Six Fallacies. 95 



in the same species, but pretty much in the same 

 race, then perhaps all the great species of nature, 

 divided off as they are from one another by vastly 

 more than differences of race, might have come 

 about by natural selection! — the great fact staring 

 him in the face, that even artificial breeding had 

 not discriminated any one of those 150 races into a 

 species different from the rest! In that logic Dar- 

 winism originated, and its subsequent career has 

 never thrown off the conditions of its birth. 



106. For those who are interested in the play of 

 a logical faculty, it may be useful to take note here 

 of several characteristic traits, the illus- 

 tration of fully half-a-dozen sophisms A °f a J Ly S '~~ 

 or fallacies, as they are called in logic. Equivoca- 

 He starts an hypothesis to explain what tion .' Com " 



J r r panson, 



he has never seen occur, the formation Erudition, 

 of species out of mere varieties, or races. Hypothesis, 



1 . , ,.-,•• Begging the 



So the point to be explained is gratuitous ; Question, 

 and the hypothesis assumed to explain 

 it is equally so; nay, more so, for the natural selec- 

 tion, which he invokes to explain it, only tells, ac- 

 cording to his own observation, in the opposite 

 direction. Still he sets up his hypothesis that 

 natural selection had formed different species 

 when artificial breeding had formed only different 

 races. Here he commits a fallacy in analogy, 

 likening two things to one another there where 

 precisely they are seen to be different. While one 

 process of breeding is seen to select and form races, 



