"Syllogism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... physicist, Clerk Maxwell, joined about the time of my brother's departure. He records one statement of Maxwell's which has, I suspect, been modified in transmission. The old logicians, said Maxwell, recognised four forms of syllogism. Hamilton had raised the number to 7, but he had himself discovered 135. This, however, mattered little, as the great majority could not be expressed in human language, and even if expressed were not susceptible of ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed countenance, floods of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him to swallow, he is brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would have conveyed to him. His own experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively conscious of himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed to hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose his hold on the soberness ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... faculty of deducing and concluding would equally demand an explanation; and secondly, that there exists in fact no such intermediation by logical notions, such as those of cause and effect. It is the object itself, not the product of a syllogism, which is present to our consciousness. Or would we explain this supervention of the object to the sensation, by a productive faculty set in motion by an impulse; still the transition, into the percipient, of the object itself, from which ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... doubt exert their powerful influence against it, and support the Baconian method." This is the only work against logic which I can introduce, but it is a rare one, I mean in contents. I quote the author's idea of a syllogism: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... to struggle for its life amid a roaring shoreless waste of doubts and darkness? Oh, how grand, and clear, and logical it had all looked half an hour ago! And how irrefragably she had been deducing from it all, syllogism after syllogism, the non-existence of evil!—how it was but a lower form of good, one of the countless products of the one great all-pervading mind which could not err or change, only so strange and recondite ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... line of the syllogism? It must be this: That matter is not seen; that mortal mind cannot see without matter; and therefore that the whole function of material sight ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... song, too quick for a cry of protestation, and reached results amazing to his instincts, his tastes, and his training, not less rapidly and naturally than tremendous Ergo is shot forth from the clash of a syllogism. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... they will repress all vice and crime, reclaim all criminals, and give to the race generally a keen devotion to duty. A belief in a State where even this will be realized is deeply implanted in human nature, and Socialism itself might easily get a major premise from it. The syllogism would run thus: (1) A better State is bound to come. (2) It cannot come under the system of private capital. (3) Therefore that system must be abolished. So would we all say if the minor premise were true—"The good State is impossible under private ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... scholastic | period, and were transformed, or | rather extended, by Ramus and others | in the sixteenth century. Whereas in | Aristotle they had expressed the | initial conditions of any conclusive | syllogism, in Ramus they became the | conditions of every systematic art: | within a system, methodically | organized for the exhibiting of | knowledge, any statement must be | taken in its full extension, it must | join things which are necessarily | related and it must be equivalent to | a definition. ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... the subject. It should seem that the sonnet, like every other legitimate composition, ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end; in other words, to consist of three parts, like the three propositions of a syllogism, if such an illustration may be used. But the frame of metre adopted by the Italians does not accord with this view; and, as adhered to by them, it seems to be, if not arbitrary, best fitted to a division of the sense into two parts, of eight and six lines each. Milton, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... adjoining profile, and the other lifting up his eyebrows, and staring without sight, have the same misfortune that attended our first James—their tongues are rather too large. A figure in the left-hand corner has shut his eyes to think; and having, in his attempt to separate a syllogism, placed the forefinger of his right hand upon his forehead, has fallen asleep. The professor, a little above the book, endeavours by a projection of his under lip to assume importance; such characters are not uncommon: ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... of a shy man who gathers assurance from the intelligence of his listener: "Such researches into the rude and uncivilised past seem to me as essential to the comprehension of the present as the mastering of the major premiss to the understanding of a syllogism; and to those who reproach me for wasting my life over the chronicles of barbarian invasions and the records of monkish litigations, instead of contemplating the illustrious deeds of Greek sages and Roman heroes, I confidently reply that it is more useful ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... steps been omitted in the syllogisms? (Such as in a syllogism in enthymeme.) If so, test any such by filling out ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... for the fulminations of the Church; below are arms, drums, banners and flags, helmet and halberd, spear and sword and matchlock; opposite appears a front, between the devilish horns of which, marked "dilemma," is formed a sort of trophy, made up of a trident spear, labelled "syllogism," and bifurcated weapons, named "real and intentional," "spiritual and temporal," and one beyond whose long straight point, labelled "direct," there is another sharp, keen one, curving round and covering it, labelled "indirect"; last is the battle-field, with armies rushing together ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... a man's no horse; He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl, And that a lord may be an owl, A calf an alderman, a goose a justice, 75 And rooks Committee-men and Trustees. He'd run in debt by disputation, And pay with ratiocination. All this by syllogism, true In mood and figure, he would do. 80 For RHETORIC, he could not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope; And when he happen'd to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words,ready ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... to prove that an ignorant man is a fool; but the Chevalier de Grammont, who was thoroughly acquainted with Matta saw very clearly that he would send the logician to the devil before he should arrive at the conclusion of his syllogism: for which reason, interposing as soon as they began to raise their voices, he told them it was ridiculous to quarrel about an affair in itself so trivial, and treated the matter in a serious light, that it might make the greater impression. Thus supper terminated peaceably, owing to the care ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... for his preacher father rested upon the absolute rock of the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt, no uncertainty, no nuance, no on the one hand, on the other, no discursiveness, no yielding to the seductions of fancy, but a stern keeping of the faith of the syllogism; a thing is so or it is not so. Mr. Hughes never hesitates. He never says, "I must think about that." He has thought about it. Or he turns instantly to his Principle ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... 