Note 354 — Chapter III

For the most part the critics of the fourth figure seem to identify it altogether with Bramantip. The following extract from Father Clarke’s Logic (p. 337) will serve to illustrate the contumely to which this poor figure is sometimes subjected: “Ought we to retain it? If we do, it should be as a sort of syllogistic Helot, to shew how low the syllogism can fall when it neglects the laws on which all true reasoning is founded, and to exhibit it in the most degraded form which it can assume without being positively vicious. Is it capable of reformation? Not of reformation, but of extinction…… Where the same premisses in the first figure would prove a universal affirmative, this feeble caricature of it is content with a particular; where the first figure draws its conclusion naturally and in accordance with the forms into which human thought instinctively shapes itself, this perverted abortion forces the mind to an awkward and clumsy process which rightly deserves to be called ‘inordinate and violent.’” Father Clarke’s own violence appears to be attributable mainly to the fact that figure 4 was not, as such, recognised by Aristotle.