382 FALLACIES. 



found it for their advantage to occupy extensive tracts of 

 land, they, being better judges of their own interest than the 

 legislature (which can only proceed on general rules) ought 

 not to be restrained from doing so. But in this argument it 

 was forgotten that the fact of a person's taking a large tract 

 of land is evidence only that it is his interest to take as much 

 as other people, but not that it might not be for his interest 

 to content himself with less, if he could be assured that other 

 people would do so too ; an assurance which nothing but a 

 government regulation can give. If all other people took 

 much, and he only a little, he would reap none of the advan- 

 tages derived from the concentration of the population and 

 the consequent possibility of procuring labour for hire, but 

 would have placed himself, without equivalent, in a situation of 

 voluntary inferiority. The proposition, therefore, that the 

 quantity of land which people will take when left to themselves 

 is that which is most for their interest to take, is true only 

 secundum quid : it is only their interest while they have no 

 guarantee for the conduct of one another. But the arrange- 

 ment disregards the limitation, and takes the proposition for 

 true simpliciter. 



One of the conditions oftenest dropped, when what would 

 otherwise be a true proposition is employed as a premise for 

 proving others, is the condition of time. It is a principle of 

 political economy that prices, profits, wages, &c. " always find 

 their level ;" but this is often interpreted as if it meant that 

 they are always, or generally, at their level ; while the truth 

 is, as Coleridge epigrammatic-ally expresses it, that they are 

 always finding their level, " which might be taken as a para- 

 phrase or ironical definition of a storm." 



Under the same head of fallacy (d dicto secundum quid ad 

 dictum simpliciter) might be placed all the errors which are 

 vulgarly called misapplications of abstract truths: that is, 

 where a principle, true (as the common expression is) in the 

 abstract, that is, all modifying causes being supposed absent, 

 is reasoned on as if it were true absolutely, and no modifying 

 circumstance could ever by possibility exist. This very com- 



