FALLACIES OF GENERALIZATION. 555 



is a false analogy, because the decay of the vital powers in an animated 

 body can be distinctly traced to the natural progress of those very changes 

 of structure which, in their earlier stages, constitutes its growth to maturi- 

 ty ; while in the body politic the progress of those changes can not, gener- 

 ally speaking, have any effect but the still further continuance of growth : 

 it is the stoppage of that progress, and the commencement of retrogression, 

 that alone would constitute decay. Bodies politic die, but it is of disease, 

 or violent death ; they have no old age. 



The following sentence from Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity is an in- 

 stance of a false analogy from physical bodies to what are called bodies 

 politic. "As there could be in natural bodies no motion of any thing un- 

 less there were some which moveth all things, and continueth immovable ; 

 even so in politic societies there must be some unpunishable, or else no 

 man shall suffer punishment." There is a double fallacy here, for not only 

 the analogy, but the premise from which it is drawn, is untenable. The 

 notion that there must be something immovable which moves all other 

 things, is the old scholastic error of apritnnm mobile. 



The following instance I quote from Archbishop Whately's Mhetoric: 

 "It would be admitted that a great and permanent diminution in the quan- 

 tity of some useful commodity, such as corn, or coal, or iron, throughout 

 the world, would be a serious and lasting loss ; and again, that if the fields 

 and coal-mines yielded regularly double quantities, with the same labor, 

 we should be so much the richer ; hence it might be inferred, that if the 

 quantity of gold mid silver in the world were diminished one-half, or were 

 doubled, like results would follow ; the utility of these metals, for the pur- 

 poses of coin, being very great. Now there are many points of resem- 

 blance and many of difference, between the precious metals on the one 

 hand, and corn, coal, etc., on the other ; but the important circumstance to 

 the supposed argument is, that the utility of gold and silver (as coin, 

 which is far the chief) dejyends on their value, which is regulated by their 

 scarcity ; or rather, to speak strictly, by the difficulty of obtaining them ; 

 whereas, if corn and coal were ten times as abundant (^. e., more easily ob- 

 tained), a bushel of either would still be as useful as now. But if it were 

 twice as easy to procure gold as it is, a sovereign would be twice as large ; 

 if only half as easy, it would be of the size of a half-sovereign, and this (be- 

 sides the trifling circumstance of the cheapness or dearness of gold orna- 

 ments) would be all the difference. The analogy, therefore, fails in the 

 point essential to the argument." 



The same author notices, after Bishop Copleston, the case of False 

 Analogy which consists in inferring from the similarity in many respects 

 between the metropolis of a country and the heart of the animal body, 

 that the increased size of the metropolis is a disease. 



Some of the false analogies on which systems of physics were confident- 

 ly grounded in the time of the Greek philosophers, are such as we now 

 call fanciful, not that the resemblances are not often real, but that it is 

 long since any one has been inclined to draw from them the inferences 

 which were then drawn. Such, for instance, are the curious speculations 

 of the Pythagoreans on the subject of numbers. Finding that the dis- 

 tances of the planets bore, or seemed to bear, to one another a proportion 

 not varying much from that of the divisions of the monochord, they in- 

 ferred from it the existence of an inaudible music, that of the spheres ; as 

 if the music of a harp had depended solely on the numerical proportions, 

 and not on the material, nor even on the existence of any material, any 



