FALLACIES OF CONFUSION. 509 



thing, means that you may do it without any breach of duty on your 

 part ; that other persons not only ought not to hinder you, but have no 

 cause to think the woree of you for doing it. This is a perfectly dis- 

 tinct proposition from the jireceding. The right, which you hav«' by 

 virtue of a duty incumbent upon other persons, is obviously (piitc a differ- 

 ent thing from a riglit consisting in the absence of any duty incumbent 

 upon yourself Yet the two things are perjictually confounded. Thus 

 a man will say he has a right to publish his opinions ; which may be 

 true in this sense, that it would be a breach of duty in any other per- 

 son to interfere and prevent the publication : but he assumes there- 

 upon, that in publishing his opinions, he himself violates no duty; 

 which may either be true or false, depending, as it does, upon his 

 having taken due pains to satisfy himself, first, that the opinions are 

 true, and next, that their publication in this manner, and at this par- 

 ticular juncture, will probably be beneficial to the interests of truth on 

 the whole. 



" The second ambiguity is that of confounding a right of any kind, 

 with a right to enforce that right by resisting or punishing a violation 

 of it. Men will say, for example, that they have a right to a good 

 government, which is undeniably true, it being the moral duty of their 

 governors to govern them well. But in granting this, you are sup- 

 posed to have admitted their right or liberty to turn out their govern- 

 ors, and perhaps to punish them, for having failed in the performance 

 of this duty; which, far from being the same thing, is by no means 

 universally true, but depends upon an immense number of varying cir- 

 cumstances, and is altogether one of the knottiest questions in practical 

 ethics." This example is (like others which have been cited) a case 

 of fallacy within fallacy ; it involves not only the second of the two 

 ambiguities pointed out, but the first likewise. 



One not unusual form of the Fallacy of Ambiguous Terms, is known 

 technically as the Fallacy of Composition and Division: when the 

 same term is collective in the premisses, distributive in the conclusion, 

 or vice versd: or when the middle term is collective in one premiss, 

 distributive in the other. As if one were to say (I quote from Arch- 

 bishop Whately) "All the angles of a triangle are equal to two right 

 angles: ABC is an angle of a triangle; therefore ABC is ctpial to 



two right angles There is no fallacy," continues the Archbishop, 



" more common, or more likely to deceive, than the one now before 

 us. The form in which it is most usually employed is to establish 

 some truth, separately, concerning each single member of a certain 

 chiss, and thence to infer the same of the whole collectively V As in 

 the argument one often hears, sometimes from persons worthy of better 

 things, to prove that the world could do without great men. If Co- 

 lumbus (it is said) had never lived, America would still have been dis- 

 covered, at most only a few years later ; if Newton had never lived, 

 some other person would have discovered the law of gravitation ; and 

 so ff)rth. Most true; these things would have been done, but in all 

 probability nf>t until some one had again been found with the (pialities 

 of a Columbus or a Newton. Because any one great man might have 

 had his place supplied by the help of others, the argument concludes 

 that all great m(!n could have been dispensed wth. The term "great 

 men" is distributive in the premisses and collective in the conclusion. 



"Such also," says Archbishop Whately, "is the fallacy which prob- 



