Fortunately for us it is not necessary, in order to convey the point of our author's observations upon this head, to afflict our readers with any dissertation upon _mode_ or _figure_, or other logical technicalities. The first form or _figure_ of the syllogism (to which those who have not utterly forgotten their scholastic discipline will remember that all others may be reduced) is familiar to every one, and to this alone we shall have occasion to refer. "All men are mortal. A king is a man; Therefore a king is mortal." Who has not met--what young lady even, though but in her teens, has not encountered some such charming triplet as this, which looks so like verse at a distance, but, like some other compositions, approximates nothing the more on this account to poetry? Who has not learnt from such examples what is a _major_, what a _middle term_, and what the _minor_ or conclusion? As no one, in the present day, advises the adoption, in 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.