disposition generally attributed to masters
in logic-fence,) to have rested satisfied with foiling his opponents
in their attack upon the exact position he had bound himself to
defend. He saves the syllogism; what becomes, in the controversy, of
poor human reason itself, is not his especial concern--it is as much
their business as his. You do not, more than I, he virtually says to
his opponents, intend to resign all reasoning whatever as a mere
inanity; I prove, for my part, that all reasoning is capable of being
put into a syllogistic form, and that your objection, if valid against
the syllogism, is equally valid against all ratiocination. You must
therefore either withdraw your objection altogether, or advance it at
your peril; the difficulty is of your making, you must solve it as you
can. Gentlemen, you must muzzle your own dog.

In this posture of affairs the author of the present work comes to the
rescue. He shall speak in his own words. But we must premise, that
although we do not intend to stint him in our quotation--though we
wish to give him all the sea-room possible; yet, for a _full_
development of his views, we must refer the reader to his volumes
themselves. There are some disquisitions which precede the part we are
about to quote from, which, in order to do complete justice to the
subject, ought to find a place here, as well as in the author's
work--but it is impossible.

"It is universally allowed, that a syllogism is vicious,
if there be any thing more in the conclusion than was
assumed in the premisses. But this is, in fact, to say,
that nothing ever was, or can be, proved by syllogism,
which was not known, or assumed to be known, before. Is
ratiocination, then, not a process of inference? And is
the syllogism, to which the word reasoning has so often
been represented to be exclusively appropriate, not
really entitled to be called reasoning at all? This
seems an inevitable consequence of the doctrine,
admitted by all writers on the subject, that a syllogism
can prove no more than is involved in the premisses. Yet
the acknowledgment so explicitly made, has not prevented
one set of writers from continuing to represent the
syllogism as the correct analysis of what the mind
actually performs in discovering and proving the larger
half of the truths, whether of science or of daily life,
which we believe; while those who have avoided