37. Syllogistic Reasoning. -- It is principally the syllogism that engages Aristotle's attention (Prior Analytics). He was the first to describe this process by which the human mind, not perceiving immediately the relation between two concepts, the terms of a judgment, compares them successively with a middle term. The syllogism is a form of reasoning in which certain things being supposed (the premisses), something else necessarily follows (the conclusion). To join ideas one with another by deducing the particular from the general, to co-ordinate and subordinate our mental notions according to their degree of universality: such is the mental process which leads us to science. The syllogism makes it clear to us that the predicate of the conclusion is contained in or excluded from the comprehension of a third idea, which includes in its extension the subject of the conclusion. The rules of the syllogism, its figures and moods are laid down with such wonderful exactness and precision that posterity has had little or no occasion to improve on the lessons of the Stagi

ARISTOTLE 33 -->rite. Induction, opposed to the syllogism, is a process which goes from the particular, i.e., from the observation of facts, to the general, i.e., to the abstraction of the essence or type realized in the particular cases. It may be said that Aristotle laid down the principles of scientific induction.