Men can reason well who cannot make a syllogism.
If we will observe the actings of our own minds, we shall find
that we reason best and clearest, when we only observe the connexion of the proof, without reducing our thoughts
to any rule of syllogism. And therefore we may take notice, that there are many men that reason exceeding clear
and rightly, who know not how to make a syllogism. He that will look into many parts of Asia and America, will
find men reason there perhaps as acutely as himself, who yet never heard of a syllogism, nor can reduce any one
argument to those forms: and I believe scarce any one makes syllogisms in reasoning within himself. Indeed
syllogism is made use of, on occasion, to discover a fallacy hid in a rhetorical flourish, or cunningly wrapt up in a
smooth period; and, stripping an absurdity of the cover of wit and good language, show it in its naked deformity.
But the weakness or fallacy of such a loose discourse it shows, by the artificial form it is put into, only to those
who have thoroughly studied mode and figure, and have so examined the many ways that three propositions may
be put together, as to know which of them does certainly conclude right, and which not, and upon what grounds it
is that they do so. All who have so far considered syllogism, as to see the reason why in three propositions laid
together in one form, the conclusion will be certainly right, but in another not certainly so, I grant are certain of
the conclusion they draw from the premises in the allowed modes and figures. But they who have not so far
looked into those forms, are not sure by virtue of syllogism, that the conclusion certainly follows from the
premises; they only take it to be so by an implicit faith in their teachers and a confidence in those forms of
argumentation; but this is still but believing, not being certain. Now, if, of all mankind those who can make
syllogisms are extremely few in comparison of those who cannot; and if, of those few who have been taught logic,
there is but a very small number who do any more than believe that syllogisms, in the allowed modes and figures
do conclude right, without knowing certainly that they do so: if syllogisms must be taken for the only proper
instrument of reason and means of knowledge, it will follow, that, before Aristotle, there was not one man that did
or could know anything by reason; and that, since the invention of syllogisms, there is not one of ten thousand that
doth.
