Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/74

 so. Yet he has been ridiculed, as if this had been the case—as for instance by Locke, who says that it would be strange if God had made men two-legged, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational! The grammarian who first distinguished nouns from verbs and gave them their names, did not invent nouns and verbs, but only called attention to their existence in language; and he who first made rules of syntax was only recording the ways in which men naturally speak and write, not making innovations in language; and so Aristotle with his “Syllogism” only clearly pointed out a process which had always, though unconsciously, been carried on. There is no doubt that, ever since they have possessed reason at all, men have made syllogisms, though, like M. Jourdain making prose, they have for the most part been unaware of it.

The ‘First Series of Analytics’ is entirely devoted to the theory of the Syllogism, with a few collateral discussions. It has no connection with the treatise ‘On Interpretation,’ from which, in phraseology and some points of doctrine, it differs. It is a work which must excite our wonder if we consider the serried mass of observations which it contains, and the absolutely complete way in which it constructs a science and provides for it an appropriate nomenclature. Though countless generations of commentators and school-men have been busy with the ‘Analytics,’ and many modem philosophers have independently treated of Logic, none of them have been able to add a single point of any importance to Aristotle’s theory of deductive reasoning. The ‘Analytics’ are of course not light