ppy to welcome so valuable an
addition; but with or without that addition, the 'System of Logic'
appears to us to present the most important advance in speculative
theory which the present century has witnessed. Either half of it, the
Ratiocinative or the Inductive, would have surpassed any previous work
on the same subject. The Inductive half discriminates and brings into
clear view, for the first time, those virtues of method which have
insensibly grown into habits among consummate scientific inquirers of
the post-Baconian age, as well as the fallacies by which some of these
authors have been misled. The Ratiocinative half, dealing with matters
which had already been well handled by Dutrieu and other scholastic
logicians, invests their dead though precise formalism with a real life
and application to the actual process of finding and proving truth. But
besides thus working each half up to perfection, Mr Mill has performed
the still more difficult task of overcoming the repugnance, apparently
an inveterate repugnance, between them, so as chemically to combine the
two into one homogeneous compound; thus presenting the problem of
Reasoned Truth, Inference, Proof, and Disproof, as one connected whole.
For ourselves, we still recollect the mist which was cleared from our
minds when we first read the 'System of Logic,' very soon after it was
published. We were familiar with the Syllogistic Logic in Burgersdicius
and Dutrieu; we were also familiar with examples of the best procedure
in modern inductive science; but the two streams flowed altogether apart
in our minds, like two parallel lines never joining nor approaching. The
irreconcilability of the two was at once removed, when we had read and
mastered the second and third chapters of the Second Book of the 'System
of Logic;' in which Mr Mill explains the functions and value of the
Syllogism, and the real import of its major premiss. This explanation
struck us at the time as one of the most profound and original efforts
of metaphysical thought that we had ever perused, and we see no reason
to retract that opinion now.[2] It appears all the more valuable when we
contrast it with what is said by Mr Mill's two contemporaries--Hamilton
and Whately: the first of whom retains the ancient theory of reasoning,
as being only a methodized transition from a whole to its parts, and
from the parts up to the whole--Induction being only this ascending part
of the process, whereby, after ha