No doubt, when this had happened, he might explain it, _ex post facto_ (if he knew logic), by alleging a hidden ‘ambiguity of the middle term’. We need not here discuss whether it is fair to treat as an inherent ambiguity what is really a juxtaposition of shades of meaning which were relative to different purposes and right in their original contexts, thus manufacturing a fallacy by selecting the premisses: the important thing is that the logician should be driven to admit that _any_ middle term may become ambiguous in this way when a syllogism is constructed, and that this completely stultifies his assumption that the _verbal_ identity of the middle guarantees the _real_ identity of the objects to which it refers.[387] If we call two things, which are and must be different if they are to be two, both ‘_M_’, we necessarily take the risk that the differences are irrelevant for the purpose of our argument. We may legitimately assume this, but if we do, our hypothesis has to be confirmed in fact; it is naïve to think that the verbal identity of the terms is quite enough. If, then, actual identity cannot be absolutely guaranteed, if there is _always_ a possibility that the same term when put into a syllogism and used in reasoning may develop an ambiguity and become effectively two, it is evident that no amount of formal validity will safeguard the truth of a conclusion, even when the premisses are in themselves severally true. The syllogistic form is convicted of _losing_ truth which it started from, and this is the very thing it boasted it could never do. Moreover, its coercive ‘cogency’ is exploded: whoever wishes to deny a ‘valid’ conclusion after admitting its premisses, has merely to suggest that by putting the premisses together a fatal ambiguity has been generated in the middle term.