CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



scholastic or syllogistic Logic, which professes to 

 lay down all the correct forms of the relation 

 between premises and conclusion. The defect of 

 this logic is in stopping short where it does, or in 

 confining itself to a very small portion of the 

 region of fallacy. When an argument is presented 

 to our consideration, as bearing out some particu- 

 lar conclusion, it may often be necessary to trace 

 back the inductions and abstractions that the pro- 

 positions are made up of, as well as to see that 

 these propositions bear out the conclusion. Thus, 

 let us suppose that the following argument were 

 used against suicide : ' Suicide is an unsocial act, 

 therefore it ought to be treated by society as an 

 offence entailing disgrace upon the memory of the 

 individual.' Like all other steps of deductive 

 reasoning, this must consist of three different 

 propositions, two premises, and a conclusion. 

 One of the premises, called the major, must be 

 a general assertion or affirmation, which must 

 contain the predicate of the conclusion. Thus, in 

 the present case, the major premise is, 'All un- 

 social acts are offences entailing disgrace upon 

 the individual committing them.' The minor 

 premise contains the subject of the conclusion, 

 and is in this case, ' Suicide is an unsocial act.' 

 The conclusion to be established is, 'Suicide does 

 or ought to entail disgrace on the actor.' Now, 

 as far as the form of the reasoning goes, this is 

 perfectly correct. If the first and second affirma- 

 tions or the premises are true, the third is true 

 likewise : a scholastic logician could find no fault 

 with the argument. But it is clear that we ought 

 not to be content with this ; we must carry our 

 scrutiny into the propositions themselves consid- 

 ering each of them to involve an induction or de- 

 duction, and two abstractions ; and we must see 

 that these processes have been correctly performed, 

 or whether they can be verified by the admitted 

 facts of the world. If we take the major premise, 

 ' Unsocial acts are punishable offences,' we find 

 ourselves called upon first to ascertain the exact 

 definition of the class of things here called 

 unsocial acts, or to put into some less ambiguous 

 description the acts meant. Now, when we cast 

 our mind about on the actions referring to society, 

 we find that there are some directly hostile to 

 social interests ; that there are others quite indif- 

 ferent ; and a third class that are not hostile, and 

 are yet not indifferent, simply because men choose 

 to put an artificial importance upon them such 

 as the observance of conventional ceremonial. 

 Now, if unsocial acts mean breaches of the laws 

 enacted for the common interests of society, the 

 argument will- have a totally different turn from 

 what it would take if we mean by these acts 

 things that society has no real concern with. It 

 would be admitted, without further discussion, 

 that anti-social acts are rightly punishable by 

 society. If we were now to pass to the minor 

 premise, ' Suicide is an unsocial act,' meaning 

 thereby an act hostile to the interests of society, 

 a new scrutiny would have to be commenced as 

 to the truth of this conjunction. The terms of 

 the proposition being clearly settled, we have to 

 see whether it agrees with the facts of social 

 workings, that suicide is opposed to any one 

 great social interest, or whether, among the con- 

 sequences or collaterals of this particular act, 

 there is to be found any one or more that con- 

 flict with the good of human society. The natural 



362 



method of proceeding in an instance like the 

 present, would be in the first place to enumerate 

 all the accompaniments that we can find con- 

 nected with the act of suicide in general ; that 

 is, with all acts of suicide, or with the great pro- 

 portion of them. In the second place, we should 

 have to determine whether any of these accom- 

 paniments were among the things that have an 

 antisocial character, or obstruct any of the general 

 interests of society. Nothing less than such a 

 procedure as this is sufficient for the determina- 

 tion of the question raised. 



From such an instance as we have now given, 

 it will be seen that fallacies may lurk in the 

 Deductive, Inductive, and Abstractive steps of an 

 inference, one or all ; and hence the reason for 

 adopting these designations as the heads of a 

 classification of fallacies. An error must exist 

 whenever any one of these processes is insuffi- 

 ciently performed; and to rectify the error, we 

 must revert to the rules for their accurate perform- 

 ance, which are founded on what we have seen 

 to be the essential characters of each process. 



3. A very large class of fallacies is included 

 under the Abuse of Language, which is the instru- 

 ment of the greater part of our reasonings, and of 

 all of them that can come under the province of 

 Logic. Many of these fallacies are not to be dis- 

 tinguished from such as come under the other 

 heads. But Language has certain tendencies of 

 a fallacious kind, that make a class apart from all 

 the rest. It is apt to stand in our minds in the 

 room of the facts that it expresses, and thus to 

 obstruct our view of the realities of the world. 

 Being a powerful instrument for fixing ideas in 

 the mind, it gives equal aid to the false and to the 

 true, and thereby perpetuates the reign of whatever 

 errors have once been clothed in words. We 

 have formerly seen that the use of a general name 

 is a perpetual affirmation of similarity among the 

 things to which it applies. Hence, if a wrong 

 generalisation has been made in any case, or if 

 a certain number of things have been falsely 

 declared to have a common feature, the general 

 name is the instrument of circulating and main- 

 taining the falsehood in the world. Another evil 

 growing out of the nature of Language is con- 

 nected with the tendency that there is to recognise 

 the separate existence of whatever has a separate 

 name. Hence arose the doctrine of Realism, 

 which maintained that abstractions had a distinct 

 and dependent existence, and that concrete objects 

 were actually formed by the union of their abstract 

 constituents. Thus, wisdom, virtue, government, 

 roundness of form, hardness, which have each 

 a distinct name, and are distinguished by the 

 human intellect, were thence supposed to have 

 distinct existence, or could be found apart from 

 the complex objects that we call ' wise,' ' virtuous,' 

 ' round/ ' hardness,' &c. The great scholastic 

 controversy of the middle age turned upon this 

 question, and it was not till the seventeenth 

 century that it was generally admitted that these 

 abstractions had no more than a mere intellectual 

 or verbal separateness of existence. 



As a supplement to the account of the Syllo- 

 gistic or Scholastic Logic given above, we may 

 here present an enumeration of the Fallacies 

 usually treated of in connection with that Logic. 

 These were of a very mixed and various character, 

 some being violations of the legitimate syllogisms, 



