"Fallacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... degree of consciousness that accompanies these readjustments varies enormously, this method of moralization may be said to be always, like the preceding, a more or less conscious process. Learning by experience is subject, of course, to many mistaken judgments; the fallacy of post hoc propter hoc leads many learners to avoid perfectly innocent acts as supposedly involving some evil result with which they were once by chance connected; and the true causes of the evils are ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... feathers are contrary to darkness; is convicted of error without difficulty. But arguments of the same kind, and quite as bad, are to be found in learned works on matters less familiar to us, and we often fail to detect the fallacy. ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and for a while the individual feels stronger; but this excitement is always followed by depression and loss of animal and mental vigor. Thus it is a mere provocative to momentary personal effort, without affording any resources to direct or execute. Hence the fallacy of that doctrine held by some, that to accomplish deeds of daring, feats of muscular strength, etc., with success, demands the drinking of spirituous liquors. Were I about to storm an enemy's battery, with no alternative before me but ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... proportion which the power bore to the weight, he demonstrated by successive experiments that the weight of the engine would of itself produce sufficient adhesion to enable it to draw upon a smooth railroad the requisite number of waggons in all kinds of weather. And thus was the fallacy which had heretofore prevailed on this subject completely exploded, and it was satisfactorily proved that rack-rails, toothed wheels, endless chains, and legs, were alike unnecessary for the efficient traction of loaded waggons upon a moderately ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... of these intricate provisions are founded on a patent fallacy. Preferences are not expressed in the Hare system, as in true preferential voting, that they may be given effect to in deciding the election, but simply in order to allow the elector to say in advance to whom he ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... the Creator, He, therefore, lacked a perfection before the creation of the world. But an assumption like this contradicts the idea of perfect goodness, therefore there is no creation. To what have I arrived, Raphael? Terrible fallacy of my conclusions! I give up the Creator as soon as I believe in a God. Wherefore do I require a God, if ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... i.e. to the things apprehended by our acts of apprehension. Thus, by an unconscious equivocation, we arrive at the conclusion that whatever we can apprehend must be in our minds. This seems to be the true analysis of Berkeley's argument, and the ultimate fallacy ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... on one grand fallacy; for, whereas this wretch is endeavouring by a supercilious conduct to lead the beholder into an opinion of his superiority to the despised person, he inwardly flatters his own vanity with a deceitful presumption that this his conduct is founded on a general preconceived ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... is, for education in the broadest sense of the word. Criticism is the operation by which suggestion is limited and corrected. It is by criticism that the person is protected against credulity, emotion, and fallacy. The power of criticism is the one which education should chiefly train. It is difficult to resist the suggestion that one who is accused of crime is guilty. Lynchers generally succumb to this suggestion, especially if the crime was a heinous one ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Chatterton. Time was when a riotous life was considered part of their calling—when they shunned the domestic ties and actually held that the consummate artist is able to love nothing but the creations of his fancy. It is such men as Thomas Sandys who have exploded that pernicious fallacy.... ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... Clergy, or of the Temporall Officers on the Spirituall; but of both on the Civill Soveraign; which ought indeed to direct his Civill commands to the Salvation of Souls; but is not therefore subject to any but God himselfe. And thus you see the laboured fallacy of the first Argument, to deceive such men as distinguish not between the Subordination of Actions in the way to the End; and the Subjection of Persons one to another in the administration of the Means. For to every ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... argument as I had put it. The assiduity of the Scottish clergy is certainly greater than that of the English. His taking up the topick of their not having so much learning, was, though ingenious, yet a fallacy in logick. It was as if there should be a dispute whether a man's hair is well dressed, and Dr Johnson should say, 'Sir, his hair cannot be well dressed; for he has a dirty shirt. No man who has not clean linen has his hair well dressed.' When some days afterwards ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... pointed out limits to them, or showed their truth to be contingent on some circumstance not originally attended to. It will appear, I think, from the subsequent part of our inquiry, that there is no logical fallacy in this mode of proceeding; but we may see already that any other mode is rigorously impracticable: since it is impossible to frame any scientific method of induction, or test of the correctness of inductions, unless on the hypothesis that some inductions ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... last evening, Calvin Ross Shelby, congressional candidate for the suffrages of an intelligent people, stultified alike his hearers and himself. We shall not dignify his specious appeal to local pride with the easy exposure of its fallacy; the victory were too cheap; but since he glibly sought to establish a parallel between his own questionable political methods and the legendary deeds of the founders of our community, we too will frame from his eloquence a parallel which we commend ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... findings of the Commission on the ground that its report was based on a fallacy, since Ireland has no more right to be considered as a separate entity than an English county, is remarkably disingenuous in view of the acknowledgment of this in the separate treatment which she received in the matter of grants made in relief of local taxation and for the establishment ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... in French, the porters understood and appreciated his defence of them, but Antoine would by no means encourage the fallacy. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... place to something else. It is put to us, for example, whether our people should not be taught to come to church for the purpose of speaking to God rather than in order to be spoken to by man. This has a pious sound; but there is a fallacy in it. Preaching is not merely the speaking of a man. If it is, then it is certainly not worth coming to church for. Preaching, if it is of the right kind, is the voice of God. This we venture to say while well aware of its imperfections. In the best ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... of the wonderful fallacy that the laws of nature are agents, instead of being, as they really are, a mere record of experience, upon which we base our interpretations of that which does happen, and our anticipation of that which will happen, is an ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... supported, as a constitutional remedy? If there be any real difference, the former is check, and the latter a check-mate, to the movements of the Government of the Union. The same reasoning demonstrates the fallacy of nullification or secession, with equal clearness and certainty. A State cannot nullify a law of the Union, because the Constitution and laws of the State are made subordinate to the Constitution ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... school blundered when it supposed that the rules which it formulated could be made absolute. To give them that character, it was necessary to make false assumptions as to the ultimate constitution of society; and the fallacy became clear when the formulae were supposed to give a real history or to give first principles, from which all industrial relations could be deduced. Meanwhile, the formulae, as they really expressed conditional truths, might be very useful so long as, in ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... object of Masonry is the physical and moral amelioration and the intellectual and spiritual improvement of individuals and society. Neither can be effected, except by the dissemination of truth. It is falsehood in doctrines and fallacy in principles, to which most of the miseries of men and the misfortunes of nations are owing. Public opinion is rarely right on any point; and there are and always will be important truths to be substituted in that opinion in the place of many errors and absurd and injurious prejudices. