544 FALLACIES. 



In these examples the circumstance overlooked was cognizable by the 

 senses. In other cases, it is one the knowledge of which could only be ar- 

 rived at by reasoning ; but the fallacy may still be classed under the head 

 to which, for want of a more appropriate name, we have given the appel- 

 lation Fallacies of Non-observation. It is not the nature of the facul- 

 ties which ought to have been employed, but the non-employment of them, 

 which constitutes this Natural Order of Fallacies. Wherever the error is 

 negative, not positive; wherever it consists especially in overlooJcing, in 

 being ignorant or unmindful of some fact which, if known and attended to, 

 would have made a difference in the conclusion arrived at; the error is 

 properly placed in the Class which we are considering. In this Class, there 

 is not, as in all other fallacies there is, a positive misestimate of evidence 

 actually had. The conclusion would be just, if the portion which is seen 

 of the case were the whole of it ; but there is another portion overlooked, 

 which vitiates the result. 



For instance, there is a remarkable doctrine which has occasionally found 

 a vent in the public speeches of unwise legislators, but which only in one 

 instance that I am aware of has received the sanction of a philosophical 

 writer, namely, M, Cousin, who in his preface to the Gorgias of Plato, con- 

 tending that punishment must have some other and higher justification 

 than the prevention of crime, makes use of this argument — that if punish- 

 ment were only for the sake of example, it would be indifferent whether 

 we punished the innocent or the guilty, since the punishment, considered as 

 an example, is equally efficacious in either case. Now we must, in order 

 to go along with this reasoning, suppose, that the person who feels himself 

 under temptation, observing somebody punished, concludes himself to be 

 in danger of being punished likewise, and is terrified accordingly. But it 

 is forgotten that if the person punished is supposed to be innocent, or even 

 if there be any doubt of his guilt, the spectator will reflect that his own 

 danger, whatever it may be, is not contingent on his guiltiness, but threat- 

 ens him equally if he remains innocent, and how, therefore, is he deterred 

 from guilt by the apprehension of such punishment? M. Cousin supposes 

 that people will be dissuaded from guilt by whatever renders the condi- 

 tion of the guilty more perilous, forgetting that the condition of the inno- 

 cent (also one of the elements in the calculation) is, in the case supposed, 

 made perilous in precisely an equal degree. This is a fallacy of overlook- 

 ing; or of non-observation, within the intent of our classification. 



Fallacies of this description are the great stumbling-block to correct 

 thinking in political economy. The economical workings of society afford 

 numerous cases in which the effects of a cause consist of two sets of phe- 

 nomena : the one immediate, concentrated, obvious to all eyes, and passing, 

 in common apprehension, for the whole effect; the other widely diffused, 

 or lying deeper under the surface, and which is exactly contrary to the 

 former. Take, for instance, the common notion so plausible at the fii'st 

 glance, of the encouragement given to industry by lavish expenditure. A, 

 who spends his whole income, and even his capital, in expensive living, is 

 supposed to give great employment to labor. B, who lives on a small por- 

 tion, and invests the remainder in the funds, is thought to give little or 

 no employment. For every body sees the gains which are made by A's 

 tradesmen, servants, and others, while his money is spending. B's sav- 

 ings, on the contrary, pass into the hands of the person whose stock he 

 purchased, who with it pays a debt he owed to some banker, who lends it 

 again to some merchant or manufacturer; and the capital being laid out 



