ERROR AND FALLACIES 323 



the fallacy under consideration ; but the violation of the former 

 demand involves a corresponding fallacy, which might be called 

 Undue Rejection of Axioms. The same considerations apply to 

 both mistakes ; and when we set them down as logical fallacies 

 we assume, of course, that the intellect, the faculty which appre 

 hends truth and estimates evidence, is essentially similar in all 

 normal human beings; that it is similarly affected in all by the 

 same kind and degree of evidence ; that it is, therefore, similarly 

 impelled in all to assent to really self-evident truths. In a word, 

 we assume that a knowable reality forms the object of human 

 science, and that all normally constituted minds behave in the 

 same way towards this reality. This assumption, itself, is not, 

 perhaps, an axiomatic truth, but is rather one of those postulates 

 or assumptions which are indispensable to all research, and 

 which are justified only by actual human experience. The only 

 &quot; proof&quot; of the contention that man can discover some truths 

 with certitude, lies in the fact that he has discovered some ; and 

 to doubt man s capacity in this regard would be to paralyse the 

 mind, and so destroy completely the path to any truth what 

 soever. 



But, granting that man can discover truth, and, consequently, 

 that some truths are really self-evident to all normal minds, the 

 question as to which truths are really axioms, and which are 

 not, is a grave and momentous question. While no one has 

 ever seriously doubted the self-evident character of the funda 

 mental laws of thought, and of certain abstract 1 principles of 

 mathematics and metaphysics, there has always existed an 

 abundance of controversy as to the ultimate significance of such 

 abstract truths of the ideal order, when applied to the concrete data 

 of sense experience for the purpose of obtaining a rational inter 

 pretation of the universe in which we live (224, 229-32). 



The settlement of these controversies, the elimination of errors as to which 

 judgments are self-evident axioms, which are only postulates justifiable by 

 experience, which are even unjustifiable, erroneous, or misleading, assumptions 

 all this belongs to epistemology, and not to logic ; though, in our treat 

 ment of Induction, Demonstration, and Scientific Explanation, we have been 

 afforded opportunities of glancing at some of the conflicting philosophies in 

 which the discussion of these problems has issued. That view of the universe, 

 which is embodied in materialism, materialistic monism, phenomenism, 

 sensism, positivism, agnosticism, apparently accepts, as an indisputable truth 

 or axiom, the false and unjustifiable assumption that whatever transcends the 

 scope and range of our sense faculties is unreal, worthless, and inadmissible. 



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