There remain, therefore, as the only cla.s.s of fallacies having properly their seat in deduction, those in which the premises of the ratiocination do not bear out its conclusion; the various cases, in short, of vicious argumentation, provided against by the rules of the syllogism. We shall call these, Fallacies of Ratiocination.
We have thus five distinguishable cla.s.ses of fallacy, which may be expressed in the following synoptic table:--
Fallacies
of Simple Inspection 1. Fallacies _ priori_.
of Inference
from evidence distinctly conceived
Inductive Fallacies 2. Fallacies of Observation.
3. Fallacies of Generalization.
Deductive Fallacies 4. Fallacies of Ratiocination.
from evidence indistinctly conceived 5. Fallacies of Confusion.
3. We must not, however, expect to find that men"s actual errors always, or even commonly, fall so unmistakeably under some one of these cla.s.ses, as to be incapable of being referred to any other. Erroneous arguments do not admit of such a sharply cut division as valid arguments do. An argument fully stated, with all its steps distinctly set out, in language not susceptible of misunderstanding, must, if it be erroneous, be so in some one of these five modes unequivocally: or indeed of the first four, since the fifth, on such a supposition, would vanish. But it is not in the nature of bad reasoning to express itself thus unambiguously. When a sophist, whether he is imposing on himself or attempting to impose on others, can be constrained to throw his sophistry into so distinct a form, it needs, in a large proportion of cases, no further exposure.
In all arguments, everywhere but in the schools, some of the links are suppressed; _ fortiori_ when the arguer either intends to deceive, or is a lame and inexpert thinker, little accustomed to bring his reasoning processes to any test: and it is in those steps of the reasoning which are made in this tacit and half-conscious, or even wholly unconscious manner, that the error oftenest lurks. In order to detect the fallacy, the proposition thus silently a.s.sumed must be supplied; but the reasoner, most likely, has never really asked himself what he was a.s.suming: his confuter, unless permitted to extort it from him by the Socratic mode of interrogation, must himself judge what the suppressed premise ought to be in order to support the conclusion. And hence, in the words of Archbishop Whately, "it must be often a matter of doubt, or rather, of arbitrary choice, not only to which genus each _kind_ of fallacy should be referred, but even to which kind to refer any one _individual_ fallacy; for since, in any course of argument, _one_ premise is usually suppressed, it frequently happens in the case of a fallacy, that the hearers are left to the alternative of supplying _either_ a premise which is _not true_, or _else_, one which _does not prove_ the conclusion: _e. g._ if a man expatiates on the distress of the country, and thence argues that the government is tyrannical, we must suppose him to a.s.sume _either_ that "every distressed country is under a tyranny," which is a manifest falsehood, _or_ merely that "every country under a tyranny is distressed," which, however true, proves nothing, the middle term being undistributed." The former would be ranked, in our distribution, among fallacies of generalization, the latter among those of ratiocination. "Which are we to suppose the speaker meant us to understand? Surely" (if he understood himself) "just whichever each of his hearers might happen to prefer: some might a.s.sent to the false premise; others allow the unsound syllogism."
Almost all fallacies, therefore, might in strictness be brought under our fifth cla.s.s, Fallacies of Confusion. A fallacy can seldom be absolutely referred to any of the other cla.s.ses; we can only say, that if all the links were filled up which should be capable of being supplied in a valid argument, it would either stand thus (forming a fallacy of one cla.s.s), or thus (a fallacy of another); or at furthest we may say, that the conclusion is most _likely_ to have originated in a fallacy of such and such a cla.s.s. Thus in the ill.u.s.tration just quoted, the error committed may be traced with most probability to a fallacy of generalization; that of mistaking an uncertain mark, or piece of evidence, for a certain one; concluding from an effect to some one of its possible causes, when there are others which would have been equally capable of producing it.
