344 



FALLACIES. 



one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell 

 dominion and the power of prophecy ; if these discoveries, 

 instead of having heen, as they really were, preconcerted by 

 meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred 

 by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder 

 of philosophic alchemy ; if they had presented themselves to 

 Professor Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in 

 possessing a particular galvanic battery ; if this battery, as far 

 as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not 

 (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for 

 the purpose of ensuring the testimony of experience to his 

 principles, and in order to bind down material nature under 

 the inquisition of reason, and force from her, as by torture, 

 unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions, 

 yet still they would not have been talked of or described as 

 instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted 

 genius and known skill. But should an accident have dis- 

 closed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or 

 Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, 

 and partly by the envy of his neighbours and partly with 

 good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the 

 general powers of his understanding ; then, * what a lucky 

 fellow ! Well, Fortune does favour fools that's for certain ! 

 It is always so !' And forthwith the exclaimer relates half 

 a dozen similar instances. Thus accumulating the one sort of 

 facts and never collecting the other, we do, as poets in their 

 diction, and quacks of all denominations do in their reasoning, 

 put a part for the whole." 



This passage very happily sets forth the manner in which, 

 under the loose mode of induction which proceeds per 

 enumerationem simplicem, not seeking for instances of such a 

 kind as to be decisive of the question, but generalizing from 

 any which occur, or rather which are remembered, opinions 

 grow up with the apparent sanction of experience, which have 

 no foundation in the laws of nature at all. *' Itaque recte 

 respondit ille," (we may say with Bacon,*) " qui cum suspensa 



* Nov. Org. t Aph. 46. 



