FALLACIES OF CONFUSION. 405 



perceptions are unhealthy. Some particular mode of conduct 

 or feeling is affirmed to be unnatural ; why ? because it is 

 abhorrent to the universal and natural sentiments of mankind. 

 Finding no such sentiment in yourself, you question the fact ; 

 and the answer is (if your antagonist is polite), that you are 

 an exception, a peculiar case. But neither (say you) do I find 

 in the people of some other country, or of some former age, 

 any such feeling of abhorrence ; " ay, but their feelings were 

 sophisticated and unhealthy." 



One of the most notable specimens of reasoning in a circle 

 is the doctrine of Hobbes, Kousseau, and others, which rests 

 the obligations by which human beings are bound as members 

 of society, on a supposed social compact. I wave the consi- 

 deration of the fictitious nature of the compact itself; but 

 when Hobbes, through the whole Leviathan, elaborately 

 deduces the obligation of obeying the sovereign, not from the 

 necessity or utility of doing so, but from a promise supposed 

 to have been made by our ancestors, on renouncing savage 

 life and agreeing to establish political society, it is impossible 

 not to retort by the question, why are we bound to keep a 

 promise made for us by others ? or why bound to keep a 

 promise at all ? No satisfactory ground can be assigned for 

 the obligation, except the mischievous consequences of the 

 absence of faith and mutual confidence among mankind. We 

 are, therefore, brought round to the interests of society, as the 

 ultimate ground of the obligation of a promise ; and yet those 

 interests are not admitted to be a sufficient justification for 

 the existence of government and law. Without a promise it 

 is thought that we should not be bound to that which is 

 implied in all modes of living in society, namely, to yield a 

 general obedience to the laws therein established; and so 

 necessary is the promise deemed, that if none has actually 

 been made, some additional safety is supposed to be given to 

 the foundations of society by feigning one. 



3. Two principal subdivisions of the class of Fallacies 

 of Confusion having been disposed of; there remains a third, 

 in which the confusion is not, as in the Fallacy of Ambiguity, 



