Many years ago there appeared, principally owing to the initiative of Dr. F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford, a comic number of _Mind_. The idea was extraordinarily good, not so the execution. A German friend of Dr. Schiller was puzzled by the appearance of the advertisements, which were doubtfully humorous. However, by a syllogistic process, he acquired information which was new and useful to him, and thus incidentally refuted Mill. Presumably he started from the title of the magazine (_Mind!_), for a mark of exclamation seems nearly always in German to be a sign of an intended joke (including of course the mark after the politeness expressed in the first sentence of a private letter or a public address). There would be, then, the following syllogism: This is a book of would-be jokes (i.e. everything in this book is a would-be joke); This advertisement is in this book; Therefore, this advertisement is a would-be joke. Thus the syllogism may be almost as powerful an agent in the detection of humour as M. Bergson's criterion, to be described in a future chapter.[57] FOOTNOTES: [56] [The following passage is almost word for word the same as a passage on pp. 123-5 of Mr. Russell's _Problems of Philosophy_, first published in 1912, a year after Mr. R*ss*ll's death. It is easy hastily to conclude that Mr. Russell was indebted to Mr. R*ss*ll to a greater degree than is usually supposed. But an examination of the internal evidence leads us to another conclusion. The two texts, it will be found, differ only in the names of the German Emperor, the Crown Prince and the other personages being replaced, in the book of 1912, by those of Messrs. Brown, Jones, Smith, and Robinson. Now, Mr. Russell, in a new edition of his _Problems_ issued near the beginning of the European war and before the Russian revolution, substituted "the Emperor of Russia" for "the Emperor of China" of the first edition. Hence it seems quite likely that Mr. Russell, who has always shown a tendency to substitute existents for nonentities, wrote Mr. R*ss*ll's notes.--<sc>Ed.</sc>] [57] [See Chapter XLII.--ED.] CHAPTER XXII THE MORTALITY OF SOCRATES The mortality of Socrates is so often asserted in books on logic that it may be as well briefly to consider what it means. The phrase "Socrates is mortal" may be thus defined: "There is at least one instant _t_ such that _t_ has not to Socrates the one-many relation R which is the converse of the relation 'exists at,' and all instants following _t_ have not the relation R to Socrates, and there is at least one instant _t´_ such that neither _t´_ nor any instant preceding _t´_ has the relation R to Socrates."