Whenever you make or find an assertion with a reason attached by such a word as “since,” “for,” or “because,” or an assertion with a consequence attached by a word like “therefore,” “hence,” or “accordingly,” you have a case of this condensed reasoning, which, theoretically at any rate, you can expand into a full syllogism, and so go over the reasoning link by link.

Sometimes, however, the expansion is far from easy, for in many of the practical exigencies of everyday life our judgments are intuitive, and not reasoned.  In such judgments we jump to a conclusion by an inarticulate, unreasoned feeling of what is true or expedient, and the grounds of the feeling may be so shadowy and complex that they can never be adequately displayed.

“Over immense departments of our thought we are still, all of us, in the savage state.  Similarity operates in us, but abstraction has not taken place.  We know what the present case is like, we know what it reminds us of, we have an intuition of the right course to take, if it be a practical matter.  But analytic thought has made no tracks, and we cannot justify ourselves to others.  In ethical, psychological, and aesthetic matters, to give a clear reason for one’s judgment is universally recognized as a mark of rare genius.  The helplessness of uneducated people to account for their likes and dislikes is often ludicrous.  Ask the first Irish girl why she likes this country better or worse than her home, and see how much she can tell you.  But if you ask your most educated friend why he prefers Titian to Paul Veronese, you will hardly get more of a reply; and you will probably get absolutely none if you inquire why Beethoven reminds him of Michael Angelo, or how it comes that a bare figure with unduly flexed joints, by the latter, can so suggest the moral tragedy of life....  The well-known story of the old judge advising the new one never to give reasons for his decisions, ’the decisions will probably be right, the reasons will surely be wrong,’ illustrates this.  The doctor will feel that the patient is doomed, the dentist will have a premonition that the tooth will break, though neither can articulate a reason for his foreboding.  The reason lies embedded, but not yet laid bare, in all the previous cases dimly suggested by the actual one, all calling up the same conclusion, which the adept thus finds himself swept on to, he knows not how or why."[42]

The small boy who said that he could not keep step because he had a cold in his head was relying on a sound general truth, Colds in the head make one stupid, for his major premise, but his condition prevented his disentangling it; and all of us every day use minor premises for which we should be incapable of stating the major.

A second practical use of the syllogism is to set forth a chain of reasoning in incontrovertible form.  If you have a general principle which is granted, and have established the fact that your case certainly falls under it, you can make an effective summing up by throwing the reasoning into the form of a syllogism.