FALLACIES OF GENERALIZATION. 493 



As a first instance, wc may cite that favorite argument in defence 

 of absolute power, drawn from tl)o analogy of paternal government in 

 a family, which govcnnnent is not, and by universal admission ought 

 not to be, controlled hij (tliDugh it sometimes ought to be controlled 

 for) the children, I'aternal govermnent, in a family, works well; 

 therefore, says the argument, despotic government in a state will work 

 well : implying that the beneficial working of parental goveniment 

 depends, in the family, upon the only point which it has in common 

 with political despotism, namely, irresjionsibility. Whereas it does not 

 depend upon that, but upon two other attributes <jf j)arental govern- 

 ment, the attection of the parent for the children, and the superiority of 

 the parent in wisdom and experience ; neither of which properties can 

 be reckoned upon, or are at all likely to exist, between a political 

 desjDot and his subjects ; and when either of these circumstances fails, 

 even in the family, and the influence of the irresponsibility is allowed 

 to work uncoiTected, the result is anything but good government. 

 This, therefore, is a false analogy. 



Another example is the not uncommon dictum, that bodies politic 

 have youth, maturity, old age, and death, like bodies natural : that 

 after a certain duration of prosperity, they tend spontaneously to decay. 

 This also is a false analogy, because the decay of the vital powers in 

 an animated body can be distinctly traced to the natural progress of 

 those very changes of structure which, in their earlier stages, constitute 

 its growth to maturity; while in the body politic the progress of those 

 changes cannot, generally speaking, have any effect but the still further 

 continuance of growth : it is the stoppage of that progress, and the 

 commencement of reti-ogression, that alone would constitute decay. 

 Bodies politic die, but it is of disease, or violent death : they have no 

 old age. 



The following sentence from Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity is an 

 instance of a false analogy from physical bodies to what are called 

 bodies politic. "As there could be in natural bodies no motion of any- 

 thing unless there were some which moveth all things, and contlnueth 

 immovable ; even so in politic societies there must be some unpunish- 

 able, or else no man shall suffer punishment." There is a double 

 fallacy here, for not only the analogy, but the premise Irom which it is 

 drawn, is untenable. The notion that there must be something im- 

 movable which moves all others, is the old scholastic error of a inimum 

 mobile. 



Some of the false analogies upon which systems of physics were 

 confidently grounded in the time of the Greek philosophers, are such 

 as we now call fanciful ; not that the resemblances arc not often real, 

 but that it is long since any one has been inclined to draw from them 

 the inferences which were then drawn. Such, for instance, are the 

 curious speculations of the Pythagoreans on the subject of numbers. 

 Finding that the distances of tlie planets bore or seemed to bear to one 

 another a proportion not varying much from that of the divisions of the 

 monochord, they inferred from it the existence of an inaudiblo music, 

 that of the spheres ; as if the music of a harp had di-pended solely on 

 the numerical proportions, and not on the material, nor even on the ex- 

 istence of any material, any stnngs at all. It has been similarly ima- 

 gined that certain combinati(jns of numbers, whicli were found to pre- 

 vail in some natural phenomena, must run through the whole of nature : 



