408 FALLACIES. 



resistance in this particular case were doing evil or not. Or 

 again, by way of disproving the assertion of the right of 

 private judgment in religion, one may hear a grave argument 

 to prove that it is impossible every one can be right in his 

 judgment. &quot; 



The works of controversial writers are seldom free from 

 this fallacy. The attempts, for instance, to disprove the 

 population doctrines of Malthus, have been mostly cases of 

 ignoratio elenchi. Malthus has been supposed to be refuted 

 if it could be shown that in some countries or ages popula 

 tion has been nearly stationary; as if he had asserted that 

 population always increases in a given ratio, or had not 

 expressly declared that it increases only in so far as it is not 

 restrained by prudence, or kept down by poverty and disease. 

 Or, perhaps, a collection of facts is produced to prove that 

 in some one country the people are better off with a dense 

 population than they are in another country with a thin one ; 

 or that the people have become more numerous and better 

 off at the same time. As if the assertion were that a dense 

 population could not possibly be well off: as if it were not part 

 of the very doctrine, and essential to it, that where there is a 

 more abundant capital there may be a greater population 

 without any increase of poverty, or even with a diminution 

 of it. 



The favourite argument against Berkeley s theory of the 

 non-existence of matter, and the most popularly effective, next 

 to a &quot; grin&quot;* an argument, moreover, which is not con 

 fined to &quot; coxcombs/ nor to men like Samuel Johnson, 

 whose greatly overrated ability certainly did not lie in the 

 direction of metaphysical speculation, but is the stock argu 

 ment of the Scotch school of metaphysicians is a palpable 

 ignoratio elenchi. The argument is perhaps as frequently 

 expressed by gesture as by words, and one of its commonest 

 forms consists in knocking a stick against the ground. This 

 short and easy confutation overlooks the fact, that in denying 

 matter, Berkeley did not deny anything to which our senses 



* &quot;And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin.&quot; 



