest we have to thank or blame the sentimentalism of Mr Matthew Arnold. His proud but futile Celts who "went down to battle but always fell" have been mistaken for the Irish of actual history. The truth ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... syllogism. Now, because the minor proposition is constantly false, this does not affect the case; each man is right to fill up the minor with his own view, and essentially they do ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... side yielding that a paper before drawn up by Mr. Henderson should be agreed unto concerning the order to be kept in these meetings, &c. but Guthrie and his adherents opposing this, Mr. Rutherford, who was never much disposed to speak in judicatories, threw in this syllogism, "What the scriptures do warrant no assembly may discharge; but private meetings for religious exercises the scriptures do warrant, Mal. v. 16. Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another, &c. James v. 16. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... the last assertion disproves the first!" I replied; "but I retract, I will not, even for the sake of a syllogism, abuse my own sex; women are never envious except when men make them so, by casting down among them the ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... her white jacket fitting close to soft, yet scarcely rising breasts; her arms singularly strong, at perfect rest; her hands, exquisitely delicate. In her right, she holds a branching and leaf-bearing rod, (the syllogism); in her left, a scorpion with double sting, (the dilemma)—more generally, the powers of rational construction ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... intellectual candour finds itself associated with the emotional capriciousness of Sterne. Truly, he is always unexpected, and as often as not superficially inconsequent. To state the three parts of a syllogism is not in his way; and by implication he challenged half the major premises in vogue. His scorn of rough-and-ready standards, commonplaces, and what used to be called "the opinion of all sensible men" made him disrespectful to common sense. It was common sense once to believe that ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... be what they may. He went like the meteoric man with the mechanical legs in the song, too quick for a cry of protestation, and reached results amazing to his instincts, his tastes, and his training, not less rapidly and naturally than tremendous Ergo is shot forth from the clash of a syllogism. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the fulminations of the Church; below are arms, drums, banners and flags, helmet and halberd, spear and sword and matchlock; opposite appears a front, between the devilish horns of which, marked "dilemma," is formed a sort of trophy, made up of a trident spear, labelled "syllogism," and bifurcated weapons, named "real and intentional," "spiritual and temporal," and one beyond whose long straight point, labelled "direct," there is another sharp, keen one, curving round and covering it, labelled "indirect"; last is the battle-field, with armies rushing together in deadly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... conquer her in single combat; and Misothea's heart was only to bless the scholar who could overpower her by disputation. Amidst the fondest transports of courtship she could call for a definition of terms, and treated every argument with contempt that could not be reduced to regular syllogism. You may easily imagine, that I wished this courtship at an end; but when I desired her to shorten my torments, and fix the day of my felicity, we were led into a long conversation, in which Misothea endeavoured to demonstrate the folly of attributing choice and self-direction ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... essentials of photography are mechanical—the judgment and the experience of the man are only secondary. A photograph can never be really a work of art. You can put those statements in the form of a syllogism. ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... briefer negative, involving the principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as I have done for the Model. "Pious and painefull." Why has that excellent old phrase gone out of use? Simply because these good painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... They need not be irrelevant. The unconscious logic of association is often deeper and truer than any syllogism." ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... his preacher father rested upon the absolute rock of the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt, no uncertainty, no nuance, no on the one hand, on the other, no discursiveness, no yielding to the seductions of fancy, but a stern keeping of the faith of the syllogism; a thing is so or it is not so. Mr. Hughes never hesitates. He never says, "I must think about that." He has thought about it. Or he turns instantly to his ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... free choice to admit the validity of such a proposition—a merely arbitrary reception of it into the understanding. The assertorical speaks of logical reality or truth; as, for example, in a hypothetical syllogism, the antecedens presents itself in a problematical form in the major, in an assertorical form in the minor, and it shows that the proposition is in harmony with the laws of the understanding. The apodeictical proposition ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... grammars of logic are among the most useless furniture of a shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world.... Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis?" THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. Trevelyan's Life of Lord Macaulay. ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... 