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... certainty of the Inconceivability Argument as applied to Theism and to mathematics shown to contain a virtual though not a formal fallacy. ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... in 1881, said, that in evidence given before the Artic Committee, of which he was a member, all the witnesses were unanimous in the opinion that spirits taken to keep out cold was a fallacy, and that nothing was more effectual than a good fatty diet, and hot tea or coffee, as a drink "Seamen who Journeyed with me up the shores of Wellington Channel," says the Admiral," in the artic regions, after one day's experience ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... after death is so untenable in the face of many scientific discoveries of to-day, and of the irrefutable facts that are constantly staring us in the face, that an instance or two are all that are necessary to prove the fallacy of ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... procured from L100,000 in England; yet he will be able to enjoy his learned and cultured leisure, just as he does at home, because all the work will be done for him by the servants he employs. For three or four years this agreeable fallacy made quite a stir in England: famous authors, distinguished soldiers, learned bishops were deceived by it; noblemen, members of Parliament, bankers and merchants, all combined to applaud this novel and excellent idea ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... "to expend compassion on a man who, etc., were surely a pathetic fallacy." Al. "Is not the man who has it in his power, ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... that the world is too big for him to overturn, he realises that there are many things he cannot understand, his intelligence sometimes revolts at what seems to be oppression and injustice. But he puts away from him the fallacy that all men are equal—they are not equal, their very inequality proves it. Some must rule and some be ruled; for some life must be pleasanter and more full of meaning than it is for others; some men must be strong ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... wines that ever the Rhone or the Rhine produced, but never was their wine like that one bottle of Sautern. It poured out as clear as the stream of hope ere it has been muddied by disappointment, and it was as soft and generous as early joy ere youth finds out its fallacy. We drank it slowly, and lingered over the last glass as if we had a presentiment that we should never meet with any thing like it again. When it was done, quite done, we ordered another bottle. But no—it was not the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... Sylvia might be thinking about all this; if she associated our pursuit by the slightest imaginative thread with a fellow who impolitely stared at her in a Havana cafe, yet to whom she had been willing to cry: "I am in danger!" Presumptuous fallacy! Then other thoughts began to race through my brain. Now that we were face to face with action, how were we going to come out? Had I a right to imperil those who were sailing with me? Was it not my duty, even at this eleventh hour, to ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... clear perception and statement of the difficulties in the way of it may suggest the means of removing them. And, in the outset, is it not obvious that the home affections flourish so scantily because scanty attention is paid to the cultivation of them? It is forever the fallacy and folly of man to think least of that which lies nearest to him, and is the most indissolubly bound up with his being as a cause of happiness or of misery. He thinks most eagerly on those comparatively exceptional and remote ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... it was easier to make a convert than to keep him. Many of the Indians clung to the idea that baptism was a safeguard against pestilence and misfortune; and when the fallacy of this notion was made apparent, their zeal cooled. Their only amusements consisted of feasts, dances, and games, many of which were, to a greater or less degree, of a superstitious character; and as the Fathers could rarely prove to their own satisfaction the absence of ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... of the ambiguity of the word 'hypostasis', sometimes used to signify substance, and sometimes person, you contrive a fallacy. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... population, that had ever been built on Earth, and yet, again in terms of population, it was nowhere near as large as Tokyo or London. The solution to the paradox lies in discovering that the term "population" is used in two different senses, thus exposing the logical fallacy of the undistributed middle. If, in referring to London or Tokyo, the term "population" is restricted to those and only those who are actively engaged in the various phases of actual government—as it is when referring to Government ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... it matter what he does not do, know, feel, care for, if he treats what he does do, know, feel, and care for, well?" The objection is ingenious, and, as Petruchio would say, "'a might have a little galled me" if its ingenuity had not been the ingenuity of fallacy. For the question is whether this insensibility to large parts of life has not injured Maupassant's treatment of the parts in which he did feel an interest. I think it has. There were too many things in emotion and in thought of which he was ignorant. Mrs. Piozzi, in ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... additional light as would flash instant conviction on the minds of all. It seems, I have been deceived; but I must be permitted to suggest, that men who persist in the renewal of assertions, without a single effort to controvert the proofs which have been adduced to demonstrate their fallacy, cannot have for their object the establishment of truth—which ought, exclusively, to influence the conduct of public characters, whether writers ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... a universal fallacy that because works like the comedies of Aristophanes discuss certain social or ethical problems, they are inspired by them. Aristophanes wrote to express his vision on life, his delight in life itself seen behind the warping screen of ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... logician regards his premisses not as hypotheses to be tested, but as established truths, he must condemn the Syllogism as a formal fallacy. It is inevitably a petitio principii. If the argument 'All men are mortal; Smith is a man, therefore Smith is mortal,' means that we know, before drawing our inference, that literally all men are mortal, we must already have discovered that Smith ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy,—is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... slightest idea where the play-actors were or had gone. They had opened a two weeks' engagement at the Teatro Quirino. There had been a good house on the opening night; the remainder of the week did not show the sale of a hundred tickets. It was a fallacy that traveling Americans had any desire to witness American productions in Italy. So, then, the managers of the theater had abruptly canceled the engagement. The American manager had shown neither foresight nor common ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... wear a patch or two there, and I'll Warrant you for pretending as much as any man; And who, you Fool, shall know the fallacy? ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... arguments in themselves, and in the spirit which produces them. The war is now reviled as unjust and unnecessary; and in order to prove it so, appeals are made to circumstances of accidental scarcity from the visitation of the seasons. The fallacy of these reasonings is equal to their mischief. It is not true that you could procure corn more easily if peace were to be made to-morrow. If this war be unjust, it ought to be stopped on its own account; but if it be indeed a war of principle ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... that this poem is more than a mere poem; it is a natural acknowledgment of the monarchy of small things, the same idea that made Dickens believe that common men could be kings—that is, in the same category as the Divine care of the hairs of the head. It gives the lie to the rather popular fallacy that events are important by their size. It is once more a position that the stone on the hillside is as mighty as the mountain of which it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... saliva in the course of an hour weighing eight or ten times as much as its own tissue. A striking example this of the rapidity with which saliva can be separated from the blood under certain circumstances, and of the fallacy of founding conclusions on the quantity secreted ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... labor, and yet, other things being favorable, be just as intelligent, just as polished in manner, and graceful in bearing as if his occupation was varied and the more laborious portions of it never continued long at a time. To-day this fallacy is beginning to be generally recognized. Go into any farming district, and you will find that the farmer's sons who are regularly engaged in one kind of labor all day, as ploughing, planting, mowing, are great, awkward, heavy-mannered youths, while his daughters are, in comparison, easy in their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... difficult to see the source of the fallacy into which Mr. Fellowes had fallen. It lies in the attempt to make a distinction in fact, as well as in theory, between the "intellectual" and "emotional" parts of our nature. It is very well for the spiritual and mental ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... disdain, and their habitual attitude toward what men believe in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is substantially the same, It takes twice as long to convert a body of women to some new fallacy as it takes to convert a body of men, and even then they halt, hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The women of Colorado had been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to prohibition sufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... perhaps, be benefitted by it. And why, in reality, should we seek to keep as a secret a practice which is perfectly right and justifiable? If there is a prejudice against it, (and we know there is), this is not the way to combat it. Only by meeting it openly, and showing the fallacy of it, can we hope to convince the public, that there is nothing wrong about it. Truth and justice need never fear the light—they can only gain additional force from it. I do not even attempt to sell a cask of gallized wine, before the purchaser is made fully ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... philosophy, and is due to their illogical logic, and to the general ignorance of the ancients respecting the part played by language in the process of thought. No such perplexity could ever trouble a modern metaphysician, any more than the fallacy of 'calvus' or 'acervus,' or of 'Achilles and the tortoise.' These 'surds' of metaphysics ought to occasion no more difficulty in speculation than a ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... that was a world apart, in which amusing and being amused was the one occupation. She had passed wearily through that period of life, and sought repose, truth, tranquillity, and religious resignation; to make those young spirits feel the fallacy of such a mode of existence was her earnest desire, and her efforts in that direction were characterized by a zeal, energy, and persistence which were productive of wonderful results. That was one phase ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... ingeniously rule and are subject to one another, stay and uphold one another, that admiration is compelled for the sagacity of the great organiser who, with unparalleled power of systematisation, collecting his material from all sources, constructed so imposing an edifice of fallacy. Avicenna, according to his lights, imparted to contemporary medical science the appearance of almost mathematical accuracy, whilst the art of therapeutics, although empiricism did not wholly lack ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... the parliament was a mere fallacy, while the sovereign was universally acknowledged to possess a dispensing power, by which all the laws could be invalidated, and rendered of no effect. The exercise of this power was also an indirect ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Minnesota we had an experience which I have always remembered as illustrative of the fallacy of all human testimony about ghosts, rappings, and other phenomena of that character. We spent two nights and a day at Fort Snelling. Some of the officers were greatly surprised by a celestial phenomenon of a very extraordinary character which had been observed for several nights past. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... "That is a curious old fallacy that lingers among us like an old faith, unable to get away from people's minds because it has literally not a leg to stand upon, or to walk with. We reveal what we are not by ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... gleams have shown us new things in our civilization and in our social life, and most of all in our own hearts. Above all other lessons we have learned, or will learn, is the fallacy of hatred. Hatred weakens, destroys, disintegrates, scatters. The world's disease to-day is the withering, blighting, wasting malady of hatred, which has its roots in the narrow patriotism which teaches people to love their own country ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... crept into the church at this time, arose from placing human reason in competition with revelation; but the fallacy of such arguments being proved by the most able divines, the opinions they had created vanished away like the stars before ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... you to say that; but it's a fallacy, all the same,' said Ida. 'Do you think Napoleon at St. Helena, squabbling with Sir Hudson Lowe, is as dignified a figure as Napoleon at the Tuileries, in the zenith of his power? But I ought not to be grumbling at fate. I have been happy for six sunshiny weeks. If I were ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... resolutions which were not a part of the platform but were nevertheless "expressive of the sentiment of this convention," the party declared itself in sympathy "with the efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of labor"; it condemned "the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners"; and it opposed the Pinkerton system of capitalistic espionage as "a menace to our liberties." The party ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... since your kind live on no planet of this system, you must come from another star. Since his science says that this is just as impossible as coming from another galaxy, he is convinced of the fallacy ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... The expression of his face would be sombre were it not for the striking eye, which has a remarkable fascination. His triumphs as a debater are achieved not by the aid of the passions, as with Sir James Graham, or with Mr. Sheil; not of prejudice and fallacy, as with Robert Peel; not with imagination and high seductive colouring, as with Mr. Macaulay: but—of pure reason. He prevails by that subdued earnestness which results from deep religious feelings, and is not ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Fallacy has its short triumphs and the persuasive critic or the creator of art values may effect real value but for a day. The limit of the credulity of the public, which Lincoln has immortalized, is the basis ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... and most important requisites for having healthy children is to avoid the eating-for-two fallacy. Most people overeat, anyway, and there should be no encouragement ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... Wych Hazel's lips; but she sent them back. Somehow her own height of happiness made her strangely tender and humble even towards such fallacy as this. ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... back to Plato and forward to Edward Bellamy, that the designs for Utopia have always been flawed by an altered conception of the humanity that walks within the city; and he has begun by trying to avoid a fallacy and ended by begging a question that he might very well have ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... know I can produce a man 150 Of female Seed, far abler to resist All his sollicitations, and at length All his vast force, and drive him back to Hell, Winning by Conquest what the first man lost By fallacy surpriz'd. But first I mean To exercise him in the Wilderness, There he shall first lay down the rudiments Of his great warfare, e're I send him forth To conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes, By Humiliation and strong Sufferance: 160 His weakness shall o'recome Satanic strength ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... though he generally looks it," I replied. "But the truth is that there is a fallacy in the simile, although it was my own. The happiness at which the lover is aiming is an infinite happiness, which can be extended without limit. The more he is loved, normally speaking, the jollier he will be. It is definitely true that the stronger the love of both lovers, the stronger ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... here and elsewhere. The bill was extremely mistaken. It was supposed to enact what it never enacted; and complaints were made of clauses in it, as novelties, which existed before the noble lord that brought in the bill was born. There was a fallacy that ran through the whole of the objections. The gentlemen who opposed the bill always argued as if the option lay between that bill and the ancient law. But this is a grand mistake. For, practically, the option is between not that bill and the old law, but between that bill and those occasional ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... The fallacy of this idea can be seen at once by making an examination of the projectiles, which will be found to contain only the quantity of powder which you could hold in the palm of your hand. The shells contain 10 ounces, the shrapnel 3, the cannister a little more than 2. Thus it may ...
