A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I
John Stuart Mill · en
This doctrine, like that of Mr. De Morgan previously noticed, is a real
addition to the syllogistic theory; and has moreover this advantage over
Mr. De Morgan's "numerically definite Syllogism," that the forms it
supplies are really available as a test of the correctness of
ratiocination; since propositions in the common form may always have
their predicates quantified, and so be made amenable to Sir W.
Hamilton's rules. Considered however as a contribution to the _Science_
of Logic, that is, to the analysis of the mental processes concerned in
reasoning, the new doctrine appears to me, I confess, not merely
superfluous, but erroneous; since the form in which it clothes
propositions does not, like the ordinary form, express what is in the
mind of the speaker when he enunciates the proposition. I cannot think
Sir William Hamilton right in maintaining that the quantity of the
predicate is "always understood in thought." It is implied, but is not
present to the mind of the person who asserts the proposition. The
quantification of the predicate, instead of being a means of bringing
out more clearly the meaning of the proposition, actually leads the mind
out of the proposition, into another order of ideas. For when we say,
All men are mortal, we simply mean to affirm the attribute mortality of
all men; without thinking at all of the _class_ mortal in the concrete,
or troubling ourselves about whether it contains any other beings or
not. It is only for some artificial purpose that we ever look at the
proposition in the aspect in which the predicate also is thought of as a
class-name, either including the subject only, or the subject and
something more. (See above, p. 104.)
For a fuller discussion of this subject, see the twenty-second chapter
of a work already referred to, "An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's
Philosophy."
[5] Mr. Herbert Spencer (_Principles of Psychology_, pp. 125-7), though
his theory of the syllogism coincides with all that is essential of
mine, thinks it a logical fallacy to present the two axioms in the text,
as the regulating principles of syllogism. He charges me with falling
into the error pointed out by Archbishop Whately and myself, of
confounding exact likeness with literal identity; and maintains, that we
ought not to say that Socrates possesses _the same_ attributes which are
connoted by the word Man, but only that he possesses attributes _exactly
like_ them: according to which phraseology, Socrates, and the attribute
mortality, are not two things coexisting with the same thing, as the
axiom asserts, but two things coexisting with two different things.