'direct comparison,' because the syllogism also may be described as a comparison between two terms: but in the syllogism the two terms are compared indirectly, or by means ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... own logic particularly, for it is generally wrong. We never know where we are to end, if once we begin following words or doctors. There is an upright stock in a man's own heart, that is trustier than any syllogism; and the eyes, and the sympathies and appetites, know a thing or two that have never yet been stated in controversy. Reasons are as plentiful as blackberries; and, like fisticuffs, they serve impartially with all sides. Doctrines do not stand or fall by their proofs, and are only logical ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for the better hampering, crippling, and muzzling of my antagonists. This is performed by the use of the far-famed syllogism. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... omelettes. In his seclusions the Vin de Bourgogne had its allotted hour, and there were appropriate moments for the Cotes du Rhone. With him Sauterne was to Medoc what Catullus was to Homer. He would sport with a syllogism in sipping St. Peray, but unravel an argument over Clos de Vougeot, and upset a theory in a torrent of Chambertin. Well had it been if the same quick sense of propriety had attended him in the peddling propensity to which I have formerly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... do right, it is felt, He must have given us some way to know what is right. The inner voice of conscience may be just such a God-given guide; therefore it is such a guide; therefore it is infallible. A natural piece of a priori reasoning, on a par with the Christian Scientist's syllogism: God is good; a good God would not permit evil to exist; therefore there is no evil. Unfortunately a priori reasoning has to yield to actual experience. Since we see that conscience is not infallible and evil does exist, there must be some ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... grasp mortal. And all these meritorious precursors were made weak by one cardinal defect, for which no gifts of intellectual acuteness could compensate. They had the scientific idea, but they lacked the social idea. They could have set opinion right about the efficacy of the syllogism, and the virtue of entities and quiddities. They could have taught Europe earlier than the Church allowed it to learn that the sun does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the sun. But they were wholly unfitted to deal with the prodigious difficulties ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... though powerful with a pen in his hand, in conversation he has not the art of managing his ideas, and is consequently hesitating and slow, and has the appearance of being always working in his mind propositions or a syllogism. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... apprehension. The doctrine that whatever is done so as to promote the glory of God is virtuous, is with him identified with the doctrine that whatever is done consciously in order to promote the glory of God is virtuous. The major premiss of the syllogism which proves an action to be virtuous must be actually present to the mind of the agent. This, in utilitarian phraseology, is to confound between the criterion and the motive. If it is, as Edwards says, the test of a virtuous action that it should ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... cannot probably be slid into the minor premise of the argument without some objection from the opposing counsel. However, this brings us at once to the main point, and the chapter called "The Organic Argument," which opens with this syllogism, is really the pith of the book, and would, perhaps, stand stronger without the other six hundred pages. In this chapter she shows the strength of a system-maker, in the rest the weaknesses of one; she feels obliged to apply her creed to everything, to illustrate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... reasoning which would place alcohol among the foods is very apparent when we put it in the form of a syllogism: All foods are oxidized in the body; alcohol is oxidized in the body; therefore alcohol is food. As logically we might say: 'All birds are bilaterally symmetrical; the earthworm is bilaterally symmetrical; therefore ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... ignored. We were supposed to be denied the faculty for putting two and two together; and, like the monkeys, who very sensibly refrain from speech lest they should be set to earn their livings, we were careful to conceal our capabilities for a simple syllogism. Thus we were rarely taken by surprise, and so were considered by our disappointed elders to be apathetic and to lack ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... with their own exuberant enthusiasm, that their main hope of making you think as they think, is to make you feel as they feel. The heart is their Aristotle; and if they cannot win you by a smile or melt you by a tear, they would think it labour lost to try a syllogism. Bunyan was neither French, nor Scotch, nor Irish. He embodied in his person, though greatly magnified, the average mind of England—playful, affectionate, downright. His intellectual power comes chiefly out in that homely self-commending sense—the brief business-like reasoning, which ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... conditions of moral obligation. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profound sensibility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of a kind of syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only the later shape into which an instinctive impulse threw itself by way of rational entrenchment. His sensibility caused Condorcet to abandon the barbarous pleasures of the chase, which had at first powerfully attracted ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... the succeeding acts ... the Latin syllogism seemed to give the most content.—Harvard Register, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall |
