istam notionem ex aquâ tantum, et communibus et vulgaribus liquoribus, absque ullâ debitâ verificatione, temere abstractam esse."
Bacon himself is not exempt from a similar accusation when inquiring into the nature of heat: where he occasionally proceeds like one who, seeking for the cause of hardness, after examining that quality in iron, flint, and diamond, should expect to find that it is something which can be traced also in hard water, a hard knot, and a hard heart.
The word κίνησις in the Greek philosophy, and the words Generation and Corruption, both then and long afterward, denoted such a multitude of heterogeneous phenomena, that any attempt at philosophizing in which those words were used was almost as necessarily abortive as if the word hard had been taken to denote a class including all the things mentioned above. Κίνησις, for instance, which properly signified motion, was taken to denote not only all motion but even all change: ἀλλοίωσις being recognized as one of the modes of κίνησις. The effect was, to connect with every form of ἀλλοίωσις or change, ideas drawn from motion in the proper and literal sense, and which had no real connection with any other kind of κίνησις than that. Aristotle and Plato labored under a continual embarrassment from this misuse of terms. But if we proceed further in this direction we shall encroach upon the Fallacy of Ambiguity, which belongs to a different class, the last in order of our classification, Fallacies of Confusion.
Chapter VI.
Fallacies Of Ratiocination.
§ 1. We have now, in our progress through the classes of Fallacies, arrived at those to which, in the common books of logic, the appellation is in general exclusively appropriated; those which have their seat in the ratiocinative or deductive part of the investigation of truth. Of these fallacies it is the less necessary for us to insist at any length, as they have been most satisfactorily treated in a work familiar to almost all, in this country at least, who feel any interest in these speculations, Archbishop Whately's Logic. Against the more obvious forms of this class of fallacies, the rules of the syllogism are a complete protection. Not (as we have so often said) that ratiocination can not be good unless it be in the form of a syllogism; but that, by showing it in that form, we are sure to discover if it be bad, or at least if it contain any fallacy of this class.
§ 2. Among Fallacies of Ratiocination, we ought perhaps to include the errors committed in processes which have the appearance only, not the reality, of an inference from premises; the fallacies connected with the conversion and æquipollency of propositions. I believe errors of this description to be far more frequently committed than is generally supposed, or than their extreme obviousness might seem to admit of. For example, the simple conversion of a universal affirmative proposition, All A are B, therefore all B are A, I take to be a very common form of error: though committed, like many other fallacies, oftener in the silence of thought than in express words, for it can scarcely be clearly enunciated without being detected. And so with another form of fallacy, not substantially different from the preceding: the erroneous conversion of an hypothetical proposition. The proper converse of an hypothetical proposition is this: If the
