Another trick is to refuse to admit true premisses because of a foreseen conclusion.

Or, if it is doubtful whether your opponent will admit them, you must advance the premisses of these premisses; that is to say, you must draw up pro-syllogisms, and get the premisses of several of them admitted in no definite order.

From this difficulty the pragmatist alone escapes, by assuming his premisses provisionally and arguing forwards, in order to test them by their consequences.

This too is my conclusion, but (if I do not delude myself) from more evident, though not perhaps more certain, premisses.

"I too," he says, "once made this very remark to Rufus when he rebuked me for not discovering the suppressed premiss in some syllogism.

It subordinates syllogism to induction, the technical to the real; it divests the major premiss of its illusory pretence to be itself the proving authority, or even any real and essential part of the proofand acknowledges it merely as a valuable precautionary test and security for avoiding mistake in the process of proving.

When you have elicited all your premisses, and your opponent has admitted them, you must refrain from asking him for the conclusion, but draw it at once for yourself; nay, even though one or other of the premisses should be lacking, you may take it as though it too had been admitted, and draw the conclusion.

I am not going to enter at all on the subject-matter itself, or to say whether I agree, or not, with your conclusions: but merely to examine, from a logic-lecturer's point of view, your premisses as relating to them.

The problem of parapet mending has been reduced to arithmetical form à la Colenso, as follows: "If two inches of rain per diem brings down one quarter of a company's parapet, and one company, working about twenty-six hours per diem, can revet one-eighth of a company's parapet, how long will your trenches lastgiven the additional premisses that no revetments to speak of are to be had, and that two inches of rain is only a minimum ration?"

(f) So long as the logician regards his premisses not as hypotheses to be tested, but as established truths, he must condemn the Syllogism as a formal fallacy.

There is always hope of a man so long as he dwells in the region of the direct categorical proposition and the unambiguous term; so long as he does not deny the rightly drawn conclusion after accepting the major and minor premisses.

We infer, we go upon reasons, we use premisses in either case.