THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

5o THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
there was no quarter for even the courtliest foe. Aristotle is so ruthless
with Plato because there is so much of Plato in him; he too remains a
lover of abstractions and generalities, repeatedly betraying the simple fact
for some speciously bedizened theory, and compelled
to a continuous
struggle to conquer his philosophic passion for exploring the empyrean,
1
There is a heavy trace of this in the most characteristic and original of
Aristotle's contributions to philosophy
the doctrine of the syllogism. A
Syllogism is a trio of propositions of which the third (the conclusion)
follows from the conceded truth of the other two (the "major" and
"minor" premisses). E. g., man is a rational animal; but Socrates is a
man;
therefore Socrates is a rational animal. The mathematical reader
will see at once that the structure of the syllogism resembles the proposition
that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other; if A
is B, and C is A, then C is B. As in the mathematical case the conclusion
is reached by canceling from both premisses their common teraij A; so
from both
and combining what remains. The
in our syllogism the conclusion is reached by canceling
premisses their common term "man/ 9
difficulty, as logicians have pointed out from the days of Pyrrho to those
of Stuart Mill, lies in this, that the major premiss of the syllogism takes
for granted precisely the point to be proved; for if Socrates is not rational
true that
(and no one questions that he is a man) it is not universally
man is a rational animal. Aristotle would reply, no doubt, that where
an individual is found to have a large number of qualities characteristic
of a class is ("Socrates a man"), a is
strong presumption
established that
the individual has the other qualities characteristic of the class ("ration-
'ality"). But apparently the syllogism
is not a mechanism for the dis-
covery of truth so much as for the clarification of exposition and thought.
All this, like the many other items of the Organon, has its value:
"Aristotle has discovered and formulated every canon of theoretical consistency,
and every artifice of dialectical debate, with an industry and
acuteness which cannot be too highly extolled; and his labors in this
direction have perhaps contributed more than any other single writer to
the intellectual stimulation of after ages." 14 But no man ever lived who
could lift logic to a lofty strain : a guide to correct reasoning is as elevafc
ing as a manual of etiquette; we may use it, but it hardly spurs us to
nobility. Not even the bravest philosopher would sing to a book of logic
underneath the bough. One always feels towards logic a,s Virgil bade
Dante feel towards those who had been damned because of their color-
less neutrality: Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa "Let us think
no more about them, but look once and pass on."
i, 307. ^Inferno, iii, 60.