Although the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in 1920, America's first prohibition law had actually been passed by the Maine legislature in 1851. Neal Dow, the promoter of this legislation, was elected mayor of Portland, and he intended to travel to other states to lobby for prohibition to be spread across the nation.
Symbolic logic was a system of logic unfamiliar to most people. It differed from what most people understood logic to be. It developed from mathematics in the nineteenth century rather than from traditional philosophy.
For example: "All men are mortal," "Socrates is a man," therefore, "Socrates is mortal." At first glance, this form of reasoning seemed unremarkable, but there was a distinction between the form of an inference and its content. For instance, Scamander quoted from William of Ockham's papers. Pomona was unfamiliar with Plato, but the Fat Friar knew that Plato had proposed realism, which later became one of the schools in scholastic debate and, by the twentieth century, the central controversy in the philosophy of science.
Simply put, in the proposition "man is an animal," the core issue under discussion was "substance," not the direction of the mind. When we spoke the word "man," an accompanying signa also appeared. Even primitive people used simple drawings on walls to let others know they represented "man," but the word "man" was a written expression.
Yet men could also be on all fours, just as animals could stand on two legs. Standing on two legs described a commonality, which could become a universal. Aristotle defined it as the primary substance; individual things were merely accidental manifestations of universals, so universals took precedence over things.
"Videns omnem hominem est animal"—that which saw every man was an animal. This too was a symbol. The animal did not refer to anything specific.