540 FALLACIES. 



dences may have greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only 

 what possibly from his own abilities he might have effected for himself, 

 his good luck will excite less attention, and the instances be less remem- 

 bered. That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and we 

 neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that success of themselves 

 without the intervention of skill or foresight; but we dwell on the fact and 

 remember it, as something strange, when the same happens to a weak or 

 ignorant man. So too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings 

 from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his 

 failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for 

 from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the 

 other undistinguished waves in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs 

 by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, 

 that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science 

 on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great 

 constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the power of 

 prophecy ; if these discoveries, instead of having been, as they really were, 

 preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had oc- 

 curred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder of 

 philosophic alchemy ; if they had presented themselves to Professor Davy 

 exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic 

 battery ; if this battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an 

 accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him 

 for the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his principles, 

 and in order to bind down material nature under the inquisition of reason, 

 and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal answers to pre2Kired and 

 precojiceived questions — yet still they would not have been talked of or 

 described as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted 

 genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar 

 discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man 

 should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbors 

 and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man below 2^ar in 

 the general powers of his understanding; then, ' Oh, what a lucky fellow ! 

 Well, Fortune does favor fools — that's for certain ! It is always so !' And 

 forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar instances. Thus ac- 

 cumulating the one sort of facts and never collecting the other, we do, as 

 poets in their diction, and quacks of all denominations do in their reason- 

 ing, put a part for the whole." 



This passage very happily sets forth the manner in which, under the 

 loose mode of induction which proceeds jocr enumerationem simplicem, 

 not seeking for instances of such a kind as to be decisive of the question, 

 but generalizing from any which occur, or rather which are remembered, 

 opinions grow up with the apparent sanction of experience, which have no 

 foundation in the laws of nature at all. " Itaque recte respondit ille " (we 

 may say with Bacon*), " qui cum suspensa tabula in templo ei monstrare- 

 tur eorum, qui vota solverant, quod naufragii periculo elapsi sint, atque 

 interrogando premeretur, anne tum quidem Deorura numen agnosceret, 

 quoBsivit denuo, -4i w5i sunt illi depicti qui post vota nuncupata perierunt? 

 Eadem ratio est fere omnis superstitionis, ut in Astrologicis, in Somniis, 

 Ominibus, Nemesibus, et hujusmodi; in quibus, homines delectati hujus- 

 modi vanitatibus, advertunt eventus, ubi implentur; ast ubi fallunt, licet 



* Nov. Org.,A^\\. 46. 



