This formulation indicates not only Galen’s commitment to the demonstrative-syllogistic method of presentation, but also some of the problems that arise from that commitment. First, if we consider this syllogism in the light of the conceptual features outlined above, we would expect the first premiss to be, or to result from, a proposition evident to reason; that is to say, this premiss should be either self-evident or follow directly from the accepted nature, or definition, of hēgemonikon. The second premiss, then, contributes the results of some empirical observation—something evident to sense-perception. The conclusion will follow inescapably from the conjunction of the two. But can the first premiss here be regarded as definitional or analytic in the required sense? The nerves are not, surely, part of an accepted definition or common conception of what the hēgemonikon is in its very nature—or at least, could only become so after a considerable length of argument, itself involving empirical inputs and various forms of reasoning (for example from plausibility and from analogy). Nor could one say, conversely, that the statement is evident to the senses: that would be to conflate a statement of empirical information with a statement derived in abstract terms from one of our fundamental conceptions (the nature of the hēgemonikon), as well as to trespass on the domain of the second premiss in this particular syllogism, for it is this that contains the result of the anatomical and physiological observations in animals.