A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive

by John Stuart Mill

Overview

Liberty Fund is pleased to make available in paperback eight of the original thirty-three cloth volumes of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill that were first published by the Universityof Toronto Press that remain most relevant to liberty and responsibility in the twenty-first century. Born in London in 1806 and educated at the knee of his father, the Scottish philosopher James Mill, John Stuart Mill became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential writers on economics and social philosophy.

The most indispensable work for understanding Mill’s thought is A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, which was the first serious attempt to methodize induction in relation to deduction.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was an economist, philosopher, Member of Parliament, and one of the most significant English classical liberals of the nineteenth century. Mill spent most of his working life with the East India Company, which he joined at age sixteen and worked for for thirty-eight years. He is also the author of On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861), and The Subjection of Women (1869).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9791221345469
Publisher:	Memorable Classics eBooks
Publication date:	05/31/2022
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	323,807
File size:	1 MB

Read an Excerpt

BOOK II. OF REASONING. /.?.oj lapof nf 6 ovAAoyjo/joj ii oil; AniST. Analyt. Prior., 1. i. cap 4 CHAPTER I. OF INFERENCE, OR REASONING, IN GENERAL. § 1. In the preceding Book, we have been occupied not with the nature of Proof, but with the nature of Assertion: the import conveyed by a Proposition, whether that Proposition be true or false; not the means by which to discriminate true from false Propositions. The proper subject, however, of Logic is Proof. Before we could understand what Proof is, it was necessary to understand what that is to which proof is applicable; what that is which can be a subject of belief or disbelief, of affirmation or denial; what, in short, the different kinds of Propositions assert. This preliminary inquiry we have prosecuted to a definite result. Assertion, in the first place, relates either to the meaning of words, or to some property of the things which words signify. Assertions respecting the meaning of words, among which definitions are the most important, hold a place, and an indispensable one, in philosophy ; but aa the meaning of words is essentially arbitrary, this class of assertions is not susceptible of truth or falsity, nor therefore of proof or disproof. Assertions respecting Things, or what may be called Real Propositions in contradistinction to verbal ones, are of various sorts. We have analyzed the import of each sort, and have ascertained the nature of the things they relate to, and the nature of what they severally assert respecting those things. We found that whatever be the form of the proposition, and whatever its nominal subject or predicate, the real subject of every proposition is some one or more facts or phenomena ofconsciousness, or some one or more of the hidden causes or powers to which we ascribe th...