_Inquiry suggested._--But here the inquiry may arise. How happens it that, if the reasonings which conduct to the profoundest and most important truths, are but successive and continued analyses of our previous conceptions, we should have admitted those preceding truths and conceptions without a suspicion of the results involved in them? The reason is probably to be found, as Dr. Brown suggests, in the fact that in the process of generalizing we form classes and orders before distinguishing the minuter varieties; we are struck with some obvious points of agreement which lead us to give a common place and a common term to the objects of such resemblance, and this very circumstance of agreement which we perceive, may involve other circumstances which we do not at the time perceive, but which are disclosed on minute and subsequent attention. "It is as if we knew the situations and bearings of all the great cities in Europe, and could lay down, with most accurate precision, their longitude and latitude. To know thus much, is to know that a certain space must intervene between them, but it is not to know what that space contains. The process of reasoning, in the discoveries which it gives, is like that topographic inquiry which fills up the intervals of our map, placing here a forest, there a long extent of plains, and beyond them a still longer range of mountains, till we see, at last, innumerable objects connected with each other in that space which before presented to us only a few points of mutual bearing." _The Position further argued from the Nature of the Syllogism._--That all deductive reasoning, at least, is essentially what has now been described, an analytic process, is evident from the fact that the syllogism to which all such argument may be reduced, is based upon the admitted principle that whatever is true of the class, is true of all the individuals comprehended under it. Something is affirmed of a given class; an individual or individuals are then affirmed to belong to that class; and on the strength of the principle just stated, it is thereupon affirmed that what was predicated of the class is also true of the individual. Nothing can be plainer than that in this process we are working from the given whole to the comprehended parts, from the complex conception stated at the outset, to the truths that lie hidden and involved in it. In other words, it is a process of analysis which we thus perform, and as all reasoning, when scientifically stated, is brought under this form, it follows that all reasoning is essentially analytic in its nature.