Such awareness first presents itself to the innate disposition, so the conviction rooted in the fitrah is stronger; and the more the intellect develops, the wider the field of universals becomes.
Accordingly, it cannot be said that knowledge of individual persons is suspended upon knowledge of species and genera, nor that knowledge of species depends on prior knowledge of genera. A man may know that he himself is a sentient being who moves by choice before he knows that every human is so, and he may know that the human being is so before he realizes that every animal is so. His knowledge that he—or any other creature—is a sentient, volitionally mobile being is therefore not contingent upon formal proof.
When he later comes to judge about the rest of humankind or the rest of the animals, the soul does so by realizing that the unseen instance is like the witnessed one, or that it shares with it the very cause that makes it a sentient, self-moving being. This is the same analogical reasoning and causal argumentation to which the jurists appeal when establishing legal rulings.
The Equivalence of Analogical and Inclusive Syllogisms
These people claim that analogical syllogism yields only conjecture, whereas their preferred inclusive syllogism yields certainty. We have shown elsewhere that this is one of the most invalid claims: analogical and inclusive syllogisms are identical in nature; certainty and conjecture vary only with the subject-matter. If the material is certain in one form, it is certain in the other; if it is conjectural in one, it is conjectural in the other.
The inclusive syllogism is composed of three terms—minor, middle, and major—and its middle term is precisely what the analogical syllogism calls the cause, the operative factor, the common denominator, the shared attribute, the description, the effective reason, and similar expressions.
Thus, in the case of nabidh one may argue: “Every nabidh is intoxicating, and every intoxicant is unlawful.” He must establish the major premise, and only then is the proof complete. At that point he can also say, “Nabidh is intoxicating; therefore it is unlawful, by analogy with grape wine.”