must be hypothetical) may be necessary. Suppose the sophist desires to establish, in the minds of his hearers or readers, the questionable fact that a certain minister of state is corrupt: using the means first indicated, he holds a long preliminary discourse on the baseness of those who, being in places of high political trust, abuse their power to serve their private ends; and exciting in this manner a strong virtuous indignation, without pointing to any person in particular as the object of it, he asks, at last, not whether A. B. is a man that deserves this indignation, but assumes that he is known to deserve it, except by people who are shut out, by their station, from being acquainted with what is done in high places (not saying so in words, but implying as much by his tone or style); and thus, if his hearers or readers are not on their guard against the delusion, he gains his point, by keeping them from the only inquiry which truth obliges them to institute. Suppose another instance for our first case :-it suits the sophist to fix it as a fact in his hearers' or readers' minds, that a certain root is not a cheap article of food. To all people of common sense, this would appear an affair of mere calculation. Accordingly, the sophist begins with calculations, elaborate and accurate, of the produce per acre of this article of food and of the other, sliding in, somewhere, as a point known and admitted in science, that the root in question contains but a tenth part of the nutritive matter which exists in the substances opposed to it. Now it is evident that all the previous calculations will most likely amount to nothing, unless the last point is clearly established, but instead of establishing it, the reasoner, by such an artifice as this, may contrive to make it pass for granted, and thus his object is gained. Suppose further, in order to elucidate the second means of sophistry indicated above, that the rhetorician wishes his hearers or readers to admit the necessity of transporting criminals to a foreign colony;-he might mingle this questionable point with one concerning which there is no question, namely that it is necessary to repress crime in the parent country; when, by passing frequently, in a long discourse, from one to the other of these two questions, he might succeed in making them seem one; that is, in making it appear that the only way of repressing crime in the parent country, is the transportation of its felons to the infant settle ment. Suppose once more, in order to elucidate the third means of sophistry which the previous remarks hint at, that the sophist wishes to establish it as a fact, that A. B. evaded, by a trick, the full payment of his just debts;—instead of setting his hearers or readers to inquire whether such was the fact, he may ask whether any one of them recollects the date of the fact. Or, in order to elucidate the fourth means of sophistry spoken of above, suppose the fact to be known that A. B. did compromise with his creditors, but the question to remain, whether it was through dishonesty, or imprudence, or unavoidable misfortune,-the sophist may stop his hearers or readers from inquiring into the probability of the last cause, by asking whether it was through dishonesty or imprudence, shutting out, by this only alternative, the thought of any other-And, lastly, as to the power of a certain tone or style of speaking in eluding a questionable point, we may suppose, for our example, a sincere holder of some religious tenet, to be thrown among unbelievers. A sophist from among these, instead of asking the grounds of the belief which he wishes to undermine, and opposing them by direct argument, may, by speaking of them with banter and contempt as not worth an argument, gain the end which he could not have reached by a direct road. CHAPTER III. DEFINITION. 1. Definition is the act of so fixing the limits of a term, that nothing more nor less than it is intended to signify at the time, shall be included in it. It is an art growing out of the use of language, and possible only by having words to operate with, or signs equivalent to words. Its general purpose is, to assist the natural understanding; and this it accomplishes by subjecting all the knowledge acquired by it to one single relation, not permanently to take place of those unnumbered relations under which the things we live among are apprehended, (for this would be not to assist our knowledge-it would be to supplant it,) but that, in the inductive and deductive process, we may stop at convenient stages, and fix, and connect, and arrange, by the one pervading relation, the whole of what we know, whether for the purpose of going on to increase our stock, or of developing the stock acquired. The art we speak of, is an essential part of formal logic, and a most important part of ours. The formal syllogism,—that which works by extremes and middle term,—would, without it, have been an impossible construction; and with regard to our logic, though it can, in a certain degree or condition, exist without it, and does so exist in the practice of uneducated people, yet, in such condition, it has no claim to rank higher than the many ordinary arts which we learn and practise without express instruction. We therefore willingly accept, from formal logic, this part of its doctrine, the only part of it which is truly useful. THEORY OF LOGICAL DEFINITION. 2. We have seen in the previous chapter, (sect. 25,) that the power of a name to extend its comprehensiveness, has no limits but the want of further things to receive its meaning; and hence we have names, as thing, being, which include every possible subject of thought.