FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 531 



"Again, we find the Greek philosophers applying themselves to extract 

 their dogmas from the most general and abstract notions which they could 

 detect ; for example, from the conception of the Universe as One or as 

 Many things. They tried to determine how far we may, or must, combine 

 with these conceptions that of a whole, of parts, of number, of limits, of 

 place, of beginning or end, of full or void, of rest or motion, of cause and 

 effect, and the like. The analysis of such conceptions with such a view, 

 occupies, for instance, almost the whole of Aristotle's Treatise on the 

 Heavens." 



The following paragraph merits particular attention : " Another mode 

 of reasoning, very widely applied in these attempts, was the doctrine of 

 contrarieties, in which it was assumed that adjectives or substances which 

 are in common language, or in some abstract mode of conception, opposed 

 to each other,.must point at some fundamental antithesis in nature, which 

 it is important to study. Thus Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans, from 

 the contrasts which number suggests, collected ten principles — Limited 

 and Unlimited, Odd and Even, One and Many, Right and Left, Male and 

 Female, Rest and Motion, Straight and Curved, Light and Darkness, Good 

 and Evil, Square and Oblong.. . . Aristotle himself deduced the doctrine 

 of four elements and other dogmas by oppositions of the same kind." 



Of the manner in which, from premises obtained in this way, the ancients 

 attempted to deduce laws of nature, an example is given in the same work 

 a few pages further on. "Aristotle decides that there is no void on such 

 arguments as this. In a void there could be no difference of up and down ; 

 for as in nothing there are no differences, so there are none in a privation 

 or negation ; but a void is merely a privation or negation of matter ; there- 

 fore, in a void, bodies could not move up and down, which it is in their 

 nature to do. It is easily seen " (Dr. Whewell very justly adds) " that 

 such a mode of reasoning elevates the familiar forms of language, and 

 the intellectual connections of terms, to a supremacy over facts ; making 

 truth depend upon whether terms are or are not piivative, and whether we 

 say that bodies fall naturally.'''' 



The propensity to assume that the same relations obtain between ob- 

 jects themselves, which obtain between our ideas of them, is here seen in 

 the extreme stage of its development. For the mode of philosophizing, 

 exemplified in the foregoing instances, assumes no less than that the prop- 

 er way of arriving at knowledge of nature, is to study nature itself sul)- 

 jectively ; to apply our observation and analysis not to the facts, but to 

 the common notions entertained of the facts. 



Many other equally striking examples may be given of the tendency to 

 assume that things which for the convenience of common life are placed in 

 different classes, must differ in every respect. Of this nature was the uni- 

 versal and deeply-rooted prejudice of antiquity and the Middle Ages, that 

 celestial and terrestrial phenomena must be essentially different, and could 

 in no manner or degree depend on the same laws. Of the same kind, also, 

 .was the prejudice against which Bacon contended, that nothing produced 

 by nature could be successfully imitated by man : " Calorem soils et ignis 

 toto genere differre ; ne scilicet homines putent se per opera ignis, aliquid 

 simile iis quae in Natura fiunt, edncore et formare posse ;" and again, " Com- 

 positionem tantum opus Hominis, Mistionem vero opus solius Naturae esse : 

 ne scilicet homines sperent aliquam ex arte Corporum naturalium genera- 

 tionem aut trausformationem."* The grand distinction in the ancient sci- 

 * Novum Organum, Aph. 75. 