11. The Syllogism defective in that it cannot explain Mind in the abstract. Mill quoted and answered. This defect ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... selfishness retire, and listen for a while to believers—fanatics even. An act of faith: that is to say, first abolish jails, and then see what can be done with criminals! It is vain to beat about the bush; we must face the alternative. The syllogism runs thus: criminality is incompatible with true civilization—with a normal and secure society. Jails are a crime; society makes and warrants jails; therefore society is criminal. And the abolition of jails—repudiation both of the principle and of the concrete fact—is the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... build up motion, matter, repulsion, attraction, weight, and inertia. He then goes on to logically evolve the solar system. In doing this he widely diverges from the Newtonian theory; reaches by syllogism the conviction that the planets are the most perfect celestial bodies; and, not being able to bring the stars within his theory, says that they are mere formal existences and not living matter, and that as compared with the solar system they are as little admirable as a cutaneous eruption ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... invariable quest, as students of his opinions are soon aware, was for the axiomatic, for absolute principles, and in this inquiry he met the intellectual demands of a period whose first minds still owned the sway of the syllogism and still loved what Bacon called the "spacious liberty of generalities." In Marshall's method—as in the older syllogistic logic, whose phraseology begins to sound somewhat strange to twentieth century ears—the ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... honored for her surprising attainments. And so the poor child, with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding was quite equal to these peculiarly masculine studies. For a week or two she went on resolutely enough, though with an occasional ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... something is inferred); (2) sapak@sasattva (existence of the li@nga in those cases where the sadhya oc probandum existed), and (3) vipak@sasattva (its non-existence in all those places where the sadhya did not exist). The Buddhists admitted three propositions in a syllogism, e.g. The hill has fire, because it has smoke, like a kitchen ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... cited as applying to any particular case under consideration. This passing from the general law to the particular instance is deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning has a regular form called the syllogism. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... the more so, from the syllogism being so admirably formed. I should very much like to be enlightened on the subject. But, alas! I can no longer command my attention. There is such a confusion in my head of the words cash, money, services, capital, interest, that, really, I hardly ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... walked on with new elation. The undesired but authoritative sanction of public recognition had been given his devotion. Gerald was not considered. Somebody had observed; so the affair must be noticeable to others. And with another tremendous leap of the heart Bobby welcomed the daring syllogism that, since the somebody of the impertinent chalk had fathomed his devotion to her, might it not be possible, oh, remotely inconceivably possible, of course, that the unknown had equally marked some slight interest on her part for him? The board fence, the maple-shaded walk, ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... morality would not only take the very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the curse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; she is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been feeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us. Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in Nathaniel Greene, and makes a general of him, to confute ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the application when voiced comes at times with a bang sufficient to take one's breath away. Given this and that, however, an application is unavoidable. As lief set fire behind powder in a gun and expect there will be no report. A mite of five, thus, will on occasion utter a syllogism that would not discredit a professor of logic, or will put a question to which a whole college of theologians might not venture an answer. A little lady of my acquaintance who had not yet seen her fourth birthday, was one morning told by her mother that she could not get out ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... mediately or immediately to the principles one is agreed upon' (which is done by means of the syllogisms of him who makes objections); 'whether the premisses of a proof (advanced by the opposer) 'are true; whether the conclusion is properly drawn; whether a four-term Syllogism has been employed; whether some aphorism of the chapter de oppositis or de sophisticis elenchis, etc., has not been violated.' (It is enough, putting it briefly, to deny some premiss or some conclusion, or finally to explain or get explained some ambiguous term.) 'One comes off victorious ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... so that the eminent Spanish theologian Tostatus, even as late as the age of Columbus, felt called upon to protest against it as "unsafe." He had shaped the old missile of St. Augustine into the following syllogism: "The apostles were commanded to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to every creature; they did not go to any such part of the world as the antipodes; they did not preach to any creatures ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reviews, pamphlets, &c., but though powerful with a pen in his hand, in conversation he has not the art of managing his ideas, and is consequently hesitating and slow, and has the appearance of being always working in his mind propositions or a syllogism. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... knowledge were bringing forth the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, were not so blinded by the white light of vision as to disown the Greeks. They made the Ethics of Aristotle the four-square walls of the city of God; they expressed the mysteries of the Undivided Three in terms of the Syllogism. Thus they refused to cut themselves off from the aristocracy of human genius. They laid hands—but not violent hands—on the heritage of the ages. No philosophers have ever equalled their bold and lowly-minded profession ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... might have thought too much about his handsome partner, and then gone home and dreamed about her, which is always dangerous, and waked up thinking of her still, and then begun to be deeply interested in her studies, and so on, through the whole syllogism which ends in Nature's supreme quod erat demonstrandum. What was there to distract him or disturb him? He did not know,—but there was something. This sumptuous creature, this Eve just within the gate of an untried Paradise, untutored in the ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I do not think any such syllogism has ever occurred to her as, Lover's look conscious; Phoebe looks conscious; therefore Phoebe is in love! It is defective in the major, you