Yet, though the five cla.s.ses run into each other, and a particular error often seems to be arbitrarily a.s.signed to one of them rather than to any of the rest, there is considerable use in so distinguishing them. We shall find it convenient to set apart, as Fallacies of Confusion, those of which confusion is the most obvious characteristic; in which no other cause can be a.s.signed for the mistake committed, than neglect or inability to state the question properly, and to apprehend the evidence with definiteness and precision. In the remaining four cla.s.ses I shall place not only the cases in which the evidence is clearly seen to be what it is, and yet a wrong conclusion drawn from it, but also those in which, although there be confusion, the confusion is not the sole cause of the error, but there is some shadow of a ground for it in the nature of the evidence itself. And in distributing these cases of partial confusion among the four cla.s.ses, I shall, when there can be any hesitation as to the precise seat of the fallacy, suppose it to be in that part of the process in which, from the nature of the case, and the tendencies of the human mind, an error would in the particular circ.u.mstances be the most probable.
After these observations we shall proceed, without further preamble, to consider the five cla.s.ses in their order.
CHAPTER III.
FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION; OR _ PRIORI_ FALLACIES.
1. The tribe of errors of which we are to treat in the first instance, are those in which no actual inference takes place at all: the proposition (it cannot in such cases be called a conclusion) being embraced, not as proved, but as requiring no proof; as a self-evident truth; or else as having such intrinsic verisimilitude, that external evidence not in itself amounting to proof, is sufficient in aid of the antecedent presumption.
An attempt to treat this subject comprehensively would be a transgression of the bounds prescribed to this work, since it would necessitate the inquiry which, more than any other, is the grand question of what is called metaphysics, viz. What are the propositions which may reasonably be received without proof? That there must be some such propositions all are agreed, since there cannot be an infinite series of proof, a chain suspended from nothing. But to determine what these propositions are, is the _opus magnum_ of the more recondite mental philosophy. Two princ.i.p.al divisions of opinion on the subject have divided the schools of philosophy from its first dawn. The one recognises no ultimate premises but the facts of our subjective consciousness; our sensations, emotions, intellectual states of mind, and volitions. These, and whatever by strict rules of induction can be derived from these, it is possible, according to this theory, for us to know; of all else we must remain in ignorance. The opposite school hold that there are other existences, suggested indeed to our minds by these subjective phenomena, but not inferrible from them, by any process either of deduction or of induction; which, however, we must, by the const.i.tution of our mental nature recognise as realities; and realities, too, of a higher order than the phenomena of our consciousness, being the efficient causes and necessary substrata of all Phenomena. Among these ent.i.ties they reckon Substances, whether matter or spirit; from the dust under our feet to the soul, and from that to Deity. All these, according to them, are preternatural or supernatural beings, having no likeness in experience, though experience is entirely a manifestation of their agency. Their existence, together with more or less of the laws to which they conform in their operations, are, on this theory, apprehended and recognised as real by the mind itself intuitively: experience (whether in the form of sensation or of mental feeling) having no other part in the matter than as affording facts which are consistent with these necessary postulates of reason, and which are explained and accounted for by them.
As it is foreign to the purpose of the present treatise to decide between these conflicting theories, we are precluded from inquiring into the existence, or defining the extent and limits, of knowledge _ priori_, and from characterizing the kind of correct a.s.sumption which the fallacy of incorrect a.s.sumption, now under consideration, simulates.
Yet since it is allowed on both sides that such a.s.sumptions are often made improperly, we may find it practicable, without entering into the ultimate metaphysical grounds of the discussion, to state some speculative propositions, and suggest some practical cautions, respecting the forms in which such unwarranted a.s.sumptions are most likely to be made.
2. In the cases in which, according to the thinkers of the ontological school, the mind apprehends, by intuition, things, and the laws of things, not cognizable by our sensitive faculty; those intuitive, or supposed intuitive, perceptions are undistinguishable from what the opposite school are accustomed to call ideas of the mind. When they themselves say that they perceive the things by an immediate act of a faculty given for that purpose by their Creator, it would be said of them by their opponents that they find an idea or conception in their own minds, and from the idea or conception, infer the existence of a corresponding objective reality. Nor would this be an unfair statement, but a mere version into other words of the account given by many of themselves; and one to which the more clear-sighted of them might, and generally do, without hesitation, subscribe. Since, therefore, in the cases which lay the strongest claims to be examples of knowledge _ priori_, the mind proceeds from the idea of a thing to the reality of the thing itself, we cannot be surprised by finding that illicit a.s.sumptions _ priori_ consist in doing the same thing erroneously: in mistaking subjective facts for objective, laws of the percipient mind for laws of the perceived object, properties of the ideas or conceptions for properties of the things conceived.
