our
controversies, of the syllogistic forms of reasoning, it is evident
that the value of the syllogism must consist, not in its practical
use, but in the accurate type which it affords of the process of
reasoning, and in the analysis of that process which a full
understanding of it renders necessary. Such an analysis supplies, it
is said, an excellent discipline to the mind, whilst an occasional
reference to the form of the syllogism, as a type or model of
reasoning, insures a steadiness and pertinency of argument. But is the
syllogism, it has been asked, this veritable type of our reasoning?
Has the analysis which would explain it to be such, been accurately
conducted?

Several of our northern metaphysicians, it is well known--as, for
example, Dr Campbell and Dugald Stewart--have laid rude hands upon the
syllogism. They have pronounced it to be a vain invention. They have
argued that no addition of knowledge, no advancement in the
acquisition of truth, no new conviction, can possibly be obtained
through its means, inasmuch as no syllogism can contain any thing in
the conclusion which was not admitted, at the outset, in the first or
major proposition. The syllogism always, say they, involves a _petitio
principii_. Admit the major, and the business is palpably at an end;
the rest is a mere circle, in which one cannot advance, but may get
giddy by the revolution. According to the exposition of logicians
themselves, we simply obtain by our syllogism, the privilege of saying
that, in the _minor_, of some individual of a class, which we had
said, in the _major_, already of the whole class.

Archbishop Whately, our most distinguished expositor and defender of
the Aristotelian logic, meets these antagonists with the resolute
assertion, that their objection to the syllogism is equally valid
against _all reasoning whatever_. He does not deny, but, on the
contrary, in common with every logician, distinctly states, that
whatever is concluded in the minor, must have been previously admitted
in the major, for in this lies the very force and compulsion of the
argument; but he maintains that the syllogism is the true type of all
our reasoning, and that therefore to all our reasoning, the very same
vice, the very same _petitio principii_, may be imputed. The
syllogism, he contends, (and apparently with complete success,) is but
a statement in full of what takes place mentally even in the most
rapid acts of reasoning. We often suppr