In these examples the circumstance overlooked was cognizable by the senses. In other cases, it is one the knowledge of which could only be arrived at by reasoning; but the fallacy may still be classed under the head to which, for want of a more appropriate name, we have given the appellation Fallacies of Non-observation. It is not the nature of the faculties which ought to have been employed, but the non-employment of them, which constitutes this Natural Order of Fallacies. Wherever the error is negative, not positive; wherever it consists especially in overlooking, in being ignorant or unmindful of some fact which, if known and attended to, would have made a difference in the conclusion arrived at; the error is properly placed in the Class which we are considering. In this Class, there is not, as in all other fallacies there is, a positive misestimate of evidence actually had. The conclusion would be just, if the portion which is seen of the case were the whole of it; but there is another portion overlooked, which vitiates the result.
For instance, there is a remarkable doctrine which has occasionally found a vent in the public speeches of unwise legislators, but which only in one instance that I am aware of has received the sanction of a philosophical writer, namely, M. Cousin, who in his preface to the Gorgias of Plato, contending that punishment must have some other and higher justification than the prevention of crime, makes use of this argument--that if punishment were only for the sake of example, it would be indifferent whether we punished the innocent or the guilty, since the punishment, considered as an example, is equally efficacious in either case. Now we must, in order to go along with this reasoning, suppose, that the person who feels himself under temptation, observing somebody punished, concludes himself to be in danger of being punished likewise, and is terrified accordingly. But it is forgotten that if the person punished is supposed to be innocent, or even if there be any doubt of his guilt, the spectator will reflect that his own danger, whatever it may be, is not contingent on his guiltiness, but threatens him equally if he remains innocent, and how, therefore, is he deterred from guilt by the apprehension of such punishment? M. Cousin supposes that people will be dissuaded from guilt by whatever renders the condition of the guilty more perilous, forgetting that the condition of the innocent (also one of the elements in the calculation) is, in the case supposed, made perilous in precisely an equal degree. This is a fallacy of overlooking; or of non-observation, within the intent of our classification.
Fallacies of this description are the great stumbling-block to correct thinking in political economy. The economical workings of society afford numerous cases in which the effects of a cause consist of two sets of phenomena: the one immediate, concentrated, obvious to all eyes, and passing, in common apprehension, for the whole effect; the other widely diffused, or lying deeper under the surface, and which is exactly contrary to the former. Take, for instance, the common notion so plausible at the first glance, of the encouragement given to industry by lavish expenditure. A, who spends his whole income, and even his capital, in expensive living, is supposed to give great employment to labor. B, who lives on a small portion, and invests the remainder in the funds, is thought to give little or no employment. For every body sees the gains which are made by A's tradesmen, servants, and others, while his money is spending. B's savings, on the contrary, pass into the hands of the person whose stock he purchased, who with it pays a debt he owed to some banker, who lends it again to some merchant or manufacturer; and the capital being laid out
