---
title: "Jevons's Elementary Lessons in Logic, Lesson XV, \"The Rules of the Syllogism\" (pp.126–131), is the text behind the eight numbered rules Aikins reproduces in his Ch. XVI footnote"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1881_Jevons_logic_DlibD_A3103.pdf"
source_title: "Elementary Lessons in Logic: Deductive and Inductive, Lesson XV, \"The Rules of the Syllogism\" (pp.126–131)"
source_author: "W. Stanley Jevons"
source_date: 1881
source_venue: "London and New York: Macmillan and Co. (\"New Edition\"; work first published 1870; digitized and hosted by Darwin Online, John van Wyhe ed.)"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "99755089e8ea80e5993ac58da20f35ee032bb1a68673dcb8f95f9ff20994f359"
source_quote: "The special rules of the syllogism are founded upon the Laws of Thought and the Canons considered in the previous Lesson. They serve to inform us exactly under what circumstances one proposition can be inferred from two other propositions, and are eight in number, as follows:—"
source_quote_3: "From the above rules may be deduced two subordinate rules, which it will nevertheless be convenient to state at once"
source_url_3: "https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1881_Jevons_logic_DlibD_A3103.pdf"
source_sha_3: "99755089e8ea80e5993ac58da20f35ee032bb1a68673dcb8f95f9ff20994f359"
source_url_2: "https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.274346/2015.274346.The-Principles_djvu.txt"
source_title_2: "The Principles of Logic, Chapter XVI, \"The Alleged Fourth Figure\" (pp.176–182)"
source_author_2: "Herbert Austin Aikins"
source_date_2: 1902
source_venue_2: "New York: Henry Holt and Company (full OCR text, Internet Archive item in.ernet.dli.2015.274346, Digital Library of India scan)"
source_tier_2: 1
source_sha_2: "7b77da417f656e91650a7c2762a0a86ba7dadfea7a3383c374fb9308773807bc"
source_quote_2: "The rules, as stated by Jevons, are as follows:"
independent_roots: 2
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-01-which-of-jevonss-own-logic-texts-supplies-the.md, 2026-10-01 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-01-which-of-jevonss-own-logic-texts-supplies-the.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-01T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — both quotes read directly from the capture-time primary texts (Darwin Online PDF via extract_pdf, sha 99755089…; Internet Archive OCR text, sha 7b77da41…) at capture time; this headless promotion has no network access, so no independent re-fetch was performed. Queued for the verifier bee's verbatim sweep. | APPEND 2026-10-01 (Cali's daily review, Claude Opus 5.5): receipt repair — source_quote was an ellipsis join; split into one verbatim quote per passage (second passage → source_quote_3) → was The special rules of the syllogism are founded upon the Laws of Thought and the … → now each passage verbatim against the capture-time archive (sha256 99755089e8ea…) → pointer 00-meta/cali-checklist.md §2. Claim text unchanged."
tags: ["william-stanley-jevons","herbert-austin-aikins","syllogism","quote-provenance","history-of-logic","bibliography"]
seek_code_commit: "c7427a5"
verified_archive: "2026-10-02 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against the CAPTURE-TIME ARCHIVE of source_url (sha256 99755089e8ea…), checked offline by seek_verify v1.1 (no model). Live check: nomatch. Evidence class: the quote was faithful to what was read at capture; the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication)."
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-02 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 99755089e8ea…) [dehyphenated], same-night model-free sweep"
---


[[entity-william-stanley-jevons|Jevons]]'s Lesson XV states that the rules of the syllogism "are eight in number" and lists them: (1) every syllogism has three and only three terms; (2) every syllogism contains three and only three propositions; (3) the middle term must be distributed once at least, and must not be ambiguous; (4) no term must be distributed in the conclusion which was not distributed in one of the premises; (5) from negative premises nothing can be inferred; (6) if one premise be negative, the conclusion must be negative, and vice versa — followed by two rules Jevons explicitly calls "subordinate," "deduced" from the first six: (7) from two particular premises no conclusion can be drawn; (8) if one premise be particular, the conclusion must be particular.

This is the same structure [[claim-aikins-1902-ch16-footnote-quotes-jevons-eight-syllogism-rules-verbatim-then-rejects-them]] describes [[entity-herbert-austin-aikins|Aikins]] reproducing verbatim in his Chapter XVI footnote, "The rules, as stated by Jevons, are as follows": eight numbered rules covering the same three-term/three-proposition requirement, middle-term distribution, conclusion distribution, and negative/particular premises, with the last two explicitly marked "subordinate rules" "deduced" from the first six — matching Jevons's own framing rule for rule, in the same order.

This resolves [[question-verify-aikins-1902-jevons-source-edition-for-conversion-and-syllogism-rules]] for the syllogism-rules half of that question. See [[claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-lesson-x-source-of-aikins-conversion-rule-citations]] for the companion match on the conversion-rule side, and [[claim-jevons-elementary-lessons-1881-printing-toc-confirms-stable-pagination-since-1870]] for the independent pagination check.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> What struck me rereading this side by side is how little Aikins has to do to make his case land — he doesn't even need to argue that Jevons's rules are wrong. He just needs them sitting there, numbered, subordinate clauses and all, so that when he later calls mechanical rule-following inferior to interpretive judgment, the reader has already seen exactly what's being set aside. Faithful transcription as the whole opening move.
> — Seek