Accordingly, a large proportion of the erroneous thinking which exists in the world proceeds on a tacit a.s.sumption, that the same order must obtain among the objects in nature which obtains among our ideas of them. That if we always think of two things together, the two things must always exist together. That if one thing makes us think of another as preceding or following it, that other must precede it or follow it in actual fact. And conversely, that when we cannot conceive two things together they cannot exist together, and that their combination may, without further evidence, be rejected from the list of possible occurrences.
Few persons, I am inclined to think, have reflected on the great extent to which this fallacy has prevailed, and prevails, in the actual beliefs and actions of mankind. For a first ill.u.s.tration of it, we may refer to a large cla.s.s of popular superst.i.tions. If any one will examine in what circ.u.mstances most of those things agree, which in different ages and by different portions of the human race have been considered as omens or prognostics of some interesting event, whether calamitous or fortunate; they will be found very generally characterized by this peculiarity, that they cause the mind to _think_ of that, of which they are therefore supposed to forebode the actual occurrence. "Talk of the devil, and he will appear," has pa.s.sed into a proverb. Talk of the devil, that is, raise the idea, and the reality will follow. In times when the appearance of that personage in a visible form was thought to be no unfrequent occurrence, it has doubtless often happened to persons of vivid imagination and susceptible nerves, that talking of the devil has caused them to fancy they saw him; as, even in our more incredulous days, listening to ghost stories predisposes us to see ghosts; and thus, as a prop to the _ priori_ fallacy, there might come to be added an auxiliary fallacy of mal-observation, with one of false generalization grounded on it. Fallacies of different orders often herd or cl.u.s.ter together in this fashion, one smoothing the way for another. But the origin of the superst.i.tion is evidently that which we have a.s.signed. In like manner it has been universally considered unlucky to speak of misfortune. The day on which any calamity happened has been considered an unfortunate day, and there has been a feeling everywhere, and in some nations a religious obligation, against transacting any important business on that day. For on such a day our thoughts are likely to be of misfortune. For a similar reason, any untoward occurrence in commencing an undertaking has been considered ominous of failure; and often, doubtless, has really contributed to it, by putting the persons engaged in the enterprise more or less out of spirits: but the belief has equally prevailed where the disagreeable circ.u.mstance was, independently of superst.i.tion, too insignificant to depress the spirits by any influence of its own. All know the story of Csar"s accidentally stumbling in the act of landing on the African coast; and the presence of mind with which he converted the direful presage into a favourable one by exclaiming, "Africa, I embrace thee." Such omens, it is true, were often conceived as warnings of the future, given by a friendly or a hostile deity; but this very superst.i.tion grew out of a pre-existing tendency; the G.o.d was supposed to send, as an indication of what was to come, something which people were already disposed to consider in that light. So in the case of lucky or unlucky names. Herodotus tells us how the Greeks, on the way to Mycale, were encouraged in their enterprise by the arrival of a deputation from Samos, one of the members of which was named Hegesistratus, the leader of armies.
Cases may be pointed out in which something which could have no real effect but to make persons _think_ of misfortune, was regarded not merely as a prognostic, but as something approaching to an actual cause of it. The _e?f?e?_ of the Greeks, and _favete linguis_, or _bona verba quso_, of the Romans, evince the care with which they endeavoured to repress the utterance of any word expressive or suggestive of ill fortune; not from notions of delicate politeness, to which their general mode of conduct and feeling had very little reference, but from _bon fide_ alarm lest the event so suggested to the imagination should in fact occur. Some vestige of a similar superst.i.tion has been known to exist among uneducated persons even in our own day: it is thought an unchristian thing to talk of, or suppose, the death of any person while he is alive. It is known how careful the Romans were to avoid, by an indirect mode of speech, the utterance of any word directly expressive of death or other calamity: how instead of _mortuus est_ they said _vixit_; and "be the event fortunate or _otherwise_" instead of _adverse_. The name Maleventum, of which Salmasius so sagaciously detected the Thessalian origin (_?a??e??_, _?a????t??_), they changed into the highly propitious denomination, Beneventum; Egesta into Segesta; and Epid.a.m.nus, a name so interesting in its a.s.sociations to the reader of Thucydides, they exchanged for Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word suggestive of _d.a.m.num_ or detriment.
