FALLACIES OF OBSERVATION, 545 



in hiring spinners and weavers, or carriers and the crews of merchant ves- 

 sels, not only gives immediate employment to at least as much industry as 

 A employs during the whole of his career, but coming back with increase 

 by the sale of the goods which have been manufactured or imported, forms 

 a'fund for the employment of the same and perhaps a greater quantity of 

 labor in perpetuity. But the observer does not see, and therefore does 

 not consider, what becomes of B's money ; he does see what is done with 

 A's ; he observes the amount of industry which A's profusion feeds ; he 

 observes not the far greater quantity which it prevents from being fed ; 

 and thence the prejudice, universal to the time of Adam Smith, that prodi- 

 gality encourages industry, and parsimony is a discouragement to it. 



The common argument against free ti'ade was a fallacy of the same na- 

 ture. The purchaser of British silk encourages British industry ; the pur- 

 chaser of Lyons silk encourages only French ; the former conduct is patri- 

 otic, the latter ought to be prevented by law. The circumstance is over- 

 looked, that the purchaser of any foreign commodity necessarily causes, di- 

 rectly or indirectly, the export of an equivalent value of some article of 

 home production (beyond what would otherwise be exported), either to 

 the same foreign country or to some other ; which fact, though from the 

 complication of the circumstances it can not always be verified by specific 

 observation, no observation can possibly be brought to contradict, while the 

 evidence of reasoning on which it rests is irrefragable. The fallacy is, 

 therefore, the same as in the preceding case, that of seeing a part only of 

 the phenomena, and imagining that part to be the whole ; and may be 

 ranked among Fallacies of Non-observation. 



§ 5. To complete the examination of the second of our five classes, we 

 have now to speak of Mal-observation ; in which the error does not lie in 

 the fact that something is unseen, but that something seen is seen wrong. 



Perception being infallible evidence of whatever is really .perceived, the 

 error now under consideration can be committed no otherwise than by 

 mistaking for conception what is, in fact, inference. We have formerly 

 shown how intimately the two are blended in almost every thing which is 

 called observation, and still more in every Description.* What is actually 

 on any occasion perceived by our senses being so minute in amount, and 

 generally so unimportant a portion of the state of facts which we wish to 

 ascertain or to communicate ; it would be absurd to say that either in our 

 observations, or in conveying their result to others, we ought not to mingle 

 inference with fact ; all that can be said is, that when we do so we ought 

 to be aware of what we are doing, and to know what part of the assertion 

 rests on consciousness, and is therefore indisputable, what part on inference, 

 and is therefore questionable. 



One of the most celebrated examples of a universal error produced by 

 mistaking an inference for the direct evidence of the senses, was the resist- 

 ance made, on the ground of common sense, to the Copernican system. 

 People fancied they saw the sun rise and set, the stars revolve in circles 

 round the pole. We now know that they saw no such thing; what they 

 really saw was a set of appearances, equally reconcilable with the theory 

 they held and with a totally diffei'ent one. It seems strange that such an 

 instance as this of the testimony of the senses pleaded with the most en- 

 tire conviction in favor of something which was a mere inference of the 



* Suvra, p. 450. 

 35 



