clusion from the
premisses involves a contradiction, since, in fact, the denial, e.g.
that an individual now living will die, is not _in terms_ contradictory
to the assertion that his ancestors and their contemporaries (to which
the general proposition, as a record of facts, really amounts) have all
died.

But the syllogistic form, though the process of inference, which there
always is when a syllogism is used, lies not in this form, but in the
act of generalisation, is yet a great collateral security for the
correctness of that generalisation. When all possible inferences from a
given set of particulars are thrown into one general expression (and, if
the particulars support one inference, they always will support an
indefinite number), we are more likely both to feel the need of weighing
carefully the sufficiency of the experience, and also, through seeing
that the general proposition would equally support some conclusion which
we _know_ to be false, to detect any defect in the evidence, which, from
bias or negligence, we might otherwise have overlooked. But the
syllogistic form, besides being useful (and, when the validity of the
reasoning is doubtful, even indispensable) for verifying arguments, has
the acknowledged merit of all general language, that it enables us to
make an induction once for all. We _can_, indeed, and in simple cases
habitually _do_, reason straight from particulars; but in cases at all
complicated, all but the most sagacious of men, and they also, unless
their experience readily supplied them with parallel instances, would be
as helpless as the brutes. The only counterbalancing danger is, that
general inferences from insufficient premisses may become hardened into
general maxims, and escape being confronted with the particulars.

The major premiss is not really part of the argument. Brown saw that
there would be a _petitio principii_ if it were. He, therefore,
contended that the conclusion in reasoning follows from the minor
premiss alone, thus suppressing the appeal to experience. He argued,
that to reason is merely to analyse our general notions or abstract
ideas, and that, _provided_ that the relation between the two ideas,
e.g. of _man_ and of _mortal_, has been first perceived, we can evolve
the one directly from the other. But (to waive the error that a
proposition relates to ideas instead of things), besides that this
_proviso_ is itself a surrender of the doctrine that an argument
consi