logicians, invests their dead though precise formalism with a real life
and application to the actual process of finding and proving truth. But
besides thus working each half up to perfection, Mr Mill has performed
the still more difficult task of overcoming the repugnance, apparently
an inveterate repugnance, between them, so as chemically to combine the
two into one homogeneous compound; thus presenting the problem of
Reasoned Truth, Inference, Proof, and Disproof, as one connected whole.
For ourselves, we still recollect the mist which was cleared from our
minds when we first read the 'System of Logic,' very soon after it was
published. We were familiar with the Syllogistic Logic in Burgersdicius
and Dutrieu; we were also familiar with examples of the best procedure
in modern inductive science; but the two streams flowed altogether apart
in our minds, like two parallel lines never joining nor approaching. The
irreconcilability of the two was at once removed, when we had read and
mastered the second and third chapters of the Second Book of the 'System
of Logic;' in which Mr Mill explains the functions and value of the
Syllogism, and the real import of its major premiss. This explanation
struck us at the time as one of the most profound and original efforts
of metaphysical thought that we had ever perused, and we see no reason
to retract that opinion now.[2] It appears all the more valuable when we
contrast it with what is said by Mr Mill's two contemporaries--Hamilton
and Whately: the first of whom retains the ancient theory of reasoning,
as being only a methodized transition from a whole to its parts, and
from the parts up to the whole--Induction being only this ascending part
of the process, whereby, after having given a complete enumeration of
all the compound parts, you conclude to the sum total described in one
word as a whole;[3] while the second (Whately) agrees in subordinating
Induction to Syllogism, but does so in a different way--by representing
inductive reasoning as a syllogism, with its major premiss suppressed,
from which major premiss it derived its authority. The explanation of Mr