"Syllogism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... force is dreadful. Had not your confiscators, by their early crimes, obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the crimes of which they have since been guilty, or that they can commit, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but the lash of the executioner, that would have refuted a sophistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder. The sophistic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... into parts, that it can scarce be united into a syllogism; yet, in obedience to him, I will abbreviate, and comprehend as much of it as I can in few words, that my answer to it may be more perspicuous. I conceive his meaning to be what follows, as to the unity of place: (if I mistake, I beg his pardon, professing it ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... hero who could conquer her in single combat; and Misothea's heart was only to bless the scholar who could overpower her by disputation. Amidst the fondest transports of courtship she could call for a definition of terms, and treated every argument with contempt that could not be reduced to regular syllogism. You may easily imagine, that I wished this courtship at an end; but when I desired her to shorten my torments, and fix the day of my felicity, we were led into a long conversation, in which Misothea ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... heart that God was on his side. And what is that but a judgment of the practical reason, the response of the heart in man to the spiritual universe? It is given in experience. It is not mediated by argument. It cannot be destroyed by syllogism. It needs no confirmation from science. It is capable of combination with any of the changing interpretations which science may put upon the outward universe. The Reformation had, however, not held fast to its great truth. It had gone back ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... have enemies! But now-a-days, these candidates for fame, these would-be celebrated, set up their enemies as they would their equipages, on credit—then, by an easy process of logic, make out the syllogism thus:—Every great man has enemies, therefore, every man who has enemies must ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... to prove, by force Of argument, 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
... 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 in its form as to excite antipathy ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... both here and in England. Such a procedure, though defended by writers of the generation just passed with much plausible argument and not a little wit, seems to me an intellectual absurdity; and my reason for saying so runs, with whatever abruptness, into the form of a syllogism:—A University, I should lay down, by its very name professes to teach universal knowledge: Theology is surely a branch of knowledge: how then is it possible for it to profess all branches of knowledge, and yet to exclude from the subjects of its teaching one which, to say the least, is ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... any steps been omitted in the syllogisms? (Such as in a syllogism in enthymeme.) If so, test any such by ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... After waiting a time, which in our state of suspense might almost be called a period, he leisurely returned, significantly saying, that neither man nor beast could pass that way! rubbing his thorn-smitten cheek. Now came the use of the syllogism, in its simplest form. "If the right road must be A, B, or C, and A and B were wrong, then C must be right." Under this conviction, we marched boldly on, without further solicitude or exploration,' and at length ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... we know it. Such, in broad statement, is the substance of Carlyle's religious convictions and moral teaching. Like Kant he takes his stand on the principles of ethical idealism. God is to be sought, not through speculation, or syllogism, or the learning of the schools, but through the moral nature. It is the soul in action that alone finds God. And the finding of God means, not happiness as the world conceives it, but blessedness, or the inward peace ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine. Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours contains, have not only been illustrated, but maintained by syllogism, and the rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! It is my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... contempt that contained more logic than a long argument from another man. In fact, the whole host of rhetorical figures seemed breaking out of his face. By a solitary glance of his eye he could look a man into a dilemma, and practise a sorites, or a homemade syllogism, by the various shiftings of his countenance, as clearly as if he had risen to the full flight of his former bombast. He had, in short, a prima facie disposition to controversy; his nose was set upon ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... performed in vacuo: he owed much to the preconceptions of his contemporaries. His invariable quest, as students of his opinions are soon aware, was for the axiomatic, for absolute principles, and in this inquiry he met the intellectual demands of a period whose first minds still owned the sway of the syllogism and still loved what Bacon called the "spacious liberty of generalities." In Marshall's method—as in the older syllogistic logic, whose phraseology begins to sound somewhat strange to twentieth century ears—the essential operation consisted ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... converse with an 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: they are more solicitous to look wise, than to be so. Of Mr. Fisher it is not ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... experience or accepted inductive reasoning, they may be cited as applying to any particular case under consideration. This passing from the general law to the particular instance is deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning has a regular form called the syllogism. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... relation which Germany sustained in the war to the allied powers, and especially to the neutral nations. The relation of the neutral nations, in modern warfare, which requires such immense supplies, is a factor of great importance for success in the field. Therefore, to close the syllogism, the mountainous character of the Vosges country was the primary factor in determining the relation of all other countries to the Central Powers, a factor constantly arising at every point in the Great ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... the whole 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 ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... to produce the illusion. Everybody agrees that Great Britain has acted in a most blackguardly fashion towards Ireland; everybody assumes that blackguardism always succeeds in this world, therefore Ireland is a failure. The only flaw in this syllogism is that it is in direct conflict with every known fact. For the rest we have to thank or blame the sentimentalism of Mr Matthew Arnold. His proud but futile Celts who "went down to battle but always fell" have been mistaken for the Irish of actual history. The truth is, of course, that the phrase ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... been hitherto flourishing and contented under its own. They adopted the conclusion that all English enactments are right; but the system of municipal law in Scotland is not English, therefore it is wrong. Under sanction of this syllogism, our rulers have indulged and encouraged a spirit of experiment and innovation at our expense, which they resist obstinately when it is to be carried through ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... push farther,—l believe that the best way to instruct mankind is not by pointing out to them their mutual errors, but by teaching them to think rightly on indifferent matters, where they will listen with patience in order to be amused, and where they do not consider a definition or a syllogism as the greatest injury you can ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... to B, "You can't hit me, as I prove by this syllogism" (here followeth the syllogism), "and B, pour toute reponse, knocks A down such a whack that he rebounds into a sitting posture; and to him the man, the tree, the lamp-post and the fire-escape become not clearly distinguishable; ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... see plainly the demoralizing tendency of syllogistic logic, they will no 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
... Evidently because the object of the mechanic was to mould things, whilst the object of the philosopher was only to mould words. Careful induction is not at all necessary to the making of a good syllogism. But it is indispensable to the making of a good shoe. Mechanics, therefore, have always been, as far as the range of their humble but useful callings extended, not anticipators but interpreters of nature. And ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
