CHAPTER I.
INFERENCE, OR REASONING IN GENERAL.
The preceding book treated, not of the proper subject of logic, viz. the nature of proof, but of assertion. Assertions (as, e.g. definitions) which relate to the meaning of words, are, since that is arbitrary, incapable of truth or falsehood, and therefore of proof or disproof. But there are assertions which are subjects for proof or disproof, viz. the propositions (the real, and not the verbal) whose subject is some fact of consciousness, or its hidden cause, about which is predicated, in the affirmative or negative, one of five things, viz. existence, order in place, order in time, causation, resemblance: in which, in short, it is asserted, that some given subject does or does not possess some attribute, or that two attributes, or sets of attributes, do or do not (constantly or occasionally) coexist.
A proposition not believed on its own evidence, but inferred from another, is said to be proved; and this process of inferring, whether syllogistically or not, is reasoning. But whenever, as in the deduction of a particular from a universal, or, in Conversion, the assertion in the new proposition is the same as the whole or part of the assertion in the original proposition, the inference is only apparent; and such processes, however useful for cultivating a habit of detecting quickly the concealed identity of assertions, are not reasoning.
Reasoning, or Inference, properly so called, is, 1, Induction, when a proposition is inferred from another, which, whether particular or general, is less general than itself; 2, Ratiocination, or Syllogism, when a proposition is inferred from others equally or more general; 3, a kind which falls under neither of these descriptions, yet is the basis of both.
CHAPTER II.
RATIOCINATION, OR SYLLOGISM.
The syllogistic figures are determined by the position of the middle term. There are four, or, if the fourth be classed under the first, three. But syllogisms in the other figures can be reduced to the first by conversion. Such reduction may not indeed be necessary, for different arguments are suited to different figures; the first figure, says Lambert, being best adapted to the discovery or proof of the properties of things; the second, of the distinctions between things; the third, of instances and exceptions; the fourth, to the discovery or exclusion of the different species of a genus. Still, as the premisses of the first figure, got by reduction, are really the same as the original ones, and as the only arguments of great scientific importance, viz. those in which the conclusion is a universal affirmative, can be proved in the first figure alone, it is best to hold that the two elementary forms of the first figure are the universal types, the one in affirmatives, the other in negatives, of all correct ratiocination.