FALLACIES OF CONFUSION. 505 



Ev-il, the double meaning of which is too obvious to need explanation: 

 yet on this foundation 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 intjuiries 

 into the summum bonum in the philosoj)hical schools were infected with 

 the same fallacy ; the ambiguous word being, as before, Evil, or its 

 contrary con-elative. 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 himself, is indeed a possible tenet, and always a 

 favorite 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 speculations 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 F'uubus, book the third : " Quod est bonum, omne laudabile 

 est. Quod autem laudabile est, omne honestum est. Eonum igitur 

 quod est, honestum est." Here the ambiguous word is laudabile, 

 which in the minor premiss means anything which mankind are accus- 

 tomed, on good gi'ounds, to admire or value; as beauty, for instance, 

 or good fortune : but in the major, it denotes exclusively moral qualities. 

 In much the same manner the Stoics were led to all their absurdest 

 paradoxes ; as that the virtuous man is alone free, alone beautiful, 

 alone a king, &c. Whoever has virtue has Good (because it has been 

 previously determined not to call anything else good) ; but again. Good 

 necessarily includes freedom, beauty, and even royalty, all of these 

 being good things ; therefore whoever has virtue has all these. 



The following is an argument of Descartes to prove, in his d priori 

 manner, the being of God. The conception, says he, of an infinite 

 Being proves the real existence of such a being. For if there is not 

 really any such being, / must have made the conception ; but if I 

 could make it, I can also unmake it ; which evidently is not true ; 

 therefin-e, there must be externally to myself, an archetype, from which 

 the conception was derived. The ambiguity in this case is in the pro- 

 noun /, by which, in one place, is to be understood my will, in anotlier 

 the laws of my nature. If the conception, existing as it does in my 

 mind, had no original without, the conclusion would uncjuestionably 

 follow that / made it : that is, the laws of my natuie must have spon- 

 taneously evolved it ; but that my ivill made it, would not follow. 

 Now when Descartes afterwards adils that I cannot unmake the con- 

 ception, he means that I cainiot get rid of it by an act of my will : 

 which is true, but is not the proposition required. That what some 

 of the laws of my nature have produced, other laws, or those same 

 laws in other circumstances, might not subsequently efface, he would 

 have found it difficult to establish. 



Analogous to thia art; some of the ambiguities in the freo-will con- 

 troversy ; which, as they will come under special consideration in the 

 concluding Book, I only mention mcmorice causd. In that discussion, 

 3S 



