333 



FALLACIES. 



the power, at our choice, for practical ends, seemed by no 

 means hopeless.* 



A prejudice, universal in the ancient world, and from which 

 Bacon was so far from being free, that it pervaded and vitiated 

 the whole practical part of his system of logic, may with good 

 reason be ranked high in the order of Fallacies of which we 

 are now treating. 



8. There remains one a priori fallacy or natural pre- 

 judice, the most deeply -rooted, perhaps, of all which we 

 have enumerated : one which not only reigned supreme in the 

 ancient world, but still possesses almost undisputed dominion 

 over many of the most cultivated minds ; and some of the 

 most remarkable of the numerous instances by which I shall 

 think it necessary to exemplify it, will be taken from recent 

 thinkers. This is, that the conditions of a phenomenon 

 must, or at least probably will, resemble the phenomenon 

 itself. 



Conformably to what we have before remarked to be of 

 frequent occurrence, this fallacy might without much impro- 

 priety have been placed in a different class, among Fallacies 

 of Generalization : for experience does afford a certain degree 

 of countenance to the assumption. The cause does, in very 

 many cases, resemble its effect ; like produces like. Many 

 phenomena have a direct tendency to perpetuate their own 

 existence, or to give rise to other phenomena similar to them- 

 selves. Not to mention forms actually moulded on one 

 another, as impressions on wax and the like, in which the 

 closest resemblance between the effect and its cause is the 

 very law of the phenomenon ; all motion tends to continue 

 itself, with its own velocity, and in its own original direction ; 

 and the motion of one body tends to set others in motion, 

 which is indeed the most common of the modes in which the 



* It is hardly needful to remark that nothing is here intended to be said 

 against the possibility at some future period of making gold ; by first discover- 

 ing it to be a compound, and putting together its different elements or in- 

 gredients. But this is a totally different idea from that of the seekers of the 

 grand arcanum. 



