The syllogism is defective because the idea of right or wrong is not simple nor ultimate, but complex, and ever subject to change from the influence of any new light presented to the mind. Nor is it true that we possess a distinct faculty to make us acquainted with each distinct quality; for, if so, the mind would be merely a very large bundle of faculties; and we should neither possess nor stand in need of any reasoning powers whatever, because the naked truth about every thing would always stand revealed before us by these faculties; which, we think, is not the fact.
In syllogistic argument, the first principles must be something that cannot be otherwise—unalterable—an eternal truth; “because these qualities cannot belong to the conclusion unless they belong to the premises, which are its causes.”
The syllogism will then stand thus:
It is not true our notion, or idea, of the moral quality of an action “is simple and ultimate, and distinct from any other idea or notion:”
It is not true that we have a distinct faculty to make us acquainted with the existence of all other distinct qualities:
Therefore, it is not true, nor self-evident, that we perceive the moral qualities of an action, or that we have the idea or notion of it, by the aid of a single distinct and separate faculty.
The “notion” advanced by Dr. Wayland, on this subject, appears to us so strange, that it would be difficult to conceive it to have been issued or promulgated by a schoolman, did we not know how often men, led by passion, some by prejudice, argue from false premises to which they take no heed, or, from a want of information, honestly mistake for truths.
LESSON V.
P. 206. “It” (slavery) “supposes that the Creator intended one human being to govern the physical, intellectual, and moral actions of as many other human beings as, by purchase, he can bring within his physical power, and that one human being may thus acquire a right to sacrifice the happiness of any number of other human beings, for the purpose of promoting his own.”