The Elements of Logic: In Four Books ...

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L. Nichols, & Company, 1802 - Logic - 239 pages
 

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Page 150 - I HAVE mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely and in train ; not that I think it necessary that all men should be deep mathematicians, but that, having got the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge, as they shall have occasion.
Page 169 - Men suffer all their life long under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself as for a thing to be, and not to be, at the same time.
Page 150 - Just so it is in the mind; would you have a man reason well, you must use him to it betimes, exercise his mind in observing the connexion of ideas, and following them in train. Nothing does this better than mathematics; which, therefore, I think should be taught all those who have the time and opportunity ; not so much to make them mathematicians, as to make them reasonable creatures...
Page 136 - But how can these men think the use of reason necessary to discover principles that are supposed innate, when reason (if we may believe them) is nothing else but the faculty of deducing unknown truths from principles or propositions that are already known? That certainly can never be thought innate which we have need of reason to discover; unless, as I have said, we will have all the certain truths that reason ever teaches us, to be innate. We may as well think the use of reason necessary to...
Page 98 - Thus, that the whole is greater than any of its parts, is an intuitive judgment; nothing more being required to convince us of its truth than an attention to the ideas of whole and part. And this too is the...
Page 158 - ... the minds of all men ; in which case it is usually omitted, whereby we have an imperfect syllogism, that seems to be made up of only two proposition.
Page 159 - This gives a pleasure not unlike to that •which the author himself feels in composing. It besides shortens discourse, and adds a certain force and liveliness to our arguments, when the words in which they are conveyed, favour the natural quickness of the mind in its operations, and a single expression is left to ex« hibit a whole train of thoughts.
Page 168 - That in which the middle term is the subject of the major proposition, and the predicate of the minor.
Page 119 - ... to call in any thing more evident by way of confirmation. But, where the connexion or repugnance comes not so readily under the inspection of the mind, there we...
Page 65 - For we are naturally led to imagine, that the same objects operate alike upon the organs of the human body, and produce an uniformity of sensations.

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