— The Battle of Bayan and Other Battles • James Edgar Allen
... to what the child here and now puts forth, we are confused and misled. We cannot read its meaning. Extreme depreciations of the child morally and intellectually, and sentimental idealizations of him, have their root in a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... of time. Thus the date and place of origin of these eternal stories, the groundwork of ballads and popular tales, can never be ascertained. The oldest known version may be found in the literature of Egypt or Chaldaea, but it is an obvious fallacy to argue that the place of origin must be the place where the tale was first written down in hieroglyph ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... upon him or any other innocent one simply as a satisfaction to justice? Law ought to always place us where we are in fact, otherwise it is detestably unjust. Why should any sensible man attribute such dealings to the Father of Spirits? The fallacy of such teaching is seen in the fact that the penalty of the Adamic law was executed in the day of the transgression, and not nine hundred nor thousands of years afterwards. The phrase, "Dying thou shalt die" does not ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... respond passionately to her husband. That this woman is more likely to conceive than the emotional one, is a well-known fact. The woman who refuses to use contraceptives, but who rejects sex expression except for a few days in the month, is likely to learn too soon the fallacy of her theory ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... could quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the material offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust and desolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so dismally non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may have been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it only presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyone perfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least corruptible of our typical spectators were too easily beguiled ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... hand, maintains that the piece was wrenched out of Hazlewood's hands and deliberately pointed at his body, and Lucy inclines to the same opinion; I do not suspect them of wilful exaggeration, yet such is the fallacy of human testimony, for the unhappy shot was most unquestionably discharged unintentionally. Perhaps it would be the best way to confide the whole secret to Hazlewood; but he is very young, and I feel the utmost repugnance to communicate to him my folly. I once thought of disclosing the ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... many methods suggested before his time of removing teeth without recourse to instrumental extraction. There were a number of applications to the gums that were claimed by older authors to remove the teeth without the need of metal instruments. We might expect that Chauliac would detect the fallacy with regard to these and expose it. He says that while much is claimed for these methods he has never seen them work in practice and ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... the opinion of the people of his section, everybody was supposed to be instructed and wise. But he had devoted his attention to the question of the coming Presidential election, and was not unwilling to exchange with all whom he might the ideas to which he had arrived. He then began to show the fallacy of some of the arguments against General Taylor, making his chief theme the fashionable statement of all those who oppose him (the old Locofocos as well as the new), that he has no principles, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... far as a superiority of preference had been indicated, and that therefore he ought to be also the choice of the House of Representatives. It would be against the spirit of the Constitution and a thwarting of the popular will, they said, to prefer either of his competitors. The fallacy of this reasoning, if reasoning it could be called, was glaring. If the spirit of the Constitution (p. 172) required the House of Representatives not to elect from three candidates before it, but only to induct an individual into the Presidency by a process ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... passage of ever so little of the sound above the palate would give a nasal twang, and that the sound was reinforced and developed only in the cavities of the throat and mouth. My practice in Oral Surgery, coupled with my own vocal studies exposed this fallacy and revealed to me the true ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... of their antagonism is the most notable characteristic of the modern scientific mind; and I believe no credulity or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have been the strength) of early imagination, indicates so strange a depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... preach and practice this fallacy as to fresh air and colds, but few physicians now deny that influenza is a germ disease or that a nose so irritated and so neglected as to secrete large quantities of mucus is a better place for breeding disease ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... dialectic. The former is a logic of truth, and is intended to furnish a canon of criticism. When logic is used to judge not analytically, but to judge synthetically of objects in general, it is called transcendental dialectic, which serves as a protection against sophistical fallacy. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... had, what we may call, sympathised with it,—had sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been sincere about it too; sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... having deserted his friends and sworn allies on that sad field, we are driven to believe that his presence there would have savoured more of the marvellous than many of his (p. 168) most celebrated achievements. The simple truth breaks the spell of the poet's picture, and forces us to unveil its fallacy, though it has been pronounced by the historian of Shrewsbury to "form one of the brightest ornaments of the pages of Marmion." To whatever cause we ascribe the decline of Owyn's power, we cannot trace its origin to a judicial visitation as ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... this be Moti, she who prates of being, And life, and death, and fallacy, and moan? Ah, how should I be fixed and steadfast? seeing All things about me shift, I need must change; Things which I thought were plain are waxen strange, Things are unfathomable which I deemed Shallow and bare; nay, maid, I do not rave, Sunbeams are mysteries, ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... This fact would have a direct bearing upon the theory which referred the melting and movement of the glaciers chiefly to their lower surface, explaining them by the central heat of the earth as their main cause. Satisfied as he was of the fallacy of this notion, Agassiz still wished to have the evidence of the glacier itself. The journey was, of course, a difficult one at such a season, but the weather was beautiful, and they accomplished it in safety, though not without much suffering. ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the man's hesitation; he, too, had probably heard that Clarence Brant weakly sympathized with his wife's sentiments, and dared not speak fully. And he understood the cowardly suggestion that there was "no real danger." It had been Clarence's one fallacy. He had believed the public excitement was only a temporary outbreak of partisan feeling, soon to subside. Even now he was conscious that he was less doubtful of the integrity of the Union than of his own household. It was not the devotion of the patriot, but the indignation ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... important points:—(i) the need of missionaries, at the present day, being not only men of holy and devoted lives, but also fully equal in intellectual equipment and culture to our home clergy; and (ii) the fallacy of trusting to the circulation of the Bible, as an instrument of mission work, unless it be accompanied—or rather preceded—by the teaching of ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... looking at the Wellington Channel floe, as the accumulation of many years of continued frost, might have some grounds upon which to base his supposition. A year's observation, however, has shown me the fallacy of supposing that in deep-water channels floes continue to increase in thickness from year to year; and to that subject I will return in a future chapter, ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... this amusing assumption would not stand a single hour in a cultured circle. Some periodicals of the day foster the fallacy in many an unfortunate mind that to read about a book is really quite as good as actually to read it. Their readers are led to infer that learning is quite a spare-time affair. I once assured a victim of this delusion ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... in any other part of the body, and this often without solution of continuity of the bones, and sometimes without evidence even of contact of the bullet with either tibia or fibula. Some remarks on this subject have already been made in the chapter on wounds in general, and some sources of fallacy exposed. I believe that in practically all these so-called explosive injuries the wound was either caused by a ricochet, or a bullet which deformed with great ease on bony contact during its progress through the limb. A considerable number of the wounds which were referred by the men to the use ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... state of affairs. The fact that Ethel was the wife of another man seemed to me so fixed and unalterable that I allowed my imagination to play with the picture of what might happen if that unalterable fact were altered. Secure in this fallacy, I worked myself up to the pitch of believing that I was actually and passionately in love with a woman whose inaccessibility was, after all, her most winning attraction. Moreover, by writing down, in this journal, the events and words of the hours we spent together, I confirmed ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... seriously to follow the Northern President's example,—and arm Negro slaves as soldiers." He adds: "That strange conclusion, had it ever been reached, would perhaps have reunited North and South eventually in sentiment,—by demonstrating at length the whole fallacy upon which the social difference of sections had so long rested. For as a Confederate writer expressed it, 'if the Negro was fit to be a soldier, he was not fit to be a slave,'" Schouler, "History of U. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... psychology now warn every student against the 'intellectualist' fallacy which is illustrated by my quotation from Macaulay. Impulse, it is now agreed, has an evolutionary history of its own earlier than the history of those intellectual processes by which it is often directed and modified. ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... are born most perfect are the highest, because farthest from the low Marsupial type. This would make the Ruminants and Ungulata higher than the Quadrumana or the Carnivora. But the Mammalia offer a still more remarkable illustration of the fallacy of this mode of reasoning, for if there is one character more than another which is essential and distinctive of the class, it is that from which it derives its name, the possession of mammary glands and the power of suckling the ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... has already been discussed, and attention has been drawn to the importance of the history given by the patient and to the various sources of fallacy or deception—in children it may be artful reticence or misrepresentation, in adults, the possibility of nightmare and ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... be obtained; but, if adventitious and foreign pleasures must be pursued, it would be perhaps of some benefit, since that pursuit must frequently be fruitless, if the practice of Savage could be taught, that folly might be an antidote to folly, and one fallacy be obviated by another. But the danger of this pleasing intoxication must not be concealed; nor, indeed, can any one, after having observed the life of Savage, need to be cautioned against it. By imputing none of his ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... music-criticism, he might have amplified the meaning of his once-famous phrase, the "pathetic fallacy," for I consider it a pathetic fallacy—though not in the Ruskinian sense—in criticism to be over-shadowed by the fear that, because some of our critical predecessors misjudged Wagner or Manet or ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... and that one, men who have achieved eminent success, whose only "schooling," perhaps, was received in the "little red school house" and therefore claim that it was a great institution for the making of men. But therein lurks a fallacy. Great men have issued from the "little red school house," it is true, but they became great not because of, but in spite of, the fact that the school house was "little" and was "red." In pointing to such men as these, as products, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel.' As if public safety could mean anything but the safety of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... nature. The religious experience must not only be found, but must also be reconciled with "the varieties of religious experience." The inadequacy of the well-known definitions of religion may be attributed to several causes. The commonest fallacy is to define religion in terms of a religion. My definition of religion must include my brother's religion, even though he live on the other side of the globe, and my ancestor's religion, in spite of his prehistoric remoteness. Error may easily arise through the attempt to ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... we see," Ont telepathed, "that there must be a Whole of which each of us is a part only. The old process which says 'I think, therefore I am,' has its fallacy in the statement, 'I think.' It assumes that that assertion is axiomatic and basic, when in reality it is the conclusion derived from a long process of mental introspection. It is a theory ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... Mr. Rotch executed his commission with fidelity, but a pass could not be obtained, his Excellency excusing himself in his refusal that he should not make the precedent of granting a pass till a clearance was obtained, which was indeed a fallacy, as it had been usual with him in ordinary cases,—Mr. Rotch returning in the evening reported as above; the Body then voted his conduct to be satisfactory, and recommending order and regularity to the People, dissolved. Previous to the dissolution, a number of Persons, supposed to be the Aboriginal ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... criminal trial, and if once we have considered how the criminal had committed a crime we no longer get free of the impression, even when we have discovered quite certainly that he had no share in the deed. The second type of fallacy—mistakes in observation—will be discussed later under ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... men and women, and when we had briefly explained our plan they decided to join forces with us, though it was evident that it was with some considerable misgivings that they thus tempted fate by opposing an ancient superstition, even though each knew through cruel experience the fallacy of ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the sight of his buffoonery more distressing, and as Randall had not provided himself with his home suit, they were the more cut off from one another. Thus there was all the less to counteract or show the fallacy of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... thought; so responsive, so discriminating and unargumentative. Argumentativeness in women was a detestable vice, in his opinion, for it meant everything but what the word itself etymologically did. Craftily he drew her out, cunningly he touched up every fallacy or crudeness in her ideas, in such wise that she unconsciously adopted his amendments, under the impression that they were ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... deeply the iron had entered his own soul. He had a profound sense of the engrained quality of evil,(741) the deep saturation of sin, the enormity of the guilt of those who sinned against the light and love of God.(742) A fallacy of his day was that God could easily and would readily forgive sin, that the standard ritual might at once atone for it and comfortable preaching bring the assurance of its removal. He denied this, and affirmed that such things do not change character; that ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) by the Representatives of the U.S., which declares, "these truths to be self-evident:—that all men are created equal," etc. It is regretable that so trenchant a state-paper should begin with so gross and palpable a fallacy. Men are not born equal, nor do they become equal before their death-days even in condition, except by artificial levelling; and in republics and limited monarchies, where all are politically equal, the greatest social inequalities ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... war and for the coalition, it has happened to us that we were converted by the arguments your majesty adduced against the war and against the coalition, and that your majesty convinced us of the fallacy of our opinion. It is, perhaps, very humiliating to admit that our conviction has veered around so suddenly, but your majesty's ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... adventure, or to try the hearts of men. Such a conception is shocking to the Christian notion of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God, but we question if there be not times when the most pious and perfect Christian may not find comfort and relief from a fallacy which was a matter of faith in less enlightened creeds, and over which the apostle, writing to the Hebrews, throws the sanction of his authority, so far as angels are concerned. [Heb., xiii, 1: 'Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... just such a causal connection. Where an existing language is concerned, this is a perfectly legitimate tooling of thought. But in applying such inferences to a supposititious language of dreams, psycho-analysts are begging the question, as well as running into other kinds of fallacy as to the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... one could solve but himself, found that he was put to the strait of giving a problem nobody could solve. He was somewhat taken aback when little Isaac declined to work on it, and coolly pointed out the fallacy involved. The only thing for the teacher to do was to say he had purposely given the proposition to see if any one would detect the fallacy. This he gracefully did, and again made a prophecy to the effect that Isaac Newton would some day take his own place and be ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... had been the intention of tapestry to replace painting. Whenever it leaned that way a deterioration was evident. It was by the lure of this fallacy that Brussels lost her pre-eminence. It was through this that the number of tones was increased from the twenty or more of Arras to the twenty thousand of the Gobelins. It was through this that the true mission of tapestry was lost, which was the mission of ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called "ethics of evolution." It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Fallacy.—One of the most frequent objections offered by the casual critic when the subject of expert testimony is discussed is to the effect that people write different hands with different pens, and he probably believes this to be true. A very slight acquaintance with the principles ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... ready to listen with sympathetic attention to the arguments for the reappearance of the souls of the dead in the earthly form they have quitted, to visit and converse with the living. He considers it a fallacy to say that anything is impossible; and my arguments are substantial. Korinna will appear to him. Castor has discovered a girl who is her very image. Your arts will convince him that it is she who speaks to him, for he never heard ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... absurdum—the lawyers' argument, technically flawless, though proceeding upon a transparent fallacy. That fallacy I shall consider hereafter; the question of the moment is the reporters'—"Have ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... entails a real, not an imaginary evil. In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo are just as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery. The two things are merely opposite sides or poles of one great disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of ideas. Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the negative pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole erroneous system, both theoretical and practical, then taboo may be defined as the negative side of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... humanity to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and the others had done. The fallacy was pointed out ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... this to be a monstrous fallacy; for surely it is entirely beyond the scope of any medical man's duty to sit in judgment on the applicants for his professional services. According to my idea of professional duty, every man is bound to do all in his power to afford relief to every sufferer who seeks it ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... the argument on the limits of variation, being myself limited in space; but I feel satisfied that it is the true answer to the very common and very strong objection, that "variation has strict limits." The fallacy is the requiring variation in domesticity to go beyond the limits of the same variation under nature. It does do so sometimes, however, because the conditions of existence are so different. I do not think a case can be pointed ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... analysis, of division and cross-division, are clearly described, and the processes of induction and deduction are constantly employed in the dialogues of Plato. The 'slippery' nature of comparison, the danger of putting words in the place of things, the fallacy of arguing 'a dicto secundum,' and in a circle, are frequently indicated by him. To all these processes of truth and error, Aristotle, in the next generation, gave distinctness; he brought them together in a separate science. But he is not to be regarded as the original inventor of any of the ...
— Sophist • Plato
... I to withhold a comforting fallacy from a hopeful soul. "Undoubtedly," I agreed. "But do you ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... still obtain the idolatrous veneration of mankind. Nor are chivalry and religion alone liable to fall into this moral superstition. It arises wherever an abstract good is substituted for its concrete equivalent. The miser's fallacy is the typical case, and something very like it is the ethical principle of half our respectable population. To the exercise of certain useful habits men come to sacrifice the advantage which was the original basis and justification of those habits. Minute knowledge is pursued at the expense of largeness ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... me happy indeed. You say you are superstitious, but if these numbers don't win you mustn't draw the conclusion that I don't love you; that would be a dreadful fallacy." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... The fallacy that a man could, by the rapid flapping of wings of any sort, overcome the force of gravity persisted up to a very recent day, despite the complete mathematical demonstration by von Helmholtz in 1878 that man could not possibly by his own muscular exertions raise his own weight into the air and ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... his ruddy face, and assumed thereby a physiognomy of almost childlike naivete. "Ah, well, on Friday, then;—though Friday is unlucky, and one rarely shines on a day of abstinence, anyhow. It's all a fallacy about fish being food for the brain. Meat, red meat, is what the brain requires." He slapped his forehead. "But ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... see—what happened? Well, riding, lessons, sisters. There was an enchanted rubbish heap, I remember, where all kinds of queer things happened. Odd, what things impress children! I can remember the look of the place to this day. It's a fallacy to think that children are happy. They're not; they're unhappy. I've never suffered so much as I did when ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... shooting from behind a hedge, merciless beating, shooting in the legs, and other similar variations of Irish Home Rule, on which I shall dwell in a later chapter—being only a protector of the weak tenant against the hard landlord, I think