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More "Fallacy" Quotes from Famous Books



... international relations will be brought about by insisting on the contrary interpretation—that our highest self-development and interest is to be attained by respecting the interests and encouraging the development of others. The root fallacy to be eradicated of course, is that one Power's gain is another's loss; a fallacy which has dominated diplomacy and is the negation of law. I think we are perceptibly breaking away from it: the great obstacle to better thinking ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer

... true import of the Constitution, in relation to slavery and the fallacy and wickedness of the doctrine of Secession, we are now prepared to deduce, from what has been said, the following reflections: First, the war in which the nation is now plunged should have strictly for its great end, the restoration of the Constitution and the Union to its original integrity; ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... logic and psychology, which have supplied so many instruments of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato. The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires ...
— The Republic • Plato

... impulses over which he has no control. There is real meaning in "strong will" and "weak will" will being a tendency to deliberate before and be steadfast in action, a tendency which varies immensely in different people. The fallacy of "free will" lies in assuming that every one has this tendency equally developed, making character a mere matter of saying "Yes!" and "No!" without reference to the ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... the use of what is commonly called the philosophy of language, is evidently misapplied by those who make it the test of grammatical certainty, it may not be amiss to offer a few considerations with a view to expose the fallacy of so ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham

... their town and Manchester. They had no sooner stated their errand than Mr. Huskisson, angrily throwing down his pen, in very few words refused their request, winding up his reply with these memorable words—remarkable not only for the fallacy of his then opinions, but also in connection with the calamitous event of the next day—"Gentlemen, I supported the scheme of the railway between Liverpool and Manchester as an experiment, but as long as I have the honour to hold a seat in parliament, I will never consent ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... the passage at length in order to give the critic's argument its widest scope. But, alas, who does not see the argument's fallacy? Who does not perceive that this reenforced skyscraper is a cardboard column liable to fall with the first push that is ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne

... that they derived their entire supplies of that element from ammonia, or the soluble nitrogenous constituents of the soil or manure. Boussingault has since re-examined this question, and by a most elaborate series of experiments, in which the utmost care was taken to avoid every source of fallacy, he was led to the conclusion, that when haricots, oats, lupins, and cresses were grown in calcined pumice-stone, mixed with the ash of plants, and supplied with air deprived of ammonia and nitric acid, their nitrogen underwent no increase. It has been objected to ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson

... excellence of Americans—an excellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations, however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what bounding ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in words. Mr. Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can never be American enough. He ranked with the students and the critics among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except, perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem so; he enriches his phrases busily, and ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell

... but an adventurous traveller can know the luxury of sleep. There is not a greater fallacy in the world than the common creed that sweet sleep is labour's guerdon. Mere regular, corporeal labour may certainly procure us a good, sound, refreshing slumber, disturbed often by the consciousness of the monotonous duties of the morrow; but how sleep the other great ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... attempted to puzzle you with this sort of question: 'If taxes be the cause of the people's misery, how comes it that they were not so miserable before the taxes were reduced as they are now?' Here is a fallacy which you will be careful to detect. I know that the taxes have been reduced; that is to say, nominally reduced, but not so in fact; on the contrary, they have, in reality, been greatly augmented. This has been done by the sleight-of-hand of paper ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... because the forbidden action 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... Snowden case is universally acknowledged by lawyers to have been masterly, and reminiscent of the great names of the profession in the past. Mr. Erwin is not dramatic. He appears to carry all before him by the sheer force of intellect, and by a kind of Lincolnian ability to expose a fallacy: He is still a young man, self-made, and studied law under Judge Brice of St. Louis, once President of the National Bar Association, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... 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

... article on strikes you have very neatly and tersely expressed the primal fallacy of modern political economy—to wit, that 'the value of any piece of labor cannot be defined'—and that 'all that can be ascertained is simply whether any man can be got to do it for a certain sum.' Now, sir, the 'value' of any piece of ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... harbors, not colonies. The colonizing idea is a fallacy. Germany is, first and last, a manufacturing country. It never was and never will be, for a long time to come, a successful colonizer. At present all that Germany wants is markets, and facilities for extending her markets. These markets Germany will always be able ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... 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 the public. The ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... fallacy lurking in the libertarian view arises from the fact that it also makes a hard and fast distinction between the self and the will. The indeterminists speak as if the self had amongst its several faculties a will which is free in the sense of being able to ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... opposition by endeavouring to make it appear that, because he opposed these claims and ignored these pretensions, he was hostile to the Church of England as a great spiritual power in the land.[114] He had himself often pointed out the fallacy of this reasoning, and drawn so clear a distinction between men and things in the controversy—the Church and her representatives—that I cannot add any thing to what he has written on the subject. In one ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... 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 had not been ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... to have lightning rods on houses, especially in the country. But it was found to be a good deal of a fallacy. I guess, after all, Mrs. Grimsby has it partly right. Human beings cannot easily command the ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose

... the fallacy of this spirit. It was supposed that the girl was practised in the art of ventriloquism, an art better known now than formerly; but it was soon after discovered that there was not so much ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor

... those several modes of union should now be considered as a mere league that may be dissolved at pleasure? It is from an abuse of terms. Compact is used as synonymous with league, although the true term is not employed, because it would at once show the fallacy of the reasoning. It would not do to say that our Constitution was only a league, but it is labored to prove it a compact (which in one sense it is) and then to argue that as a league is a compact every compact between nations must of course be a league, and that ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson

... I do not see just now some fallacy in the theory to invalidate the practise, for in Spain, the mother country, this corps is displaying, and has ever ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... and how many rows in an equal length of the ribbon, on the most moderate computation there were six hundred thousand eggs. Yet this Doris was certainly not very common; although I was often searching under the stones, I saw only seven individuals. No fallacy is more common with naturalists, than that the numbers of an individual species depend on its ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... the worst thing that can happen to a man, or to an idea—some wretched fallacy, perhaps, that has governed the minds of men, some gross superstition, ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens

... expresses fully and forcibly the meaning for which eight not very euphonious English words are required. The notion that the existence of these comprehensive words in an Indian language, or any other, is an evidence of deficiency in analytic power, is a fallacy which was long ago exposed by the clear and penetrative reasoning of Duponceau, the true father of American philology. [Footnote: See the admirable Preface to his translation of Zeisberger's Delaware Grammar, p. 94.] As he has ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... surprising to notice how often in political debates this fallacy is committed. It is human nature to believe for the time being that the other side will do the worst thing that the circumstances make possible. Fortunately, human nature just as constantly ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... 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 us believe, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... This is the profound fallacy underlying the present-day economic peace propagandism, whose heaviest underwriter, Mr. Carnegie, is, by the way, an agnostic. While there is faith there will be fighting. Do away with either and society would crumble. What the Puritans did for us, the Prussians have done for Germany. They ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... all other engines, military or political, used by his rivals or foes for his destruction. He is aware of the fatal consequences all former factions suffered from the public exposure of their past crimes and future views; of the reality of their guilt, and of the fallacy of their boasts and promises. He does not doubt but that a faithful account of all the actions and intrigues of his Government, its imposition, fraud, duplicity, and tyranny, would make a sensible alteration in the public opinion; and that even those who, from motives of patriotism, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... general be effected until it has in some sort been sanctioned by popular approval. But to attribute every advance, or even most advances, along the path of progress to the masses by whom a step forward is finally sanctioned, is hardly a more patent fallacy than the notion that because every statute is passed with the assent of the Crown, to the Queen may be ascribed the glory of every beneficial Act passed in her name. To maintain, as every man versed ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... dream of idle romance, which can never bear the test of reality," said Mad. de la Tour; "and I hope you will detect its fallacy before you are taught it by the bitter lessons ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney

... are often assured that the colleges at the two older universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are themselves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly be propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding of the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an attempt to ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no farther state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain. Without this accomplishment, the natural expectation and desire of such a state were but a fallacy in nature. Unsatisfied considerators would quarrel at the justice of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower; whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper ignorance of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... with him. This set her heart a little to rights, and she grew calm with a belief, that if so it was, as now she doubted not, a sight of her, or a future hope from her, would calm all his discontent, and beget a right understanding; she therefore resolves to write to him, and own her little fallacy: but before she did so, Octavio, whose passion was violent as ever in his soul, though it was oppressed with a thousand torments, and languished under as many feeble resolutions, burst at last into all its former softness, and he resolves to write to the false ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... 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

... a place well down town that we chose. It was a second floor, open in the rear, and there was sunlight most of the day. The rooms were really better than the ones we had. They could not be worse, we decided—a fallacy, for I have never seen a flat so bad that there could not be a worse one—and the price was not much higher. Also, there was a straight fireplace in the dining-room, which the Precious Ones described as being "lovelly," and the janitress was a humble creature who ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine

... last bottle, those feelings that seemed inevitably connected with whatever is last appeared to steal over him,—a tinge of sadness for pleasures fast passing and nearly passed, a kind of retrospective glance at the fallacy of all our earthly enjoyments, insensibly suggesting moral and edifying reflections, led him by degrees to confess that he was not quite satisfied with himself, though "not very bad for a commissary;" and finally, as the decanter waxed low, he would interlard ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... own, if there be no secret error or oversight in our proceedings hitherto, that all sensible qualities are alike to be denied existence without the mind. But, my fear is that I have been too liberal in my former concessions, or overlooked some fallacy or other. In short, I did ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley

... a temporary excess like getting drunk—squalid, if you like—but not touching your real relationships. Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools. They believe in the same law for both sexes. It is a ridiculous fallacy. Only Edmond was different. He loved women—psychologically. He was therefore inconstant, which is the real sin against marriage. He was a great lover, an artist. Every woman was to him what a canvas is to a painter, a violin to a violinist. The colours and the sounds he got ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco

... 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 Ibsen, we should be too merciful in criticising our contemporaries. Here is the "pathos ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... their day's excursion, composed themselves to rest as usual. Observing them to be asleep, I tried various ways to see whether it was a scheme to prove my intentions or not, but, after making a noise, and walking about, sometimes touching them with my feet, I found there was no fallacy. My heart then exulted with joy at seeing a time come that I might, in all probability be delivered from my captivity; but this joy was soon dampened by the dread of being discovered by them, or taken by any ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... hate is terribly common in sexual matters: it may be that hate turned to love is not uncommon in the rivalries of race or class. But any philosophy about the sexes that begins with anything but the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a fallacy; and all its historical comparisons are as ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavor of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more homebred, social, and joyous than at present. I regret to say that they are daily growing more and more faint, being gradually worn away by time, but still more obliterated by modern ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... from more regular states, not even the protection usually extended by a neutral port, and that in consequence he should be permitted to seize for Great Britain the vessels in Tunis. The Turk may possibly have overlooked the fallacy in this argument, which assumed that the protection extended by neutral governments was rather for the benefit of the belligerent than for the quiet and safety of its own waters; but he was perfectly clear-sighted as to his personal advantage ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... and linger. The Boyles go to England from the press of panic, Lady Boyle being old and infirm. Ah, but your talking friend would interest you, and you might accept the talk in infinitesimal doses, you know. Lamartine has surely acted down the fallacy of the impractical tendencies of imaginative men. I am full of France just now. Are you all prepared for an outbreak in Ireland? I hope so. My husband has the second edition of his collected poems[174] in the press by this time, by grace of Chapman and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... discovering the fallacy of our own judgment; to be ashamed of what we love, yet still to love, are feelings most unpleasant; and though they assume not the dignity of deep distress, yet philosophy has scarce any power to soothe their worrying, incessant annoyance. ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... do not know much of life. Pooh! I, Puck, who have dwelt for many of my days on their boudoir cushions, and eaten of their dainty little dinners, and been smuggled under their robes even into operas, balls, and churches, tell you that is an utter fallacy. They do not choose you to know that they know it, very probably; but there is nothing that is hidden from them, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... nationality to suppress insurrection. That the insurgents should be put upon a par with the Government, that they should enjoy the benefits of an established system, that they should have every right and every immunity as if the quarrel were between equal powers, has seemed to us a fallacy tinctured with deep prejudice. That feeling has been courteously, but firmly represented by our ministers. Since it pleased the European courts to proclaim their neutrality, we have borne the injustice temperately, and have confined our demands to our rights under that status. When the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... he had been alive—making allowances for temperamental variations. Degas knew that to grasp the true meaning of the nude it must be represented in postures, movements which are natural, not studio attitudes. As Monet exposed the fallacy of studio lighting, so Degas revealed the inanity of its poses. Ibsen said the stage should be a room with the fourth wall removed; Degas preferred the key-hole through which we seem to peep upon the privacy ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... so," said he, sadly. "But really, sir, it isn't. You may think that love rules all things nowadays, but that is a fallacy. Of late years a rival concern has sprung up. I have found my office subjected to a most annoying competition which has attracted away from me a large number of my closest followers. In the days when we acknowledged ourselves to be purely heathen, love was regarded with respect, ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs

... these arguments appeared reasonable, and she pursued their dictates; but in the practice of the life in which she plunged she proved the fallacy of the system, and at times tore her hair with frantic sorrow, that she had not continued in the mid-way of guilt, and so preserved some portion of self-approbation, to recompense her in a small degree, for the total loss of the esteem of ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald

... weakness of Mrs. Morpher to imagine that "Clytie" was a consolation and model for Mliss. Following this fallacy, Mrs. Morpher threw Clytie at the head of Mliss when she was "bad," and set her up before the child for adoration in her penitential moments. It was not, therefore, surprising to the master to hear that Clytie was coming to school, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... at first you don't succeed,' you know follow out the inestimable Watts's advice, and 'try again.' There's nothing like it: it gets to be quite a game in the long run. I thank my stars," laughing, "I have never been a slave to the 'pathetic fallacy' called love; yet it has its ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown

... is on the surface. Let us bore a little deeper toward the core of the subject. It is a fundamental fallacy of Socialism that all gain is the result of Labor and that therefore all gain belongs to Labor—the term "Labor" in practice meaning the great majority of laborers ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams

... into the fallacy of over-estimating the advantages of military training—with its fine air of set-up manliness and restrained yet vitalised discipline—because we are mostly compelled to compare such training with the lack of training fostered by that tame, dull sedentary routine of which there is ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... of three or four millions of men are not suddenly endowed with faculties and habits which render them capable of diverting one-third of their energies to work which is new, disproportionate, gratuitous, and supererogatory.—A fallacy of monstrous duplicity lies at the basis of the political theories of the day and of those which were invented during the following ten years. Arbitrarily, and without any examination, a certain weight ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... by these views would justify a fuller discussion and disproof of them here, did space permit. It must suffice to indicate merely that they have the same taint of illogicalness as the "fallacy of waste," and the "fallacy of luxury."[9] They overlook the fact that an income, either of money or of other goods, coming even to the wealthiest, will be used in some way. It may be used either for immediate ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... used to pay the public debt, though depreciated far below the standard of coin. "The same currency for the bond-holder and the plough-holder" was a favorite cry in the mouths of many. This plausible and poisonous fallacy quickly took root in Ohio, whose political soil has often nourished rank and luxuriant outgrowth of Democratic heresies, and it came to be known distinctively as "The Ohio Idea." The apt response of the Republicans was, the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... See Letters and Horne Tooke his poetry his twin volumes his many "veins" his critical preface and the epic on Shakespeare his phrenesis his fallacy his Poems and Burnett his hunger-madness as the hero of a novel and the Earl of Buchan his autobiography his annuity his disappearance and Earl Stanhope and Lord Stanhope on other people's poetry his "Poetic Sympathies" his immersion his novel way ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... about 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

... 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 ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... good. It is a splendid thing to belong to a noble family, whose name serves as a card of admission to the highest circles. Nobility is a distinction; it is a gold coin that bears the stamp of its own value. It is the fallacy of the time, and many poets express it, to say that all that is noble is bad and stupid, and that, on the contrary, the lower one goes among the poor, the more brilliant virtues one finds. I do not share this opinion, for it is wrong. In the upper ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... 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, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore

... to a 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 ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... is no particular need of my commenting upon the fallacy of this reasoning, since it is not likely that any of my young readers will sufficiently admire his character to be in any danger of being led ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger

... and long applause, perhaps, that the Professor was relieved from the explanation of this rather astounding phenomenon of the idealistic workings of a purely practical brain—or, as my impious friend scoffed the incongruity later, in a particularly withering allusion, as the "blank- blanked fallacy, don't you know, of staying the hunger of a howling mob by feeding 'em on ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley

... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... he conquered by deserting his ground, and not meeting the 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.' ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... he may have about him the melody of birds, although he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feeling for the Beggar's, and in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish. The "Poet's Epitaph" is disfigured, to my taste, by the common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse epithet of "pin-point," in the sixth stanza. All the ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... England, much liker a greedy Ostrich intent on provender and a whole skin mainly, stands with its other extremity Sunward; with its Ostrich-head stuck into the readiest bush, of old Church-tippets, King-cloaks, or what other "sheltering Fallacy" there may be, and so awaits the issue. The issue has been slow; but it is now seen to have been inevitable. No Ostrich, intent on gross terrene provender, and sticking its head into Fallacies, but will be awakened one day,—in a terrible a-posteriori manner, if not ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... Fairly juste. Fairy feino. Faith fido. Faithful fidela. Falcon falko. Fall fali. Fall falo. Fall (in price) malplikarigxo. Fall off, away defali. Fall out (disagree) malpaci. Fall (in ruins) ruinigxi. Fallacy sofismo. Fallow senkulturega. False falsa. Falsehood mensogo. Falsify falsi. Falsification falsado. Falsifier falsinto. Fame famo. Familiar kutima. Familiarize kutimigi. Familiarity kutimeto. Family familio. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... Professor Mivart's denunciations of natural selection, I have only one fault to find with them, namely, that they do not speak out with sufficient bluntness. The difficulty of showing the fallacy of Mr. Darwin's position, is the difficulty of grasping a will-o'-the-wisp. A concluding example will put this clearly before the reader, and at the same time serve to illustrate the most tangible feature of difference between Mr. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... last great lesson of our motley teacher—the gallows! that accursed tree which has its root in injuries. How clearly PUNCH exposes the fallacy of that dreadful law which authorises the destruction of life! PUNCH sometimes destroys the hangman: and why not? Where is the divine injunction against the shedder of man's blood to rest? None can answer! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various