"If an hare cross the highway," says Sir Thomas Browne,[2] "there are few above threescore that are not perplexed thereat; which notwithstanding is but an augurial terror, according to that received expression, _Inauspicatum dat iter oblatus lepus_. And the ground of the conceit was probably no greater than this, that a fearful animal pa.s.sing by us portended unto us something to be feared; as upon the like consideration the meeting of a fox presaged some future imposture." Such superst.i.tions as these last must be the result of study; they are too recondite for natural or spontaneous growth. But when the attempt was once made to construct a science of predictions, any a.s.sociation, though ever so faint or remote, by which an object could be connected in however far-fetched a manner with ideas either of prosperity or of danger and misfortune, was enough to determine its being cla.s.sed among good or evil omens.
An example of rather a different kind from any of these, but falling under the same principle, is the famous attempt on which so much labour and ingenuity were expended by the alchemists, to make gold potable. The motive to this was a conceit that potable gold could be no other than the universal medicine: and why gold? Because it was so precious. It must have all marvellous properties as a physical substance, because the mind was already accustomed to marvel at it.
From a similar feeling, "every substance," says Dr. Paris,[3] "whose origin is involved in mystery, has at different times been eagerly applied to the purposes of medicine. Not long since, one of those showers which are now known to consist of the excrements of insects, fell in the north of Italy; the inhabitants regarded it as manna, or some supernatural panacea, and they swallowed it with such avidity, that it was only by extreme address that a small quant.i.ty was obtained for a chemical examination." The superst.i.tion, in this instance, though doubtless partly of a religious character, probably in part also arose from the prejudice that a wonderful thing must of course have wonderful properties.
3. The instances of _ priori_ fallacy which we have hitherto cited belong to the cla.s.s of vulgar errors, and do not now, nor in any but a rude age ever could, impose upon minds of any considerable attainments.
But those to which we are about to proceed, have been, and still are, all but universally prevalent among thinkers. The same disposition to give objectivity to a law of the mind--to suppose that what is true of our ideas of things must be true of the things themselves--exhibits itself in many of the most accredited modes of philosophical investigation, both on physical and on metaphysical subjects. In one of its most undisguised manifestations, it embodies itself in two maxims, which lay claim to axiomatic truth: Things which we cannot think of together, cannot coexist; and Things which we cannot help thinking of together, must coexist. I am not sure that the maxims were ever expressed in these precise words, but the history both of philosophy and of popular opinions abounds with exemplifications of both forms of the doctrine.
To begin with the latter of them: Things which we cannot think of except together, must exist together. This is a.s.sumed in the generally received and accredited mode of reasoning which concludes that A must accompany B in point of fact, because "it is involved in the idea." Such thinkers do not reflect that the idea, being a result of abstraction, ought to conform to the facts, and cannot make the facts conform to it. The argument is at most admissible as an appeal to authority; a surmise, that what is now part of the idea, must, before it became so, have been found by previous inquirers in the facts. Nevertheless, the philosopher who more than all others made professions of rejecting authority, Descartes, constructed his system on this very basis. His favourite device for arriving at truth, even in regard to outward things, was by looking into his own mind for it. "Credidi me," says his celebrated maxim, "pro regul generali sumere posse, omne id quod vald dilucid et distinct concipiebam, verum esse;" whatever can be very clearly conceived, must certainly exist; that is, as he afterwards explains it, if the idea includes existence. And on this ground he infers that geometrical figures really exist, because they can be distinctly conceived. Whenever existence is "involved in an idea," a thing conformable to the idea must really exist; which is as much as to say, whatever the idea contains must have its equivalent in the thing; and what we are not able to leave out of the idea cannot be absent from the reality.[4] This a.s.sumption pervades the philosophy not only of Descartes, but of all the thinkers who received their impulse mainly from him, in particular the two most remarkable among them, Spinoza and Leibnitz, from whom the modern German metaphysical philosophy is essentially an emanation. I am indeed disposed to think that the fallacy now under consideration has been the cause of two-thirds of the bad philosophy, and especially of the bad metaphysics, which the human mind has never ceased to produce. Our general ideas contain nothing but what has been put into them, either by our pa.s.sive experience, or by our active habits of thought; and the metaphysicians in all ages, who have attempted to construct the laws of the universe by reasoning from our supposed necessities of thought, have always proceeded, and only could proceed, by laboriously finding in their own minds what they themselves had formerly put there, and evolving from their ideas of things what they had first _involved_ in those ideas. In this way all deeply-rooted opinions and feelings are enabled to create apparent demonstrations of their truth and reasonableness, as it were out of their own substance.