* And if we have names thus comprehensive, the same process which led up to these, will have produced others of less and less degrees of comprehensiveness, till the names are those on which the process has not yet been tried, that is to say, proper names, or the names of individuals. As the process consists in superinducing a relation upon the results of the natural understanding, and therefore is an artificial process, so, though the principle is always the same, there are great differences of detail in applying it. For instance, almost every transcendentalist has his own set of categories, the summa genera under which he is led, by the character of his inductive studies, to marshal the developments of his understanding. What these severally are, needs not be stated here: it is sufficient to say that not one of them exactly coincides with the views unfolded in this Manual, which therefore proposes its own categories, namely * Except nothing or not-being; a name which, shadowy as it is, still keeps the fact present, that wherever there is knowledge, there must be, under it, the thing known, and the thing by which it is known. Here, the former is denoted by thing or being; the latter, by nothing, not-being, or nonentity; or, contrarily, we know what not-being is, because we know what being is. the distribution of all things which can be the subject of thought into Things-physical, and Things-metaphysical, the former of these subdividing into Things-real and Things-ideal. Now, as to things-ideal, since they are the counterparts or the compositions of things-real, we need not pursue them distinctly from things-real, but go on to speak of the subdivisions as equally belonging to both under their general denomination of Things-physical. There is an old division of real things into matter and mind; a division which, in our days, has been thought sufficient to warrant an inductive system of philosophy built upon the latter, so as to be distinct from the sciences professing to be concerned solely about the former. Whether this is, or is not a sound purpose, requires no discussion here: it is sufficient to assert that though the distinction on which it is founded is a most convenient one for many logical ends, it is one concerning which we can at present know nothing (whatever we may believe) further than that man is a being capable of constant progress in knowledge, and raised in this respect above all other creatures perceptible by his senses. We may state this fact by saying he has a mind; but in so stating, we do not explain, or get beyond the fact as previously stated. * Transferring, then, both matter and mind, from the place sometimes assumed for them among things-physical, to * Be it well observed that what is here said, interferes in no degree with the Bible doctrine of man's immortality, but goes quite along with it, as far as, on human grounds, any doctrine can go. Nay, even the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul, (a doctrine not identical with the Bible doctrine, though not contrary to it, and therefore, by believers, often, perhaps almost always, joined to it,) even that doctrine is not contradicted by what is said above, though its claim to scientific validity is questioned. Nor, again, do the remarks made above give any countenance to what is called Materialism; for if it asserts that mind is an abstraction, that is, not a Thing-physical but metaphysical, it asserts the same of matter, whose existence as a substratum or common essence of all the things of sense, is, like the other point, quite unsusceptible both of proof and disproof. Matter, as far as we can know anything about it, has its existence only in an arbitrary definition, which comprehends just so many of the things of sense as experience in physical science points out to be expedient. In the meantime what more rational to believe than that man, however assimilated to the things of sense among which he is now placed, is designed for immortality, by having means within reach for regaining the perfection of a nature that evidently struggles to raise itself above them what we deem their proper place, namely among thingsmetaphysical, we come next,-in our progress down toward individual things,—to the domains of acknowledged inductive science; and what shall here be the summa genera or heads of classification, depends on the judgement of those who, having experience in those wide domains, are qualified by such experience to guide others. All that logic proposes, is, to direct the principle of every classification, not to lay down the classification itself. That principle is easily stated. The summum genus or general name of the things about which the science, whatever it may be, is conversant, must be divided into subordinate heads, each of these again into sub-subordinate heads, and so on downwards till our last division brings us to the individual things by which our earliest knowledge was suggested, and for the better comprehension of which, this systematizing principle has been put in operation. The word division, be it here observed, is not, in describing the foregoing operation, used in the same sense as when used in speaking of the division of any natural substance into parts,— as for instance into halves, quarters, or eighths, and so forth, -but it is used to signify what, for common apprehension, we might better signify by the term distribution; distribution implying that the whole is spread out, remaining, as a whole, what it was. Our meaning above, then, otherwise stated, is, that the chief head is spread out into subordinate heads, each of these, again, into sub-subordinate heads, and so on till the lowest heads can but be spread out into the individuals of which they consist. Now it matters not what the chief head, or the subordinate heads, or the subsubordinate heads are called ;* we have only to remember that, in logic, the names employed are commonly these: summum genus for the chief head; genus for each of the heads under it; subaltern genus for each of the sub-subordinate heads; and for each of as many more as may be subjected to each of these; till we come to the proximum genus, or that next above the species, and then under each species we have only individuals. Be it observed, however, that every subaltern genus is a species with relation to the genus immediately above it, *As, for instance, instead of the names which follow above, we may use those of Class, Order, Genus, Species, Variety. |