one fact will prove more forcibly than any argument the fallacy of such ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... body he defames and disregards. His great power is the veto; but the perverse use of this could easily be checked by the perverse use of many a legislative power which a mere majority of Congress can effectively use. The fallacy of the argument of "the President's friends," in their proposition that Congress should settle the dispute by the easy method of allowing Mr. Johnson to have his own way, consists in its entire oversight of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... member of my congregation. It were a great blessing, if every particular of what in the sum we call popular sentiment could carry about the name of its manufacturer stamped legibly upon it. I gave a stab under the fifth rib to that pestilent fallacy,—'Our country, right or wrong,'—by tracing its original to a speech of Ensign Cilley at a dinner of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... at one time, (and still is in some parts of the world) regarded as a psychic bird; it being thought that phantasms invariably took their departure as soon as it began to crow. This, however, is a fallacy. As ghosts appear at all hours of the day and night, in season and out of season, I fear it is only too obvious that their manifestations cannot be restricted within the limits of any particular time, and that ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... capacity of the people to govern themselves; that there is greater safety in a numerous representative body than in the single Executive created by the Constitution, and that the Executive veto is a "one-man power," despotic in its character. To expose the fallacy of this objection it is only necessary to consider the frame and true character of our system. Ours is not a consolidated empire, but a confederated union. The States before the adoption of the Constitution ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... intelligent listener, for whom the present series of volumes has been primarily planned. We hear much, nowadays, of the value of "Musical Appreciation." It is high time that something was done to educate our audiences and to dispel the hitherto prevalent fallacy that Music need not be regarded seriously. We do not want more creative artists, more executants; the world is full of them—good, bad and indifferent—but we do want more ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... persist in acts because we feel we should not persist in them, our conduct is but a modification of that which ordinarily springs from the combativeness of phrenology. But a glance will show the fallacy of this idea. The phrenological combativeness has for its essence, the necessity of self-defence. It is our safeguard against injury. Its principle regards our well-being; and thus the desire to be well is excited simultaneously with its ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the world are liable to give different names to the same fossil, and in all parts of the world they are occasionally liable to group together different fossils under the same title. Both these sources of fallacy require to be guarded against in reasoning as to the age of strata from their fossil remains. Thirdly, the mere fact of fossils being found in beds which are known by physical evidence to be of different ages, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... infinite. This stupendous fact ought to produce a revolution in the higher teaching of mathematics; it has itself added immeasurably to the educational value of the subject, and it has at last given the means of treating with logical precision many studies which, until lately, were wrapped in fallacy and obscurity. By those who were educated on the old lines, the new work is considered to be appallingly difficult, abstruse, and obscure; and it must be confessed that the discoverer, as is so often the case, has hardly himself emerged from the mists which the light of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... proving the existence of God, and a masterly effort it was.* But in his later great work, the "Critique of the Pure Reason," he saw its fallacy, and said of it—that if the existence could he proved at all, it must be on the grounds ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... succession of opinions can be equivalent to an examination of their value. Maine shows, for example, how the theory of the 'rights of man' first came up in the world; but does not thereby either prove or disprove it. It may have been a fallacy suggested by accident or a truth first discovered in a particular case. Maine, therefore, and the historical school generally require some basis for their inquiries, and that basis is supplied by the teaching of Bentham and Austin. I will only observe in connection with this that Fitzjames ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... believe, no greater fallacy than trusting to inspiration, except that of believing that a certain mood is necessary for writing. Ninety-nine hundredths of the best literary work is done by men who write to live, who know that they must write, and who do write, whether the weather is fine or rainy, whether ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... thought, a faculty of felicitious generalisations and diacritical judgment, long-sustained intellectual effort, an unselective mirroring of the world in the mind, and that relative immunity to fallacy which goes together with a stable and ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... same principle serves to keep the internal politics of the Germans quiet, and prevent Socialism being the practical hope or peril it has been in so many other countries. It operates in two ways; first, by a curious fallacy about "the time not being ripe"—as if time could ever be ripe. The same savage superstition from the forests had infected Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he made a personality out of the Zeitgeist—perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... a community is not, as mathematicians would say, always of the same sign. To ignore this is the essential fallacy of the cult called Individualism. But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... matter there are certain test facts which upset the adroitest statistical legerdemain. Though, really, the fallacy which regards an addition of territory as an addition of wealth to the "owning" nation is a very much simpler matter than the fallacies lying behind gambling systems, which are bound up with the laws of chance and the law of averages and much else that philosophers ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... and degraded, that it has less wealth and happiness than England; but then it considers, that, however bad its finances may be, they are getting no worse; that to continue the war for twenty years will bring no more ruin on the nation, while half the term would probably ruin us. Till we show the fallacy of this calculation, we cannot expect a durable peace. Our ruin is become an object, not only of ambition, but of necessity, as it were, to France; and nothing but despair of being able to accomplish their object will make them abandon ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... Nature were a harmony, had falsehood written almost on its face. It was the Geology of Catastrophism, a Geology so out of line with Nature as revealed by the other sciences, that on a priori grounds a thoughtful mind might have been justified in dismissing it as a final form of any science. And its fallacy was soon and thoroughly exposed. The advent of modified uniformitarian principles all but banished the word catastrophe from science, and marked the birth of Geology as we know it now. Geology, that is to say, had fallen at last into the great scheme of Law. Religious doctrines, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... accept favours, make myself a dependent, and be subservient to the unfeeling caprice of Hector, or any other proud and ignorant relation? Did not such people esteem wealth as the test and the measure of worth? What counterpoise had I, but sanguine hopes? of the probable fallacy of which I had already received strong proofs; and which did not, in the pictures that fancy at present drew, burst upon me with those bright and vivid flashes that had lately made them so alluring. My passions and propensities ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... popular fallacy," said the emir. "Nothing could be more erroneous than the prevalent idea that American girls marry foreign noblemen because attracted by the glitter of rank, holding their own plain republican citizens in despite. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... standard of value," so often used, is erroneous and misleading. There can be no fixed standard of value, and the student who wishes to delve into our financial problems should clear his mind of such a fallacy at the very threshold ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... By that old fallacy of Premise A. "They are only doing it for themselves," we say. "They are paid for what they do. They wouldn't do it if they weren't paid for it!" That is the vital core of the real opposition to Socialism, this erroneous ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... but in a despatch to Lord Normanby, against this very unjustifiable breach of faith on the part of France. We have seen these despatches, which are very firm, but written in a very proper and kind tone, exposing at the same time the fallacy of what has been done; for the King himself declared that he would never let one of his sons marry the Queen, he insisted on her marrying a descendant of Philip V. This has been done, and at the same ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... an annuity of two millions dead charge upon the public in favor of certain moneyed men; but inspect the thing more nearly, follow the stream in its meanders, and you will find that there is a good deal of fallacy in this ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... hand both the vocational and recreational interests of youth. With this accession of educational territory will come a proportionate increase in the number of male teachers, and a further diminution of the fallacy that the only kind of order is silence and the prime condition of mental concentration inaction. The system will become less ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... moreover, Julian, despite his knowledge of the thorny paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along which all her poor sisterhood walked incessantly, had not entirely disabused himself of the fallacy that a life such as hers was, in some vague, undefined and indefinable way, a life of pleasure. Even when we know a thing to be, we often cannot feel it to be. Knowledge in the mind does not inevitably bring to the birth sensation in the heart, or even the mental apprehension, half ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the challenge to the Sun newspaper which led to the debate in the preceding pages. It is not improbable that while thinking on the points he proposed to defend, his naturally acute mind perceived their fallacy, as there was a gradual shifting of his position from the subject of the original challenge, till on the last evening of the debate he ended with the astonishing announcement that on the Tuesday following he would deliver a lecture against gambling ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... submission. How many people think that to pray means to bring their wishes to God, and try to coax Him to make them His wishes! Why, half the shallow sceptical talk of this generation about the worthlessness of prayer goes upon that fundamental fallacy that the notion of prayer is to dictate terms to God; and that unless a man gets his wishes answered he has no right to suppose that his prayers are answered. But it is not so. Prayer is not after ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... suddenly given. I read yesterday a debate of this year on the subject of enlarging women's rights over property. It was a leaf from the class-book that is preparing for the needed instruction. The men learned visibly as they spoke. The champions of Woman saw the fallacy of arguments on the opposite side, and were startled by their own convictions. With their wives at home, and the readers of the paper, it was the same. And so the stream flows on; thought urging action, and action leading to the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... his men so long on salt-provisions, with a scanty allowance of corrupted water, or what he could procure by distillation The melted ice of the sea was not only fresh but soft, and so wholesome, as to show the fallacy of human reason unsupported by experiments. An ancient of great authority had assigned, from theory, bad qualities to melted snow; and from that period to the present times, this prejudice extended to ice ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... comparisons between the photograph and the hand-drawn picture are apt to be vitiated by the confusion of various extraneous interests with a purely artistic satisfaction resting in the thing itself. It is the old fallacy, involved in all the comparisons of Art with Nature. Of course, at bottom the interest is always that of the indwelling idea. But the question is, whether we stop at the outside, the material texture, or pass at once to the other extreme, the thought conveyed, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... who, the day after the "massacre" of March 5, 1770, was chosen chairman of the committee, to demand of the governor the immediate removal of the troops from the town of Boston. The stern and inflexible patriot clearly exposed the fallacy of Hutchinson's reply to the demand, and compelled the governor to yield. No flattery could lull his vigilance, no sophistry deceive his penetration. Difficulties did not discourage, nor danger appall him. Though poor, he ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... master switch controlling the power that fed Hot Rod, and blessing as he did it the fallacy of engineering that had required external power to power the mighty ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... hypnotised by the economists of the day, were unable to perceive this plain truth. Let me give another illustration. The capital exploit of Union Economics was, as has been said, its dealing with the land question, but perhaps its most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which it met the Great Famine. Now the singular thing about this famine is that during it there was no scarcity of food in Ireland; there was only a shortage ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... the further defect, or the additional advantage, of eliminating any theory of future punishment and reward. In lieu of anything of the kind, there was a doctrine that evil, in producing evil, automatically punished itself. The doctrine is incontrovertible. But, for corollary, went the fallacy that virtue is its own reward. Against that idea Job protested so energetically that mediaeval monks were afraid to read what he wrote. Yet it was perhaps in demonstration of the real significance of the allegory that a spiritualistic ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... all this it is persistently alleged that even if He had the power He could not have performed miracles, because miracles are violations of law, and the Lawgiver cannot violate even mere physical laws; but this specious fallacy is refuted by the simple assertion that He introduced a new power or force to counteract or modify others, which counteraction or modification of forces is no more than what is taking place in every part of the world ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... clearly explained the great mischief of such a situation, in your excellent treatise on the diseases of the army. On this account, I have thought it not improper, to address to you the following observations and experiments, which I think clearly demonstrate the fallacy of Dr. Alexander's reasoning, indisputably establish your doctrine, and indeed justify the apprehensions of all ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... ever that elementary conception of the right method and the just limitations of knowledge, by power of which he should not just strain out a single error here or there, but make a final precipitate of fallacy. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the expense either of growth, or of bodily activity, or of mental activity; as constitution and circumstances determine? We believe no logical intellect will question it. To think otherwise is to entertain in a disguised form the old fallacy of the perpetual-motion schemers—that it is possible to ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... into a maxim for ever repeated, is remarkable for the grossest fallacy: Ars longa, vita brevis(9). I would fain know, what art, compared with the natural duration of human life from puberty ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... There is a fallacy into which men and women of mature years are apt to fall—namely, that the cares and sorrows of the ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... will show how complex it was. In the first and foremost place there is a clear note of denunciation against the long established fallacy of the old order of battle in single line. Secondly, there is in its stead the reestablishment of the primitive system of mutually supporting squadrons in line ahead. Thirdly, there is the principle of throwing one ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett |
