524 



FAILLACIES. 



ernment. This, therefore, is a false 

 analogy. 



Another example is the not un- 

 common 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 ani- 

 mated 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 

 retrogression, that alone would con- 

 stitute decay. Bodies politic die, but 

 it is of disease or violent death ; they 

 have no old age. 



The following sentence from Hook- 

 er'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 anything unless there were 

 some which moveth all things, and 

 continueth immovable : even so in 

 politic societies there must be some 

 unpunishable, or else no man shall 

 suffer punishment." There is a double 

 fallacy here, for not only the analogy, 

 but the premise from which it is 

 drawn, is untenable. The notion 

 that there must be something im- 

 movable which moves all other things, 

 is the whole scholastic error of a pri- 

 mum mobile. 



The following instance I quote from 

 Archbishop Whately's Rhetoric: "It 

 would be admitted that a great and 

 permanent diminution in the quantity 

 of some useful commodity, such as 

 corn, or coal, or iron, throughout the 

 world, would be a serious and lasting 

 loss ; and again, that if the fields and 

 coal-mines yielded regularly double 

 quantities, with the same labour, we 

 should be so much the richer ; hence 

 it might be inferred, that if the quan- 



tity of gold and silver in the world 

 were diminished one-half, or were 

 doubled, like results would follow ; 

 the utility of these metals, for the 

 pmrposes of coin, being very great. 

 Now there are many points of re- 

 semblance and many of difference, 

 between the precious metals on the 

 one hand, and corn, coal, &c., on the 

 other ; but the important circum- 

 stance to the supposed argument is, 

 that the utility of gold and silver (as 

 coin, which is far the chief) depends 

 on their value, which is regulated by 

 their scarcity ; or rather, to speak 

 strictly, by the difficulty of obtaining 

 them ; whereas, if corn and coal were 

 ten times as abundant, {i.e. more 

 easily obtained,) a bushel of either 

 would still be as useful as now. But 

 if it were twice as easy to procure 

 gold as it is, a sovereign would be 

 twice as large ; if only half as easy 

 it would be of the size of a half- 

 sovereign, and this (besides the trifl- 

 ing circumstance of the cheapness or 

 dearness of gold ornaments) would 

 be all the difference. The analogy, 

 therefore, fails in the point essential 

 to the argument." 



The same author notices, aftei 

 Bishop Copleston, the case of False 

 Analogy which consists in inferring 

 from the similarity in many respects 

 between the metropolis of a country 

 and the heart of the animal body, 

 that the increased size of the metro- 

 polis is a disease 



Some of the false analogies on 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 are 

 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 Pytha- 

 goreans on the subject of numbers. 

 Finding that the distances of the 

 planets bore and seemed to bear to 

 one another a proportion not varying 

 much from that of the divisions of 

 the monochord, they inferred from it 



