languages and in considerable number: nor can any of these be found in which, by him who may wish to put a deceit upon those to whom he has to address himself, instruction in no small quantity may not be obtained.

What in these books of instruction is professed to be taught comes under this general description: viz. how, by means of words aptly employed, to gain your point; to produce upon those with whom you have to deal, those to whom you have to address yourself, the impression, and, by means of the impression, the disposition most favourable to your purpose, whatsoever that purpose may be.

As to the impression and disposition the production of which might happen to be desired, whether the impression were correct or deceptious, whether the disposition were with a view to the individual or community in question, salutary, indifferent, or pernicious, was a question that seemed not in any of these instances to have come across the author's mind. In the view taken by them of the subject, had any such question presented itself, it would have been put aside as foreign to the subject; exactly as, in a treatise on the art of war, a question concerning the justice of the

war.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero, and Quintilian, Isaac Voss, and, though last and in bulk least, yet not the least interesting, our own Gerard Hamilton (of whom more will be said), are of this stamp. Between those earliest and these latest of the writers

who have written on this subject and with this view, others in abundance might be inserted; but these are quite enough.

After so many ages past in teaching with equal complacency and indifference the art of true instruction and the art of deception-the art of producing good effects, and the art of producing bad effectsthe art of the honest man and the art of the knaveof promoting the purposes of the benefactor and the purposes of the enemy of the human race-after so many ages during which, with a view to persuasion, disposition, action, no instructions have been endeavoured to be given but in the same strain of imperturbable impartiality, it seemed not too early in the nineteenth century to take up the subject on the ground of morality, and to invite common honesty for the first time to mount the bench and take her seat as judge.

As to Aristotle's fallacies, unless his petitio principii and his fallacia, non causa pro causâ be considered as exceptions, upon examination so little danger would be found in them, that, had the philosopher left them unexposed to do their worst, the omission need not have hung very heavy upon his conscience; scarce

in

any instance will be discovered any the least danger of final deception: the utmost inconvenience they seem capable of producing seems confined to a slight sensation of embarrassment. And as to the embarrassment, the difficulty will be, not in pronouncing that the proposition in question is incapable of form- ' ing a just ground for the conclusion built upon it, but

in finding words for the description of the weakness which is the cause of this incapacity: not in discovering the proposition to be absurd, but in giving an exact description of the form in which the absurdity presents itself.

Section III.

RELATION OF FALLACIES TO VULGAR ERRORS.

Error, vulgar error a, is an appellation given to an opinion which, being considered as false, is considered in itself only, and not with a view to any consequences of any kind, of which it may be productive.

It is termed vulgar with reference to the persons by whom it is supposed to be entertained and this either in respect of their multitude, simply, or in respect of the lowness of the station occupied by them or the greater part of them in the scale of respectability, in the scale of intelligence.

Fallacy is an appellation applied not exclusively to an opinion or to propositions enunciative of supposed opinions, but to discourse in any shape considered as having a tendency, with or without design, to cause any erroneous opinion to be embraced, or even, through

a

Vulgar errors is a denomination which, from the work written on this subject by a physician of name in the seventeenth century, has obtained a certain degree of celebrity.

Not the moral (of which the political is a department), but the physical, was the field of the errors which it was the object of Sir Thomas Brown to hunt out and bring to view: but of this restriction no intimation is given by the words of which the title of his work is composed.

the medium of erroneous opinion already entertained, to cause any pernicious course of action to be engaged or persevered in.

Thus, to believe that they who lived in early or old times were, because they lived in those times, wiser or better than those who live in later or modern times, is vulgar error: the employing that vulgar error in the endeavour to cause pernicious practices and institutions to be retained, is fallacy.

By those by whom the term fallacy has been employed, at any rate by those by whom it was originally employed, deception has been considered not merely as a consequence more or less probable, but as a consequence the production of which was ained at on the part at least of some of the utterers.

Έλεγχοι σοφιςων, arguments employed by the sophists, is the denomination by which Aristotle has designated his devices, thirteen in number, to which his commentators, such of them as write in Latin, give the name of fallacia, (from fallere to deceive,) from which our English word fallacies.

That in the use of these instruments, such a thing as deception was the object of the set of men mentioned by Aristotle under the name of sophists, is altogether out of doubt. On every occasion on which they are mentioned by him, this intention of deceiving is either directly asserted or assumed.

Section IV.

POLITICAL FALLACIES THE SUBJECT OF THIS

WORK.

The present work confines itself to the examination and exposure of only one class of fallacies, which class is determined by the nature of the occasion in which they are employed.

The occasion here in question is that of the formation of a decision procuring the adoption or rejection of some measure of government: including under the notion of a measure of government, à measure of legislation as well as of administration; two operations so intimately connected, that the drawing of a boundary line between them will in some instances be matter of no small difficulty, but for the distinguishing of which on the present occasion, and for the purpose of the present work, there will not be any need.

Under the name of a Treatise on Political Fallacies, this work will possess the character, and, in so far as the character answers the design of it, have the effect of a treatise on the art of government: having for its practical object and tendency, in the first place, the facilitating the introduction of such features of good government as remain to be introduced; in the next place giving them perpetuation-perpetuation, not by means of legislative clauses aiming directly at that object (an aim of which the inutility and mischievousness will come to be fully laid open to view in the course of this work), but by means of that instrument, viz.