§ 3. Those who considered the _dictum de omni_ as the foundation of the syllogism, looked upon arguments in a manner corresponding to the erroneous view which Hobbes took of propositions. Because there are some propositions which are merely verbal, Hobbes, in order apparently that his definition might be rigorously universal, defined a proposition as if no propositions declared anything except the meaning of words. If Hobbes was right; if no further account than this could be given of the import of propositions; no theory could be given but the commonly received one, of the combination of propositions in a syllogism. If the minor premiss asserted nothing more than that something belongs to a class, and if the major premiss asserted nothing of that class except that it is included in another class, the conclusion would only be, that what was included in the lower class is included in the higher, and the result, therefore, nothing except that the classification is consistent with itself. But we have seen that it is no sufficient account of the meaning of a proposition, to say that it refers something to, or excludes something from, a class. Every proposition which conveys real information asserts a matter of fact, dependent on the laws of nature, and not on artificial classification. It asserts that a given object does or does not possess a given attribute; or it asserts that two attributes, or sets of attributes, do or do not (constantly or occasionally) coexist. Since such is the purport of all propositions which convey any real knowledge, and since ratiocination is a mode of acquiring real knowledge, any theory of ratiocination which does not recognise this import of propositions, cannot, we may be sure, be the true one. Applying this view of propositions to the two premisses of a syllogism, we obtain the following results. The major premiss, which, as already remarked, is always universal, asserts, that all things which have a certain attribute (or attributes) have or have not along with it, a certain other attribute (or attributes). The minor premiss asserts that the thing or set of things which are the subject of that premiss, have the first-mentioned attribute; and the conclusion is, that they have (or that they have not) the second. Thus in our former example, All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, the subject and predicate of the major premiss are connotative terms, denoting objects and connoting attributes. The assertion in the major premiss is, that along with one of the two sets of attributes, we always find the other: that the attributes connoted by “man” never exist unless conjoined with the attribute called mortality. The assertion in the minor premiss is that the individual named Socrates possesses the former attributes; and it is concluded that he possesses also the attribute mortality. Or if both the premisses are general propositions, as