Art of Reasoning

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Gentle reader, - Ih is fitting that you, who are about to peruse the following work, should know the design which the Author had in composing it. In looking at the works on Logic now generally read, he observed that they constituted two great classes, - lst. Those which were strictly formal in their character, and which, consequently, appeared to the general reader tedious, precise, dry, dull, and uninviting. 2nd. Those which, aiming at popularity, overstepped the legitimate bounds of the science - denuded it of its rigidly-formal and abstract nature - spread their observations over a widely-discursive field -and thus, by their very vagueness and indefinity, rendered their precepts vain, nugatory, unmeaning, and impracticable. N 0 one appeared to him sufficiently adapted, in manner and in matter, to the spirit of the age in which we live. To write a Logic which would be the synthesis of these - which would be popular in its method of exposition, without abating one jot or tittle of that abstract and formal austerity which science invariably assumes - was the aim of the Author. The projection -in 1850 - of a new Serial, The British Controversialist, to which the Author was invited to contribute, afforded him the Opportunity of essaying to work his thought into realization. He. Drew up an outline plan, presented it to the Editors of.

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Gentle reader, - Ih is fitting that you, who are about to peruse the following work, should know the design which the Author had in composing it. In looking at the works on Logic now generally read, he observed that they constituted two great classes, - lst. Those which were strictly formal in their character, and which, consequently, appeared to the general reader tedious, precise, dry, dull, and uninviting. 2nd. Those which, aiming at popularity, overstepped the legitimate bounds of the science - denuded it of its rigidly-formal and abstract nature - spread their observations over a widely-discursive field -and thus, by their very vagueness and indefinity, rendered their precepts vain, nugatory, unmeaning, and impracticable. N 0 one appeared to him sufficiently adapted, in manner and in matter, to the spirit of the age in which we live. To write a Logic which would be the synthesis of these - which would be popular in its method of exposition, without abating one jot or tittle of that abstract and formal austerity which science invariably assumes - was the aim of the Author. The projection -in 1850 - of a new Serial, The British Controversialist, to which the Author was invited to contribute, afforded him the Opportunity of essaying to work his thought into realization. He. Drew up an outline plan, presented it to the Editors of.