464 FALLACIES. 



vidual -substances, but names of a peculiar kind of entities termed 

 Universal Substances. Because we can think and speak of man in 

 g'eneral, that is, of all men in so far as j)ossessing the common, attri- 

 butes of the species, without fastening our thoughts pemianently on 

 some one individual man ; therefore man in general was supposed to 

 be, not an aggregate of individual men, but an abstract or universal 

 man, distinct from these. 



It may be imagined what havoc metaphysicians trained in these 

 babits made with philosophy, when' they came to the largest generali- 

 zations of all, Substantice SecundcB of any kind were bad enough, but 

 such Substantiae Secundae as to bv, for example, and to ev, standing for 

 peculiar entities supposed to be inherent in all things which exist, or 

 which are said to be one, were enough to put an end to all intelligible 

 discvission ; especially since, with a just perception that the truths 

 whicli philosophy pursues are general truths, it was soon laid down 

 that these general substances were the only objects of science, being 

 immutable, while individual substances cognizable by the senses, 

 being in a perpetual flux, could not be the subject of real knowledge. 

 This misapprehension of the import of general language constitutes 

 Mysticism, a word so much oftener written and spoken than under- 

 Stood. Whether in the Vedas, in the Platonists, or in the Hegelians, 

 mysticism is neither more nor less than ascribing objective existence to 

 the subjective creations of the mind's own faculties, to mere ideas of 

 the intellect ; and believing that by watching and contemplating these 

 ideas of its own making, it can read in them what takes place in the 

 world without. 



§ 5. Proceeding with the enumeration of a priori fallacies, and 

 endeavoring to arrange them with as much reference as possible to 

 their natural affinities, we come to another, which is also nearly allied 

 to the fallacy preceding the last, standing in the same relation to one 

 variety of it as the fallacy last mentioned does to the other. This, too, 

 represents nature as bound to conform herself to the incapacities of 

 our intellect; but instead of only asserting that nature cannot do a 

 thing because we caimot conceive it done, goes the still greater length 

 of averring that nature does a particular thing, on the sole ground 

 that we can see no reason why she should not. Absurd as this seems 

 when so plainly stated, it is a received principle among philosophers 

 for demonsti-ating a priori the laws of physical phenomena. A phe- 

 nomenon must follow a certain law, because we see no reason why it 

 should deviate from that law in one way father than in another. This 

 is called the principle of the Sufficient Reason ; and by means of it 

 philosophers often flatter themselves that they are able to establish, 

 without any appeal to experience, the most general tinaths of experi- 

 mental physics. 



Take, for example, two of the most elementary of all laws, the law 

 of inertia and the first law of motion. A body at rest canjiot,- it is 

 affirmed, begin to move unless acted upon by some external force : 

 because, if it did, it must either move up or down, forward or back- 

 ward, and so forth ; but if no outward force acts upon it, there can be 

 no reason for its moving up rather than down, or down rather than 

 up, &c., ergo it will not move at all. Q. E. D. 



This reasoning I conceive to be entirely fallacious, as indeed Dr. 



