470 FALLACIES. 



merit of your own; for it is substantially the same 

 thing, to prove what was not denied or to disprove 

 what was not asserted : the latter practice is not less 

 common, and it is more offensive, because it frequently 

 amounts to a personal affront, in attributing to a 

 person opinions, &c., which he perhaps holds in 

 abhorrence. Thus, when in a discussion one party 

 vindicates, on the ground of general expediency, a 

 particular instance of resistance to government in a 

 case of intolerable oppression, the opponent may 

 gravely maintain, that ' we ought not to do evil that 

 good may come;' a proposition which of course had 

 never been denied, the point in dispute being, ' whe- 

 ther resistance in this particular case were doing evil 

 or not.' " 



The works of controversial writers are seldom 

 free from this fallacy. They join issue on the wrong 

 point, or do not join issue at all. The attempts, for 

 instance, to disprove the population doctrines of Mal- 

 thus, have been mostly cases of ignoratio elenclii. 

 Malthus has been supposed to be refuted if it could 

 be shown that in some countries or ages population 

 has been nearly stationary; as if he had asserted that 

 population always increases in a given ratio, or had 

 not expressly declared that it "increases only in so far 

 as it is not restrained by prudence, or kept down by 

 poverty and disease. Or, perhaps, a great collection 

 of facts is produced to prove that in some one 

 country the people are better off with a dense popu- 

 lation than they are in another country with a thin 

 one ; or that the people have become more numerous 

 and better off at the same time. As if the assertion 

 were that a dense population could not possibly be 

 well off: as if it were not part of the very doctrine, 

 and essential to it, that where there is a more abun- 



