This exclusion cannot meet with great difficulties. It is already almost an accomplished fact, and the only thing required is to render it explicit, decisive and coherent. But what is to be done with all that part of human thought called _syllogistic,_ consisting of judgements and reasonings based upon concepts? What is syllogistic? Is it to be looked down upon with contempt, as something useless, as has so often been done by the humanists in their reaction against scholasticism, by absolute idealism, by the enthusiastic admiration of our times for the methods of observation and experiment of the natural sciences?--Syllogistic, reasonings _forma,_ is not the discovery of truth; it is the art of expounding, debating, disputing with oneself and others. Proceeding from concepts already formed, from facts already observed, and appealing to the persistence of the true or of thought (such is the meaning of the laws of identity and contradiction), it infers consequences from those data, that is, it re-states what has already been discovered. Therefore, if it be an _idem per idem_ from the point of view of invention, it is most efficacious in teaching and in exposition. To reduce affirmations to a syllogistic form is a way of controlling one's own thought and of criticizing the thought of others. It is easy to laugh at syllogizers, but, if syllogistic has been born and persists, it must have good reasons of its own. Satire on it can concern only its abuses, such as the attempt to prove syllogistically questions of fact, observation and intuition, or the neglect of profound meditation and unprejudiced investigation of problems, in favour of syllogistic externality. And if so-called _mathematical Logic_ can sometimes aid us in our attempt to remember with ease, rapidly to control the results of our own thought, let us welcome this form of syllogistic also, anticipated by Leibnitz among others and again attempted by some in our own days. But precisely because syllogistic is the art of exposition and debate, its theory cannot hold the first place in a philosophical Logic, thus usurping that belonging to the doctrine of the concept, which is the central and dominating doctrine, to which everything logical in syllogistic is reducible, without leaving a residuum (relations of concepts, subordination, co-ordination, identification and so on). Nor must it ever be forgotten that concept and (logical) judgement and syllogism are not in the same line. The first alone is the logical fact, the second and third are the forms in which the first manifests itself. These, in so far as they are forms, can only be examined æsthetically (grammatically), and in so far as they possess logical content, only by ignoring the forms themselves and passing to the doctrine of the concept. [Sidenote: _Logical falsehood and æsthetic truth._]