306 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



No. Do two? No. . . . Do two million? &quot; This ex 

 ample gave the name sorites to this class of fallacy among the 

 Greek sophists. Exactly similar is the example called the calvus : 

 &quot;Does pulling one hair from a man s head make him bald? 

 No. Does pulling two? &quot; etc. They may be regarded as 

 examples of the fallacy of composition. Here is an instructive 

 example of the fallacy of composition, from John Stuart Mill s 

 work on Utilitarianism : J &quot; No reason can be given why the 

 general happiness is desirable, except that each person, as far as 

 he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, 

 however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof the case 

 admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness 

 is a good : that each person s happiness is a good to that person, 

 and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of 

 all persons &quot;. Apart from all the ambiguities (in the terms 

 &quot; good,&quot; &quot; desirable,&quot; &quot; happiness &quot;) which make the reasoning 

 in this passage worthless, it is also vitiated by the fallacy of 

 arguing that because A desires his own happiness (or what is 

 &quot; good &quot; to himself*), and B his own, and C his own . . . there 

 fore A desires the happiness of (or what is &quot; good &quot; to) B, C, D 

 . . . (as well as his own), and similarly B, and similarly C . . . ; 

 and that therefore the general happiness is desired by all, and is 

 therefore a &quot; good &quot; to all. 



(d] ACCENTUS. By the fallacy of accent (or prosody} Aristotle 

 meant the mistake of using a wrong tonic accent, or stress of 

 the voice, in pronouncing the written Greek word : the written 

 language had, in his time, no signs to mark the differences of stress 

 and breathing in speech. The same mistake can arise in Latin 

 from giving a wrong quantity in pronouncing the written word : 

 &quot; Omne malum est fugiendum ; pomum est malum ; ergo fugien- 

 dum &quot;. It was distinguished from equivocation, perhaps because 

 words differently pronounced, though spelled the same way, are 

 scarcely the same word ; and the ambiguity was regarded as con 

 fined to written language. It is nowadays generally understood 

 to embrace all ambiguities of meaning which turn on change of 

 emphasis in speech: the commandment &quot;Thou shalt not bear 

 false witness against thy neighbour &quot; may be made to bear dif 

 ferent meanings according to the word emphasized. De Morgan 

 would regard as an instance of this fallacy the introduction (with 

 out notice), into a quotation, of italics not in the original, or the 



1 P- 53. 