The other form of the fallacy; Things which we cannot think of together cannot exist together,--including as one of its branches, that what we cannot think of as existing cannot exist at all,--may thus be briefly expressed: Whatever is inconceivable must be false.
Against this prevalent doctrine I have sufficiently argued in a former Book,[5] and nothing is required in this place but examples. It was long held that Antipodes were impossible because of the difficulty which was found in conceiving persons with their heads in the same direction as our feet. And it was one of the received arguments against the Copernican system, that we cannot conceive so great a void s.p.a.ce as that system supposes to exist in the celestial regions. When men"s imaginations had always been used to conceive the stars as firmly set in solid spheres, they naturally found much difficulty in imagining them in so different, and, as it doubtless appeared to them, so precarious a situation. But they had no right to mistake the limitation (whether natural, or, as it in fact proved, only artificial) of their own faculties, for an inherent limitation of the possible modes of existence in the universe.
It may be said in objection, that the error in these cases was in the minor premise, not the major; an error of fact, not of principle; that it did not consist in supposing that what is inconceivable cannot be true, but in supposing antipodes to be inconceivable, when present experience proves that they can be conceived. Even if this objection were allowed, and the proposition that what is inconceivable cannot be true were suffered to remain unquestioned as a speculative truth, it would be a truth on which no practical consequence could ever be founded, since, on this showing, it is impossible to affirm of any proposition, not being a contradiction in terms, that it is inconceivable. Antipodes were really, not fict.i.tiously, inconceivable to our ancestors: they are indeed conceivable to us; and as the limits of our power of conception have been so largely extended, by the extension of our experience and the more varied exercise of our imagination, so may posterity find many combinations perfectly conceivable to them which are inconceivable to us. But, as beings of limited experience, we must always and necessarily have limited conceptive powers; while it does not by any means follow that the same limitation obtains in the possibilities of nature, nor even in her actual manifestations.
Rather more than a century and a half ago it was a scientific maxim, disputed by no one, and which no one deemed to require any proof, that "a thing cannot act where it is not." With this weapon the Cartesians waged a formidable war against the theory of gravitation, which, according to them, involving so obvious an absurdity, must be rejected _in limine_: the sun could not possibly act upon the earth, not being there. It was not surprising that the adherents of the old systems of astronomy should urge this objection against the new; but the false a.s.sumption imposed equally on Newton himself, who in order to turn the edge of the objection, imagined a subtle ether which filled up the s.p.a.ce between the sun and the earth, and by its intermediate agency was the proximate cause of the phenomena of gravitation. "It is inconceivable,"
said Newton, in one of his letters to Dr. Bentley,[6] "that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter _without mutual contact_.... That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act on another, at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who in philosophical matters has a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it." This pa.s.sage should be hung up in the cabinet of every cultivator of science who is ever tempted to p.r.o.nounce a fact impossible because it appears to him inconceivable. In our own day one would be more tempted, though with equal injustice, to reverse the concluding observation, and consider the seeing any absurdity at all in a thing so simple and natural, to be what really marks the absence of "a competent faculty of thinking." No one now feels any difficulty in conceiving gravity to be, as much as any other property is, "inherent, and essential to matter," nor finds the comprehension of it facilitated in the smallest degree by the supposition of an ether (though some recent inquirers do give this as an explanation of it); nor thinks it at all incredible that the celestial bodies can and do act where they, in actual bodily presence, are not.
To us it is not more wonderful that bodies should act upon one another "without mutual contact," than that they should do so when in contact; we are familiar with both these facts, and we find them equally inexplicable, but equally easy to believe. To Newton, the one, because his imagination was familiar with it, appeared natural and a matter of course, while the other, for the contrary reason, seemed too absurd to be credited.
