reading. The style is severely scientific, and concisely expository; not a single grace of ornament, not a superfluous word, is admitted. As Aristotle introduced into these treatises a copious use of the letters A, B, C, to denote the three terms of the syllogism, many parts read like Euclid with the diagrams omitted. It is not necessary to attempt any further description of the contents, or to give here an account of the figures and moods of syllogisms, of conversion of propositions, reduction of syllogisms to the first figure, and the rest, because all these things have found their way into modern compendiums. Are they not written in Aldrich, and Mansel, and Whately, and many other books?
Yet there is one passage of the ‘Prior Analytics’ which we must quote in bare justice to Aristotle. Owing to the too exclusive study of his logical works in the middle ages, and owing to modern writers identifying him with the absurdities of his followers, an idea arose that he, like the least judicious of the schoolmen, thought that all reasoning should be through syllogisms, that nature could be expounded by means of syllogisms, and that syllogisms were a source of knowledge. Hence came protests like that of Bacon, that “the syllogism is unequal to the subtlety of nature.” But nothing could be further from the truth than the whole idea. The reader may be assured that on a point of this kind Aristotle was as sensible as Lord Bacon or John Stuart Mill. After showing that syllogisms are constantly used, and after analysing their form, and showing on what their
