In East of Eden, John Steinbeck asserts that since individuals can be born with physical deformities, then likewise individuals can be born with malformed souls. This statement follows the logical argument style of modus ponens, which states that if one statement in an argument is true, then the other must likewise be true. Therefore following this premise, Steinbeck’s argument is valid. His argument is likewise supported by quotations from East of Eden one such quotation is “Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have…show more content… These ideas only exist in contradistinction to the higher level distal cause of Steinbeck’s ideology, the Christian Bible. This quotation shows Steinbeck’s idea of how a malformed soul could communicate with normal people. “When I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true. The trouble is that since we cannot know what she wanted, we will never know whether or not she got it. If rather than running toward something, she ran away from something, we can’t know whether she escaped. Who knows but that she tried to tell someone or everyone what she was like but could not, for lack of a common language. Her life may have been her language, formal, developed, indecipherable.” This quotation shows Steinbeck’s ideology toward “monsters” in that since people do not know what if anything these “monsters” want people cannot wholly condemn them or their behavior, as this may be nothing more than an attempt to