It is strange that any one, after such a warning, should rely implicitly on the evidence _ priori_ of such propositions as these, that matter cannot think; that s.p.a.ce, or extension, is infinite; that nothing can be made out of nothing (_ex nihilo nihil fit_). Whether these propositions are true or not this is not the place to determine, nor even whether the questions are soluble by the human faculties. But such doctrines are no more self-evident truths, than the ancient maxim that a thing cannot act where it is not, which probably is not now believed by any educated person in Europe.[7] Matter cannot think; why? because we _cannot conceive_ thought to be annexed to any arrangement of material particles. s.p.a.ce is infinite, because having never known any part of it which had not other parts beyond it, we _cannot conceive_ an absolute termination. _Ex nihilo nihil fit_, because having never known any physical product without a pre-existing physical material, we _cannot_, or think we cannot, _imagine_ a creation out of nothing. But these things may in themselves be as conceivable as gravitation without an intervening medium, which Newton thought too great an absurdity for any person of a competent faculty of philosophical thinking to admit: and even supposing them not conceivable, this, for aught we know, may be merely one of the limitations of our very limited minds, and not in nature at all.
No writer has more directly identified himself with the fallacy now under consideration, or has embodied it in more distinct terms, than Leibnitz. In his view, unless a thing was not merely conceivable, but even explainable, it could not exist in nature. All _natural_ phenomena, according to him, must be susceptible of being accounted for _ priori_.
The only facts of which no explanation could be given but the will of G.o.d, were miracles properly so called. "Je reconnais," says he,[8]
"qu"il n"est pas permis de nier ce qu"on n"entend pas; mais j"ajoute qu"on a droit de nier (au moins dans l"ordre naturel) ce qui absolument n"est point intelligible ni explicable. Je soutiens aussi ... qu"enfin la conception des cratures n"est pas la mesure du pouvoir de Dieu, mais que leur conceptivit, ou force de concevoir, est la mesure du pouvoir de la nature, tout ce qui est conforme l"ordre naturel pouvant tre conu ou entendu par quelque crature."
Not content with a.s.suming that nothing can be true which we are unable to conceive, scientific inquirers have frequently given a still further extension to the doctrine, and held that, even of things not altogether inconceivable, that which we can conceive with the greatest ease is likeliest to be true. It was long an admitted axiom, and is not yet entirely discredited, that "nature always acts by the simplest means,"
_i.e._ by those which are most easily conceivable.[9] A large proportion of all the errors ever committed in the investigation of the laws of nature, have arisen from the a.s.sumption that the most familiar explanation or hypothesis must be the truest. One of the most instructive facts in scientific history is the pertinacity with which the human mind clung to the belief that the heavenly bodies must move in circles, or be carried round by the revolution of spheres; merely because those were in themselves the simplest suppositions: though, to make them accord with the facts which were ever contradicting them more and more, it became necessary to add sphere to sphere and circle to circle, until the original simplicity was converted into almost inextricable complication.
4. We pa.s.s to another _ priori_ fallacy or natural prejudice, allied to the former, and originating as that does, in the tendency to presume an exact correspondence between the laws of the mind and those of things external to it. The fallacy may be enunciated in this general form--Whatever can be thought of apart exists apart: and its most remarkable manifestation consists in the personification of abstractions. Mankind in all ages have had a strong propensity to conclude that wherever there is a name, there must be a distinguishable separate ent.i.ty corresponding to the name; and every complex idea which the mind has formed for itself by operating upon its conceptions of individual things, was considered to have an outward objective reality answering to it. Fate, Chance, Nature, Time, s.p.a.ce, were real beings, nay, even G.o.ds. If the a.n.a.lysis of qualities in the earlier part of this work be correct, names of qualities and names of substances stand for the very same sets of facts or phenomena; _whiteness_ and _a white thing_ are only different phrases, required by convenience for speaking of the same external fact under different relations. Not such, however, was the notion which this verbal distinction suggested of old, either to the vulgar or to the scientific. Whiteness was an ent.i.ty, inhering or sticking in the white substance: and so of all other qualities. So far was this carried, that even concrete general terms were supposed to be, not names of indefinite numbers of individual substances, but names of a peculiar kind of ent.i.ties termed Universal Substances. Because we can think and speak of man in general, that is, of all persons in so far as possessing the common attributes of the species, without fastening our thoughts permanently on some one individual person; therefore man in general was supposed to be, not an aggregate of individual persons, but an abstract or universal man, distinct from these.
