Mr. Buckles Fallacies. 167 



Bat this intimate connection of the two should 

 not lead us to confound the one with the other ; 

 and we fall into a grave error whenever we do so. 

 Once more we repeat, it is the province of emo- 

 tion to feel, of the intellect to think and form 

 propositions. Scientifically speaking, therefore, 

 all truths are intellectual; and there can be no 

 such thing as a " moral truth." 



But there is another sense in which the expres- 

 sion " moral truths " may be taken. It may mean 

 " truths relative to morality." Mr. Buckle gener- 

 ally uses it in this sense, but he so often con- 

 founds " moral truths " with " moral feelings " 

 that the foregoing remarks were rendered neces- 

 sary to a right understanding of his argument. 



Our author then declares that the truths which 

 we possess relating to morality have not changed 

 for thousands of years. No, they have not. 

 Neither have " intellectual truths." A truth, 

 once established, never changes, cannot change; 

 otherwise it would be no truth, but a falsehood. 

 Take, for example, the law of gravitation : " All 

 bodies in the universe attract each other with 

 forces directly proportional to their masses, and 

 inversely proportional to the squares of their dis- 

 tances apart." We have had no occasion to alter 

 this statement since the time of Newton. It is a 



