Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: B. THE ACT OF THE AGENT, FORMAL LOGIC. chapter{Section 4CHAPTER 1. I. Definition of the act. II. Division of the act. III. Matter of the act. IV. Definition of terms. V. Division of terms. I. Definition. See pp. 10—14. II. Division. In the " Act of the Agent " there are two things to be considered, viz., its Matter and Form. Having seen what Logic is, and having besides looked at the intellect of man, which is the direct agent of Logic, we must conclude at once that the Matter of reasoning can be no other than those acts of the intellect which admit of being arranged suitably for the attainment of Truth, i.e., ideas and statements or "judgments;" while the Form of Logic must be that disposition—or handling —of ideas and statements, by means of which the intellect attains its end of knowing Truth. We have already shown that this disposition or handling of ideas and statements, is that internal discourse of the mind which is called reasoning; and hence reasoning must be the Form of Logic. III. Matter. As intellectual acts are more easily treated of by the use of signs, the word of the intellect or idea is known in Logic as a Term, and the complex word or "judgment" as a Proposition. Hence Terms and Propositions are the signs of the matter of the " Act of the Agent," or of Formal Logic. IV. Terms. Definition. Taken absolutely, a term is the external sign of what by a simple internal word has become the object of thought: thus fan- tail, tame, wild, virtue, triangle, scalene, isosceles, are terms. Considered relatively, a term is denned by Aristotle "that into which every proposition' is resolved, as into subject and predicate," e.g., our fan-tails- subject—are—interesting birds—predicate. Here the two terms are fan-tails and interesting birds, united by ...