FALLACIES OF GENERALISATION. 



5J7 



an established priesthood, without arti- 

 ficial distinctions of rank, &c One 

 poor person in a thousand educated, 

 while the nine hundred and ninety- 

 nine remain uneducated, has usually 

 aimed at raising himself out of his 

 class, therefore education makes people 

 dissatisfied with the condition of a 

 labourer. Bookish men, taken from 

 speculative pursuits and set to work 

 on something they know nothing 

 about, have generally been found or 

 thought to do it ill ; therefore pliilo- 

 sophers are unfit for business, &c., &c. 

 All these are inductions by simple 

 enumeration. Reasons having some 

 reference to the canons of scientific 

 investigation have been attempted to 

 be given, however unsuccessfully, for 

 some of these propositions ; but to the 

 multitude of those who parrot them, 

 the cnumeratio simplex, ex his tan- 

 tummodo quce prcesto sunt pronuncians, 

 is the sole evidence. Their fallacy 

 consists in this, that they are induc- 

 tions without elimination : there has 

 been no real comparison of instances, 

 nor even ascertainment of the material 

 facts in any given instance. There is 

 also the further error of forgetting 

 that such g»eneralisations, even if well 

 established, could not be ultimate 

 truths, but must be results of laws 

 much more elementary ; and there- 

 fore, until deduced from such, could 

 at most be admitted as empirical 

 laws, holding good within the limits 

 of space and time by which the par- 

 ticular observations that suggested 

 the generalisations were bounded. 



This error of placing mere empirical 

 laws, and laws in which there is no 

 direct evidence of causation, on the 

 same footing of certainty as laws of 

 cause and effect, an error which is 

 at the root of perhaps the greater 

 number of bad inductions, is exempli- 

 fied only in its grossest form in the 

 kind of generalisations to which we 

 have now referred. These, indeed, 

 do not possess even the degree of 

 evidence which pertains to a well- 

 ascertained empirical law, but admit 

 of refutation on the empirical ground 



itself, without ascending to casual 

 laws. A little reflection, indeed, will 

 show that mere negations can only 

 form the ground of the lowest and 

 least valuable kind of empirical law. 

 A phenomenon has never been no- 

 ticed : this only proves that the con- 

 ditions of that phenomenon have not 

 yet occurred in experience, but does 

 not prove that they may not occur 

 hereafter. There is a better kind 

 of empirical law than this, namely, 

 when a phenomenon which is observed 

 presents within the limits of observa- 

 tion a series of gradations, in which a 

 regularity, or something like a ma- 

 thematical law, is perceptible, from 

 which, therefore, something may be 

 rationally presumed as to those terms 

 of the series which are beyond the 

 limits of observation. But in nega- 

 tion there are no gradations and no 

 series : the generalisations, therefore, 

 which deny the possibility of any 

 given condition of man and society 

 merely because it has never yet been 

 witnessed, cannot possess this higher 

 degree of validity even as empirical 

 laws. What is more, the minuter 

 examination which that higher order 

 of empirical laws presupposes, being 

 applied to the subject-matter of these, 

 not only does not confirm, but actually 

 refutes them. For in reality the past 

 history of Man and Society, instead 

 of exhibiting them as immovable, un- 

 changeable, incapable of ever present- 

 ing new phenomena, shows them on 

 the contrary to be, in many most im- 

 portant particulars, not only change- 

 able, but actually \mdergoing a pro- 

 gressive change. The empirical law, 

 therefore, best expressive, in most 

 cases, of the genuine result of ob- 

 servation, would be, not that sucli 

 and such a phenomenon will continue 

 unchanged, but that it will continue 

 to change in some particular manner. 

 Accordingly, while almost all gene- 

 ralisations relating to Man and So- 

 ciety, antecedent to the last fifty or 

 sixty years, have erred in the gross 

 way which we have attempted to 

 characterise, namely, by implicitly 



