514 FALLACIES. 



the undue adoption of a conclusion which is disagreeable to us, as of one 

 which is agreeable, if it be of a nature to bring into action any of the 

 stronger passions. Persons of timid character are the more predisposed 

 to believe any statement, the more it is calculated to alarm them. Indeed 

 it is a psychological law, deducible from the most general laws of the men- 

 tal constitution of man, that any strong passion renders us credulous as to 

 the existence of objects suitable to excite it. 



But the moral causes of opinions, though with most persons the most 

 powerful of all, are but remote causes ; they do not act directly, but by 

 means of the intellectual causes ; to which they bear the same relation that 

 the circumstances called, in the theory of medicine, predisposing causes, 

 bear to exciting causes. Indifference to truth can not, in and by itself, 

 produce erroneous belief ; it operates by preventing the mind from collect- 

 ing the proper evidences, or from applying to them the test of a legitimate 

 and rigid induction ; by which omission it is exposed unprotected to the 

 influence of any species of apparent evidence which offers itself sponta- 

 neously, or which is elicited by that smaller quantity of trouble which the 

 mind may be willing to take. As little is Bias a direct source of wrong 

 conclusions. We can not believe a proposition only by wishing, or only 

 by dreading, to believe it. The most violent inclination to find a set of 

 propositions true, will not enable the weakest of mankind to believe them 

 without a vestige of intellectual grounds — without any, even apparent, evi- 

 dence. It acts indirectly, by placing the intellectual grounds of belief in 

 an incomplete or distorted shape before his eyes. It makes him shrink 

 from the irksome labor of a rigorous induction, when he has a misgiving 

 that its result may be disagreeable; and in such examination as he does 

 institute, it makes him exert that which is in a certain measure voluntary, 

 his attention, unfairly, giving a larger share of it to the evidence which 

 seems favorable to the desired conclusion, a smaller to that which seems 

 unfavorable. It operates, too, by making him look out eagerly for reasons, 

 or apparent reasons, to support opinions which are conformable, or resist 

 those which are repugnant, to his interests or feelings ; and when the in- 

 terests or feelings are common to great numbers of persons, reasons are 

 accepted and pass current, which would not for a moment be listened to in 

 that character if the conclusion had nothing more powerful than its reasons 

 to speak in its behalf. The natural or acquired partialities of mankind are 

 continually throwing up philosophical theories, the sole recommendation of 

 which consists in the premises they afford for proving cherished doctrines, 

 or justifying favorite feelings; and when any one of these theories has 

 been so thoroughly discredited as no longer to serve the purpose, another 

 is always ready to takes its place. This propensity, when exercised in fa- 

 vor of any widely-spread persuasion or sentiment, is often decorated with 

 complimentary epithets; and the contrary habit of keeping the judgment 

 in complete subordination to evidence, is stigmatized by various hard names, 

 as skepticism, immorality, coldness, hard-heartedness, and similar expres- 

 sions according to the nature of the case. But though the opinions of the 

 generality of mankind, when not dependent on mere habit and inculcation, 

 have their root much more in the inclinations than in the intellect, it is a 

 necessary condition to the triumph of the moral bias that it should first 

 pervert the understanding. Every erroneous inference, though originating 

 in moral causes, involves the intellectual operation of admitting insufficient 

 evidence as sufficient; and whoever was on his guard against all kinds of 

 inconclusive evidence which can be mistaken for conclusive, would be in 