see, so it ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... such as the above is called a syllogism. It consists of a major premise (A), a minor premise (B), ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... life by evoking its emotions to a consciousness of terror and pity, laughter and love. Its purpose is not primarily to rouse the intellect to thought or call the will to action. In so far as the drama uplifts and edifies the audience, it does so, not by precept or by syllogism, but by emotional suggestion. It teaches not by what it says, but rather by what it deeply and mysteriously is. It convinces not by its arguments, but by ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... talks my friends went away sad. The conclusion was too cruel. It had all the cold logic of a syllogism (like that almost brutal form of argument so much admired in the Paraphernalia of ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... is for the same faculty to form a syllogism, and to draw the conclusion. But, in practical matters, it is the reason that forms syllogisms. Since therefore choice is a kind of conclusion in practical matters, as stated in Ethic. vii, 3, it seems that it is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... are mending. Broken windows are repaired; lost revenues are recovered; and the sons of Crispin have evacuated chambers once more consecrated to syntax and the syllogism. Through these spacious courts we recognize the progress of the man who has accomplished the arduous restoration. Tall, and in the prime of life, with cocked-hat and powdered hair, with lawn tops to his morocco boots, and with ribbons luxuriant at his knee, there is nothing to mark ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... essential, to be repeated to him. After Logic he directs him to the study of Physics, which he would not have carried too far; and recommends some plain and short abridgement: he could think of none at that time but Jacchaeus. He is of opinion, that as in Logic the rules of syllogism are chiefly to be attended to, so in Physics the enquiry into the nature and functions of the soul is of most importance. After Physics he advises him to proceed to Metaphysics, of which he might get some notion from Timplerus' book, ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... have verbal involutions, for the better hampering, crippling, and muzzling of my antagonists. This is performed by the use of the far-famed syllogism. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... plainly the demoralizing tendency of syllogistic logic, they will no doubt exert their powerful influence against it, and support the Baconian method." This is the only work against logic which I can introduce, but it is a rare one, I mean in contents. I quote the author's idea of a syllogism: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... avow Secularism? If 'Secularism is true, how is it that so many of the finest and highest minds take refuge from it—a treacherous refuge, I allow—in Ultramontanism? There is something in this more than a mere defective syllogism—more than an insufficient presentation of the evidence. Truth, in the widest sense, is that which is in accordance with the laws and conditions of human nature. But where beliefs are so directly antithetical as they are here, the repugnance and resistance ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... 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 ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... intelligence. Here there can be neither more nor less. Important or unimportant gives no ground of difference; and the number of the writers as little. The secretaries may have been many—the historian was one and the same, and he infallible. This is the MINOR of the syllogism, and if it could be proved, the conclusion would be at least plausible; and there would be but one objection to the procedure, namely, its uselessness. For if it had been proved already, what need of proving ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a general form, would produce but a slight impression. But when applied to any particular order of facts, to any particular article of industry, to any one class of labor, it is extremely specious, because it is a syllogism which is not false, but incomplete. And what is true in a syllogism always necessarily presents itself to the mind, while the incomplete, which is a negative quality, an unknown value, is ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... so scattered into parts, that it can scarce be united into a syllogism; yet, in obedience to him, I will abbreviate, and comprehend as much of it as I can in few words, that my answer to it may be more perspicuous. I conceive his meaning to be what follows, as to the unity of place: (if I mistake, I beg ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... were formed into the first proposition of an hypothetical syllogism, I defy the man born in Ireland, who is now in the fairest way of getting a collectorship, or a cornet's post, to give a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... probatur,) that is, the second proposition in the preceding syllogism. It will be perceived that the arguments of the author are constructed according to the rules of the Aristotelian logic. A familiar acquaintance with this mode of reasoning continued to be cultivated, at this time, by all who wished to excel in public ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... was far too wise to follow it up then. The weaker sex, as a rule, are acute but not very close reasoners; they mix up their majors and minors with a charming recklessness; and, if innocent of nothing else, are generally guiltless of a syllogism. It follows that, in the course of an argument, it is easy enough to entangle them in their talk. When such a chance occurs, don't come down on your pretty antagonist with "I thought you said so and so," but be politic as ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... the divine Scriptures recklessly and without fear; they have set aside the rule of ancient faith; and Christ they have not known, not endeavoring to learn what the divine Scriptures declare, but striving laboriously after any form of syllogism which may be found to suit their impiety. And if any one brings before them a passage of divine Scripture, they see whether a conjunctive or a disjunctive form of syllogism can be made from it. And as being of the earth and speaking of the earth and as ignorant of ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... originally to have consisted of four books, of which but two remain.