We learn from Mill himself that he made an attempt about this time, while his mind was full of Herschel's Discourse, to connect a scientific method with the body of the Old Logic. But he could not make the junction to his satisfaction, and abandoned the attempt in despair. A little later, in 1837, upon the appearance of Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, he renewed it, and this time with happier results. Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences was published in 1840, but by that time Mill's system was definitely shaped.
It was, then, to Herschel and Whewell, but especially to the former, that Mill owed the raw materials of his Inductive Method. But why did he desire to concatenate this with the old Logic? Probably because he considered that this also had its uses for the student of society, the political thinker. He had inherited a respect for the old Logic from his father. But it was the point at which he sought to connect the new material with the old, the point of junction between the two, that determined the form of his system. We find the explanation of this in the history of the old Logic. It so happened that Whately's Logic was in the ascendant, and Whately's treatment of Induction gives the key to Mill's.
Towards the end of the first quarter of this century there was a great revival of the study of Logic at Oxford. The study had become mechanical, Aldrich's Compendium, an intelligent but exceedingly brief abstract of the Scholastic Logic, being the text-book beyond which no tutor cared to go. The man who seems to have given new life to the study was a tutor who subsequently became Bishop of Llandaff, Edward Copleston. The first public fruits of the revival begun by him was Whately's article on Logic in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, published as a separate book in 1827. Curiously enough, one of Whately's most active collaborators in the work was John Henry Newman, so that the common room of Oriel, which Mr. Froude describes as the centre from which emanated the High Church Movement, may also be said to have been the centre from which emanated the movement that culminated in the revolution of Logic.
The publication of Whately's Logic made a great stir. It was reviewed by Mill, then a young man of twenty-one, in the Westminster Review (1828), and by Hamilton, then forty-five years of age, in the Edinburgh (1833). There can be no doubt that it awakened Mill's interest in the subject. A society formed for the discussion of philosophical questions, and called the Speculative Society, met at Grote's house in 1825, and for some years following. Of this society young Mill was a member, and their continuous topic in 1827 was Logic, Whately's treatise being used as a sort of text-book.
It is remarkable that Mill's review of Whately, the outcome of these discussions, says very little about Induction. At that stage Mill's chief concern seems to have been to uphold the usefulness of Deductive Logic, and he even goes so far as to scoff at its eighteenth century detractors and their ambition to supersede it with a system of Induction. The most striking feature of the article is the brilliant defence of the Syllogism as an analysis of arguments to which I have already referred. He does not deny that an Inductive Logic might be useful as a supplement, but apparently he had not then formed the design of supplying such a supplement. When, however, that design seriously entered his mind, consequent upon the felt need of a method for social investigations, it was Whately's conception of Induction that he fell back upon. Historically viewed, his System of Logic was an attempt to connect the practical conditions of proof set forth in Herschel's discourse with the theoretic view of Induction propounded in Whately's. The tag by which he sought to attach the new material to the old system was the Inductive Enthymeme of the Schoolmen as interpreted by Whately.
Whately's interpretation—or misinterpretation—of this Enthymeme, and the conception of Induction underlying it, since it became Mill's ruling conception of Induction, and virtually the formative principle of his system, deserves particular attention.
"This, that and the other horned animal, ox, sheep, goat, ruminate; therefore, all horned animals ruminate."
The traditional view of this Enthymeme I have given in my chapter on Formal Induction (p. 238). It is that a Minor Premiss is suppressed: "This, that and the other constitute the whole class". This is the form of the Minor in Aristotle's Inductive Syllogism.
But, Whately argued, how do we know that this, that and the other—the individuals we have examined—constitute the whole class? Do we not assume that what belongs to the individuals examined belongs to the whole class? This tacit assumption, he contended, is really at the bottom of the Enthymeme, and its proper completion is to take this as the Major Premiss, with the enumeration of individuals as the Minor. Thus:—
What belongs to the individuals examined belongs to the whole class.