It may be imagined what havoc metaphysicians trained in these habits made with philosophy, when they came to the largest generalizations of all. _Substanti Secund_ of any kind were bad enough, but such Substanti Secund as _t? ??_, for example, and _t? ??_, standing for peculiar ent.i.ties supposed to be inherent in all things which _exist_, or which are said to be _one_, were enough to put an end to all intelligible discussion; especially since, with a just perception that the truths which philosophy pursues are _general_ truths, it was soon laid down that these general substances were the only subjects of science, being immutable, while individual substances cognizable by the senses, being in a perpetual flux, could not be the subject of real knowledge. This misapprehension of the import of general language const.i.tutes Mysticism, a word so much oftener written and spoken than understood. Whether in the Vedas, in the Platonists, or in the Hegelians, mysticism is neither more nor less than ascribing objective existence to the subjective creations of our own faculties, to ideas or feelings of the mind; and believing that by watching and contemplating these ideas of its own making, it can read in them what takes place in the world without.
5. Proceeding with the enumeration of _ priori_ fallacies, and endeavouring to arrange them with as much reference as possible to their natural affinities, we come to another, which is also nearly allied to the fallacy preceding the last, standing in the same relation to one variety of it as the fallacy last mentioned does to the other. This, too, represents nature as under incapacities corresponding to those of our intellect; but instead of only a.s.serting that nature cannot do a thing because we cannot conceive it done, goes the still greater length of averring that nature does a particular thing, on the sole ground that we can see no reason why she should not. Absurd as this seems when so plainly stated, it is a received principle among scientific authorities for demonstrating _ priori_ the laws of physical phenomena. A phenomenon must follow a certain law, because we see no reason why it should deviate from that law in one way rather than in another. This is called the Principle of the Sufficient Reason;[10] and by means of it philosophers often flatter themselves that they are able to establish, without any appeal to experience, the most general truths of experimental physics.
Take, for example, two of the most elementary of all laws, the law of inertia and the first law of motion. A body at rest cannot, it is affirmed, begin to move unless acted upon by some external force: because, if it did, it must either move up or down, forward or backward, and so forth; but if no outward force acts upon it, there can be _no reason_ for its moving up rather than down, or down rather than up, &c., _ergo_, it will not move at all.
This reasoning I conceive to be entirely fallacious, as indeed Dr.
Brown, in his treatise on Cause and Effect, has shown with great acuteness and justness of thought. We have before remarked, that almost every fallacy may be referred to different genera by different modes of filling up the suppressed steps; and this particular one may, at our option, be brought under _pet.i.tio principii_. It supposes that nothing can be a "sufficient reason" for a body"s moving in one particular direction, except some external force. But this is the very thing to be proved. Why not some _internal_ force? Why not the law of the thing"s own nature? Since these philosophers think it necessary to prove the law of inertia, they of course do not suppose _it_ to be self-evident; they must, therefore, be of opinion that, previously to all proof, the supposition of a body"s moving by internal impulse is an admissible hypothesis; but if so, why is not the hypothesis also admissible, that the internal impulse acts naturally in some one particular direction, not in another? If spontaneous motion might have been the law of matter, why not spontaneous motion towards the sun, towards the earth, or towards the zenith? Why not, as the ancients supposed, towards a particular place in the universe, appropriated to each particular kind of substance? Surely it is not allowable to say that spontaneity of motion is credible in itself, but not credible if supposed to take place in any determinate direction.
Indeed, if any one chose to a.s.sert that all bodies when uncontrolled set out in a direct line towards the north pole, he might equally prove his point by the principle of the Sufficient Reason. By what right is it a.s.sumed that a state of rest is the particular state which cannot be deviated from without special cause? Why not a state of motion, and of some particular sort of motion? Why may we not say that the natural state of a horse left to himself is to amble, because otherwise he must either trot, gallop, or stand still, and because we know no reason why he should do one of these rather than another? If this is to be called an unfair use of the "sufficient reason," and the other a fair one, there must be a tacit a.s.sumption that a state of rest is more natural to a horse than a state of ambling. If this means that it is the state which the animal will a.s.sume when left to himself, that is the very point to be proved; and if it does not mean this, it can only mean that a state of rest is the simplest state, and therefore the most likely to prevail in nature, which is one of the fallacies or natural prejudices we have already examined.