[206] In the first of these he considers rhetorical invention generally, supplies commonplaces for the six parts of an oration promiscuously, and gives a full analysis of the two forms of argument, syllogism and induction. In the second book he applies these rules particularly to the three subject-matters of rhetoric, the deliberative, the judicial, and the descriptive, dwelling principally on the judicial, as affording the most ample field for discussion. This treatise ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... supreme sweetness, not that he is a channel through which God's tenderness runs down into our hearts. No; he sees no such spiritual proof as this, but a merely logical one, expressed almost in the form of a syllogism. Major proposition—"No man can work miracles without God's help." Minor proposition—"Jesus works miracles." Conclusion—"Therefore Jesus has ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the line of the syllogism? It must be this: That matter is not seen; that mortal mind cannot see without matter; and therefore that the whole function of material sight is ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... and in the pleasures of comprehension." Because rationality itself is a wilful exercise one hears Hymns to Reason and sees it personified as an extremely dignified goddess. For all the light and shadow of sentiment and passion play even about the syllogism. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... plus his experience of feeling, and minus the ingenuousness of his self-knowledge. He took instead to self-mystification, trying to persuade himself that because he could not have Alison, Alison was not worth having. After that, it was but a step to palming off on his reason the monstrous syllogism that because Alison was unworthy, and Alison was a woman, therefore all women were unworthy. Except for purely literary purposes, he had done with the sex. He became if anything more intently, more remorselessly analytical, more absolutely the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... states of mind, and to certain phases of opinion, but as it seems to me, far deeper than the region of logical understanding, and far more conclusive than anything that can be cast into the form of a syllogism, is the experience of a soul which knows that God is its, and that it is God's. 'I think, therefore, I am,' said the philosopher. 'I have God; therefore I shall always be,' says the Christian. Whilst that evidence is available only for himself, it is absolutely conclusive for himself. And ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... educed only from expressed Thought, but the Law is not objective thought, any more than the idea of the sculptor is marble, or the conception of the painter is paint. The simplest expression of thought is not the syllogism but the logical proposition. Now, it is plain that if the proposition is the formulation—the material representative of thought—if we study it as we study other natural symbols, we will find in it the fundamental Law of Thinking, and ultimately ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... it to Vint: All women love babies; babies do nothing but cry; therefore, women love crying; there couldn't be a syllogism ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl, And that a lord may be an owl, A calf an alderman, a goose a justice, 75 And rooks Committee-men and Trustees. He'd run in debt by disputation, And pay with ratiocination. All this by syllogism, true In mood and figure, he would do. 80 For RHETORIC, he could not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope; And when he happen'd to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words,ready to show ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... logic," rejoined Mauleverer, "that syllogism is clear enough; and though I believe a girl may cling now and then to the memory of a departed lover, I do not think she will when the memory is allied with shame. Love is nothing more than vanity ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... go on to point out whither this idea of uniqueness tends. I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... satisfied with what it may accidentally glean in this harvest-field; that, in the rapture experienced in the sensuous apperception of its beauty, lies the highest phase of art-sensibility. Therefore, concludes the syllogism, it matters nothing as to the character of the libretto or poem to whose words the music is arranged, so long as the dramatic framework suffices as a support for the flowery festoons of song, which drape its ugliness and beguile attention by the fascinations of bloom ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... is the next degree, if not the very thing. For what else is madness than for a man to be out of his wits? But to let them see how they are clean out of the way, with the Muses' good favor we'll take this syllogism in pieces. Subtly argued, I must confess, but as Socrates in Plato teaches us how by splitting one Venus and one Cupid to make two of either, in like manner should those logicians have done and distinguished madness from madness, if at least ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... weapon of attack and defense for this master fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than any syllogism; sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplomatist's pinch of snuff, an excuse for pausing while he studied his adversary or made up his own mind; sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul, he invented ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... he, "I am well pleased it should be so; you are poor; you will have more time to devote to my malady, and a greater interest in curing me. What think you of the syllogism?" ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... leaning forward with flushed faces and darting hands, in all the heat of argument. Never had he heard such jargon of scholastic philosophy, such fine-drawn distinctions, such cross-fire of major and minor, proposition, syllogism, attack and refutation. Question clattered upon answer like a sword on a buckler. The ancients, the fathers of the Church, the moderns, the Scriptures, the Arabians, were each sent hurtling against the other, while the rain still dripped and the dark ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that makes it to be, the reason of or for it is the explanation given by the human mind; but reason is, in popular language, often used as equivalent to cause, especially in the sense of final cause. In the statement of any reasoning, the argument may be an entire syllogism, or the premises considered together apart from the conclusion, or in logical strictness the middle term only by which the particular conclusion is connected with the general statement. But when the reasoning is not in strict logical form, the middle term following the conclusion ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... out the old Formula and Law Phraseology, so that it may cover the new, contradictory, entirely uncoverable Thing? Whereby the poor Formula does but crack, and one's honesty along with it! The thing that is palpably hot, burning, wilt thou prove it, by syllogism, to be a freezing-mixture? This of stretching out Formulas till they crack is, especially in times of swift change, one of the sorrowfullest ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... flourishing and contented under its own. They adopted the conclusion that all English enactments are right; but the system of municipal law in Scotland is not English, therefore it is wrong. Under sanction of this syllogism, our rulers have indulged and encouraged a spirit of experiment and innovation at our expense, which they resist obstinately when it is to be carried through ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... to theology the epistemological principles and criteria furnished by philosophy to perceive that the Catholic dogma is as reasonable as the Protestant theory is absurd. The Protestant syllogism: "I know with a certainty of faith that the penitent sinner who does his share, is justified through the grace of Christ; now, I, who am a penitent sinner, know with a certainty of faith that I have done my share; therefore, I know with a certainty of faith that ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... mistaken about its importance. A warning example may be found in the inference which is made from the sentence given a criminal because of "identical motive.'' The Petitio, the Ignorantia, etc., belong to this class. The purely logical mistakes or mistakes of syllogism do not ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... knowledge. The metaphysics of infinite, or finite, spirit, have too often been enlisted in the service of superstition. But the human faculties are fortified by the art and practice of dialectics; the ten predicaments of Aristotle collect and methodize our ideas, [59] and his syllogism is the keenest weapon of dispute. It was dexterously wielded in the schools of the Saracens, but as it is more effectual for the detection of error than for the investigation of truth, it is not surprising that new generations of masters and disciples should ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... organization, but founded on convention only. I lament this the more, as he is unquestionably the ablest writer living, on abstract subjects. Assuming the fact, that the earth has been created in time, and consequently the dogma of final causes, we yield, of course, to this short syllogism. Man was created for social intercourse; but social intercourse cannot be maintained without a sense of justice; then man must have been created with a sense of justice. There is an error into which most of the speculators on government ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Me.(494) Nature has providentially given us a powerful antidote to eloquence, or the criminal that has the best advocate would escape. But, when rhetoric. and logic stagger my lords the judges, in steps prejudice, and, without one argument that will make a syllogism, confutes Messrs. Demosthenes, Tully, and Hardinge, and makes their lordships see as clearly as any old woman in England, that belief is a much better rule Of faith than demonstration. This is Just my case: I do ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... hand—his faintly wheezy tones bleating triumphantly out at the end of a passage from "The Ring and the Book," as he lowered his volume and bent beaming towards them all, his right eye still blocked, for response. Miss Donne, her skimpy skirt powdered with chalk, explaining a syllogism from the blackboard, turning quietly to them, her face all aglow, her chalky hands gently pressed together, "Do you see? Does anyone see?" Monsieur, spoiling them, sharpening their pencils, letting them ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... some greyhead wearing many gold rings on his fingers, and he will shake his head and say: "Hear, my child. It is right that you should philosophize; but you ought to have some brains also; all this that you are doing is silly. You learn the syllogism from philosophers; but you know how to act better than philosophers do." Man why then do you blame me, if I know? What shall I say to this slave? If I am silent, he will burst. I must speak in this way: "Excuse me, as you would excuse lovers; I am not my own master; ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... helped by the most irrefutable syllogism concerning the peculiar nature and separate exclusive divinity of its great religious Teacher. But lives will be lifted everywhere in the measure that they see the man in Him who taught us of God. For men need ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... occasions when thought is terribly and comprehensively sudden: the rudimentary processes of reasoning, by analogy and syllogism, so slow and so laborious, turn to divination. We have an occult vision, immediate and complete, into the obscure manner of life, and crowd an infinity of discovery into a very few seconds. It was so with Philip Rainham now. Lightmark had scarcely closed the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... student—the student of the thirteenth century—struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste and the mannerisms ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... arrogance of their Creed was revolting. This man Bernhardi, and Treitschke, and Nietzsche, and the rest of them lived, and acted on one assumption. They compressed their thoughts into a syllogism: ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... and completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point. By this the sonnet is distinguished from the epigram. In the epigram the conclusion is everything; all that goes before it is only there for the sake of the surprise of the end, or denouement, as in a logical syllogism the premisses are nothing but as they necessitate the conclusion. In the sonnet the emphasis is nearly, but not quite, equally distributed, there being a slight swell, or rise, about its middle. The sonnet must not advance by progressive climax, or end abruptly; ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry |
