derer! I was appalled." The old priest had hardly spoken when the
company was joined by an aged and prominent nobleman of the region,
whom all present greeted with great respect. Saluting his priestly
friend with no little reverence, the nobleman turned to the company
and said, with calm unconsciousness: "You must know, my friends, in my
youth I was the very first person whom my honored friend here ever
confessed."

Now observe. The priest had not said who the murderer was. The
nobleman in his contribution to the conversation had not confessed to
the company the murder. He had not mentioned it in any way. And the
priest had scrupulously avoided mentioning him. But all present drew
at once the reasonable conclusion that, granting the correctness of
the two assertions, the nobleman was a murderer. We, of course, must
all agree in this conclusion. Now is this conclusion the result of a
mere analysis of either of the two assertions made? And does the
conclusion merely result from our power to form abstract ideas?
Plainly, the conclusion is due to the power of all present to make a
synthesis, or, as one sometimes says, to put two and two together.
Plainly, whatever abstract ideas are here used, it is not these which
constitute the main work of a reasonable being who views the situation
in which the nobleman is placed by the whole sense of the
conversation. Reason here discovers a novel fact which {96} neither
the priest nor the nobleman had stated. This discovery is as much an
experience as if it were the observation of an actual killing of one
man by another. Only it is the discovery of the relations involved in
a synthesis of meanings. This discovery is at once empirical (yes, in
the broader sense of the word intuitive), and it is a discovery of a
necessary connection. It is not due to mere analysis. It is not a bit
of barren intellectualism. It is not an unpractical comment. It is a
discovery that might wreck the nobleman's reputation, and that might
more or less indirectly lead to his ultimate conviction upon a capital
charge. Now, that is an example, trivial enough if viewed as a mere
anecdote, but a typical example, of the synthetic and constructive use
of reason as a source of insight.

Let me turn to another also at first sight seemingly trivial case. An
English logician, De Morgan, long ago called attention to a form of
reasoning which, up to his time, the logicians had unduly neglected.
If you assume that "a hors