350 FALLACIES. 



discussion, to state some speculative propositions, and 

 suggest some practical cautions (not absolutely incon- 

 sistent with either view of the philosophical question) 

 respecting the forms in which such unwarranted 

 assumptions are most likely to be made. 



2. In the cases in which, according to the philoso- 

 phers of the ontological school, the mind apprehends, 

 by intuition, things, and the laws of things, not cog- 

 nizable by our sensitive faculty; those intuitive, or 

 supposed intuitive, perceptions are undistinguishable 

 from what the opposite school are accustomed to call 

 ideas of the mind. When they themselves say that 

 they perceive the things by an immediate act of a 

 faculty given for that purpose at their creation, it 

 would be said of them by their opponents that they 

 find an idea or conception in their own minds, and 

 from the idea or conception, infer the existence of a 

 corresponding objective reality. Nor would this be 

 an unfair statement, but a mere version into other 

 words of the account given by themselves; and one 

 to which the more clear-sighted of them might, and 

 generally do, without hesitation subscribe. Since, 

 therefore, in the cases which lay the strongest claim 

 to be examples of knowledge a priori, the mind pro- 

 ceeds from the idea of a thing to the reality of the 

 thing itself, we cannot be surprised by finding that 

 illicit assumptions a priori consist in doing the same 

 thing erroneously: in mistaking subjective facts for 

 objective, laws of the percipient mind for laws of the 

 perceived object, properties of the ideas or concep- 

 tions for properties of the things conceived. 



Accordingly, a large proportion of the erroneous 

 thinking which exists in the world proceeds upon a 

 tacit assumption, that the same order must obtain 



