A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~440,000 words · 2,094 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Stuart Mill. (n.d.). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/a-system-of-logic-ratiocinative-and-inductive
- MLAJohn Stuart Mill. "A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/a-system-of-logic-ratiocinative-and-inductive.
- ChicagoJohn Stuart Mill. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/a-system-of-logic-ratiocinative-and-inductive.
What it is about
Mill's treatise on induction: how a law is reached from cases, with the four methods of experimental inquiry — agreement, difference, residues and concomitant variations — that still carry his name.
Context and history
Published in 1843, it was Mill's first major book and the one that made his reputation. The sixth and last book extends the same demand to the 'moral sciences': it argues that society admits of a science, and it is the text where that claim is defended by argument rather than merely proclaimed.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
This book makes no pretense of giving to the world a new theory of the intellectual operations. Its claim to attention, if it possess any, is grounded on the fact that it is an attempt, not to supersede, but to embody and systematize, the best ideas which have been either promulgated on its subject by speculative writers, or conformed to by accurate thinkers in their scientific inquiries. To cement together the detached fragments of a subject, never yet treated as a whole; to harmonize the true portions of discordant theories, by supplying the links of thought necessary to connect them, and by disentangling them from the errors with which they are always more or less interwoven, must necessarily require a considerable amount of original speculation. To other originality than this, the present work lays no claim. In the existing state of the cultivation of the sciences, there would be a very strong presumption against any one who should imagine that he had effected a revolution in the theory of the investigation of truth, or added any fundamentally new process to the practice of it. The improvement which remains to be effected in the methods of philosophizing (and the author believes that they have much need of improvement) can only consist in performing more systematically and accurately operations with which, at least in their elementary form, the human intellect, in some one or other of its employments, is already familiar. In the portion of the work which treats of Ratiocination, the author has not deemed it necessary to enter into technical details which may be obtained in so perfect a shape from the existing treatises on what is termed the Logic of the Schools. In the contempt entertained by many modern philosophers for the syllogistic art, it will be seen that he by no means participates; though the scientific theory on which its defense is usually rested appears to him erroneous: and the view which he
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