446 FALLACIES. 



the middle term, Evil, the double meaning of which is 

 too obvious to need explanation: yet on this founda- 

 tion Plato constructs his principal ethical doctrine, in 

 which he was followed by most of the philosophical 

 sects among the later Greeks ; that virtue is a branch 

 of intelligence, and is to be produced, therefore, mainly 

 by intellectual cultivation. All the inquiries into the 

 summum bonum in the philosophical schools were 

 infected with the same fallacy; the ambiguous word 

 being, as before, Evil, or its contrary correlative, 

 Good, which sometimes meant what is good for 

 oneself, at other times what is good for other people. 

 That nothing which is a cause of evil on the whole 

 to other people, can be really good for the agent him- 

 self, is indeed a possible tenet, and always a favourite 

 one with moralists, although in the present age the 

 question has rather been, not whether the proposition 

 is true, but how society and education can be so 

 ordered as to make it true. At all events, it is not 

 proved merely by the fact that a thing beneficial to 

 the world, and a thing beneficial to a person himself, 

 are both in common parlance called good. That is no 

 valid argument, but a fallacy of ambiguity. 



Of such stuff, however, were the ethical specula- 

 tions of the ancients principally composed, especially 

 in the declining period of the Greek philosophic mind. 

 The following is a stoical argument taken from Cicero 

 De Finibus, book the third: " Quod est bonum, omne 

 laudabile est. Quod autem laudabile est, omne 

 honestum est. Bonum igitur quod est, honestum 

 est." Here the ambiguous word is laudabile, which 

 in the minor premiss means anything which mankind 

 are accustomed, on good grounds, to admire or value ; 

 as beauty, for instance, or good fortune: but in the 

 major, it denotes exclusively moral qualities. In 



