336 FALLACIES. 



grounds for a conclusion which it has not arrived at 

 by any of the legitimate methods of induction which 

 it has not, even carelessly or overhastily, endeavoured 

 to test by those legitimate methods. 



$ 3. There is another branch of what may be 

 called the Philosophy of Error, which must be men- 

 tioned here, though only to be excluded from our 

 subject. The sources of erroneous opinions are two- 

 fold, moral and intellectual. Of these, the moral do 

 not fall within the compass of this work. They may 

 be classed under two general heads ; Indifference to 

 the attainment of truth, and Bias : of which last the 

 most common case is that in which we are biassed by 

 our wishes; but the liability is almost as great to the 

 undue adoption of a conclusion which is disagreeable 

 to us as of one which is agreeable, if it be of a nature 

 to bring into action any of the stronger passions. 

 Persons of timid character are the more predisposed 

 to believe any statement, the more it is calculated to 

 alarm them. Indeed, it is a psychological law, dedu- 

 cible from the most general laws of the mental consti- 

 tution of man, that any strong passion renders us 

 credulous as to the existence of objects suitable to 

 excite it. 



But the moral causes of our opinions, though real 

 and most powerful, are but remote causes: they do 

 not act immediately, but by means of the intellectual 

 causes; to which they bear the same relation that the 

 circumstances called, in the theory of medicine, pre- 

 disposing causes, bear to exciting causes. Indifference 

 to truth cannot, in and by itself, produce erroneous 

 belief; it operates by preventing the mind from col- 

 lecting the proper evidences, or from applying to them 

 the test of a legitimate and rigid induction; by which 



