416 . FALLACIES. 



empirically from the people of their own country to 

 the people of other countries, as if human beings felt, 

 judged, and acted, everywhere in the same manner. 



5. In the foregoing instances, the distinction is 

 confounded between empirical laws, which express 

 merely the customary order of the succession of effects, 

 and the laws of causation on which the effects depend. 

 There may, however, be incorrect generalization when 

 this mistake is not committed ; when the investigation 

 takes its proper direction, that of causes, and the 

 result erroneously obtained purports to be a really 

 causal law. 



The most vulgar form of this fallacy is that which 

 is commonly called post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or cum 

 hoc, ergo propter hoc. As when it is inferred that 

 England owes her industrial preeminence to her restric- 

 tions on commerce: as when the old school of finan- 

 ciers, and, I am sorry to add, Coleridge, maintained 

 that the national debt was one of the causes of the 

 national prosperity: as when the excellence of the 

 Church, of the Houses of Lords and Commons, of 

 the procedure of the law courts, &c., are inferred 

 from the, mere fact that the country has prospered 

 under them. In these and similar cases, if it can be 

 rendered probable by other evidence that the supposed 

 causes have some tendency to produce the effect 

 ascribed to them, the fact of its having been produced, 

 though only in one instance, is of some value as a 

 verification by specific experience : but in itself it goes 

 scarcely any way at all towards establishing such a 

 tendency, since, admitting the effect, a hundred other 

 antecedents could show an equally strong title of that 

 kind to be considered as the cause. 



In these examples we see bad generalization a 



