What carries weight is the material content of the knowledge, not the outward form of the proposition. Once the material is certain, it remains the same whether it is cast in the mold of an analogical syllogism or a universal syllogism. Likewise, it makes no difference whether the syllogism is couched—according to their terminology—in conjunctive or conditional form, or in any wording you prefer, especially if that wording is better than theirs, clearer to the mind, and more concise; the meaning in every case is one.
Take the clearest example. You say, “This is a man, and every man is created—or an animal, or sentient, or self-moving by volition, or rational, or whatever you please of man’s necessary attributes.” If you wish, you may frame the proof exactly so. Or you may say, “He is a man; therefore he is created, or sentient, or an animal, or self-moving,” and the like, “just like other men, for they share in manhood, which entails these qualities.” Or you may say, “This is a man, and manhood entails these judgments; consequently they pertain to him.” Or again: “If he is a man, then he is characterized by the attributes inseparable from man.” Or yet again: “Either he is characterized by these attributes or he is not; the latter is impossible, so the former must be the case, for these attributes are necessary to man, and his existence without them is inconceivable.”
Induction Is Not an Inference from the Particular to the Universal
Induction yields certainty only when it is exhaustive; then you have judged the common element by what you have observed in every single instance. In such a case you are not inferring a universal from one particular, nor a general rule from a special case. Rather, you are inferring one of two concomitants from the other, for the presence of that predicate in every individual included under the universal requires that it be necessary to the universal as such.
Hence their claim that this is an inference from a single particular to an all-embracing universal is incorrect. Why? Because a proof must be inseparable from that which it proves. Were it possible for the proof to exist without the thing proved, and for the latter not to be necessary to it, then, even after we knew the proof to be established, we would not know the establishment of