scholastic logicians, invests their dead though precise formalism with a real life and application to the actual process of finding and proving truth.  But besides thus working each half up to perfection, Mr Mill has performed the still more difficult task of overcoming the repugnance, apparently an inveterate repugnance, between them, so as chemically to combine the two into one homogeneous compound; thus presenting the problem of Reasoned Truth, Inference, Proof, and Disproof, as one connected whole.  For ourselves, we still recollect the mist which was cleared from our minds when we first read the ‘System of Logic,’ very soon after it was published.  We were familiar with the Syllogistic Logic in Burgersdicius and Dutrieu; we were also familiar with examples of the best procedure in modern inductive science; but the two streams flowed altogether apart in our minds, like two parallel lines never joining nor approaching.  The irreconcilability of the two was at once removed, when we had read and mastered the second and third chapters of the Second Book of the ’System of Logic;’ in which Mr Mill explains the functions and value of the Syllogism, and the real import of its major premiss.  This explanation struck us at the time as one of the most profound and original efforts of metaphysical thought that we had ever perused, and we see no reason to retract that opinion now.[2] It appears all the more valuable when we contrast it with what is said by Mr Mill’s two contemporaries—­Hamilton and Whately:  the first of whom retains the ancient theory of reasoning, as being only a methodized transition from a whole to its parts, and from the parts up to the whole—­Induction being only this ascending part of the process, whereby, after having given a complete enumeration of all the compound parts, you conclude to the sum total described in one word as a whole;[3] while the second (Whately) agrees in subordinating Induction to Syllogism, but does so in a different way—­by representing inductive reasoning as a syllogism, with its major premiss suppressed, from which major premiss it derived its authority.  The explanation of Mr Mill attacks the problem from the opposite side.  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 proof—­and acknowledges it merely as a valuable precautionary test and security for avoiding mistake in the process of proving.  Taking Mr Mill’s ‘System of Logic’ as a whole, it is one of the books by which we believe ourselves to have most profited.  The principles of it are constantly present to our mind when engaged in investigations of evidence, whether scientific or historical.