FALLACIES OF CONFUSION. 395 



this particular juncture, will probably be beneficial to the 

 interests of truth on the whole. 



" The second ambiguity is that of confounding a right of 

 any kind, with a right to enforce that right by resisting or 

 punishing a violation of it. People will say, for example, that 

 they have a right to good government, which is undeniably 

 true, it being the moral duty of their governors to govern 

 them well. But in granting this, you are supposed to have 

 admitted their right or liberty to turn out their governors, and 

 perhaps to punish them, for having failed in the performance 

 of this duty; which, far from being the same thing, is by 

 no means universally true, but depends on an immense 

 number of varying circumstances," requiring to be conscien- 

 tiously weighed before adopting or acting on such a resolu- 

 tion. This last example is (like others which have been 

 cited) a case of fallacy within fallacy ; it involves not only 

 the second of the two ambiguities pointed out, but the first 

 likewise. 



One not unusual form of the Fallacy of Ambiguous Terms, 

 is known technically as the Fallacy of Composition and Divi- 

 sion : when the same term is collective in the premises, distri- 

 butive in the conclusion, or vice versa : or when the middle 

 term is collective in one premise, distributive in the other. 

 As if one were to say (I quote from Archbishop Whately) 

 " All the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles : 

 ABC is an angle of a triangle ; therefore ABC is equal to two 

 right angles. .... There is no fallacy more common, or more 

 likely to deceive, than the one now before us. The form 

 in which it is most usually employed is to establish some 

 truth, separately, concerning each single member of a certain 

 class, and thence to infer the same of the whole collectively." 

 As in the argument one sometimes hears, to prove that the 

 world could do without great men. If Columbus (it is said) 

 had never lived, America would still have been discovered, at 

 most only a few years later ; if Newton had never lived, some 

 other person would have discovered the law of gravitation ; 

 and so forth. Most true : these things would have been 