... Pitt admitted that "state necessity" might occasionally be allowed as a valid reason for the abrogation of a charter, he affirmed that nothing short of such absolute necessity could excuse such a measure, and he relied on the previous history of the Company to prove the fallacy of an observation that had sometimes been made, that commercial companies could not govern empires. There were three interests to be considered: that of the native Indians, that of the Company, ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... put forward proposals of this nature are labouring under the dominion of a fundamental fallacy. They overlook the fact I have explained in the foregoing section, that Cavalry by its very nature can never be other than a highly-specialized Arm, and hence that the system adopted by the Infantry of raising ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi

... fun of curious phenomena. I don't know that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS. There is a tacit understanding in every community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various reasons for this forbearance: one is old; one is rich; one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss him from the manager's box. The ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... no wish here to enter largely into a subject so wide and so full of difficulties; but I may remark, that the explanations usually suggested where life takes its rise without apparent generative means, always appear to me to partake much of the fallacy of the petitio principii. When, for instance, lime is laid down upon a piece of waste moss ground, and a crop of white clover for which no seeds were sown is the consequence, the explanation that the seeds have been ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... 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 ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... politics during the last five years. The Whigs have been at war with the English constitution. First of all they captured the King; then they vanquished the House of Commons; now they have laid siege to the House of Lords. But here the fallacy of their grand scheme of political mystification begins to develop itself. Had, indeed, their new constituency, as they have long impudently pretended, really been 'the people,' a struggle between such a body and ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli

... dilatory suspicion that Liszt influenced Chopin in the production of his masterpieces. Lina Ramann, in her exhaustive biography of Franz Liszt, openly declares that Nos. 9 and 12 of op. 10 and Nos. 11 and 12 of op. 25 reveal the influence of the Hungarian virtuoso. Figures prove the fallacy of her assertion. The influence was the other way, as Liszt's three concert studies show—not to mention other compositions. When Chopin arrived in Paris his style had been formed, he was the creator ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... "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

... is that children will learn many truths in the Sunday School which they will not put into practice then, perhaps, but which they will find useful in later life. This fallacy underlies, of course, almost all conventional education and has only been overthrown by the dictum of modern psychology, that there is but small storage accommodation in the brain for facts which have no immediate relation to life. What may be termed the saturating power of the ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne

... about 10. minutes after, as exactly representing what I saw through the Glass, as I could, I drew the Scheme B. This I was sufficiently satisfied (by very often observing it through the Tube, and changing my Eye into various positions, that so there might be no kind of Fallacy in it) could be nothing else, but some more Dusky and Spotted parts of the ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... appearance; while specious means having the appearance of truth, plausible. Hence we see that the very essence of a fallacy is its speciousness. We may very properly say that a fallacy is more or less specious, but we can not properly say that a fallacy is specious, since without speciousness we ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... Moreover, I knew my subject thoroughly, and understood what points to dwell upon and what to gloze over, how to twist and turn the statistics, and how to marshal my facts in such fashion as would make it very difficult to expose their fallacy. Then, when I had done with general arguments, I went on to particular cases, describing as a doctor can do the most dreadful which had ever come under my notice, with such power and pathos that women in ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard

... our pleasant afternoon. While you are consuming the supper you will hang over some water to heat for the dish-washing, and the dish-washing you will attend to the moment you have finished eating. Do not commit the fallacy of sitting down for a little rest. Better finish the job completely while you are about it. You will appreciate leisure so much more later. In lack of a wash-rag you will find that a bunch of tall grass bent ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... children with her, and could not brook the idea of leaving them in the hands of the savage monster. She even trusted to the hope that he would withdraw, as soon as he could, without molesting any of them. A few minutes served to convince her of the fallacy of this expectation. When the opening had been made sufficiently large, he raised his tomahawk, sunk it deep into the brains of one of the children, and throwing the scarcely lifeless body into the back yard, ordered ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... by military experts as an axiom that trained troops armed with the present breech-loading and rapid-firing arm cannot be successfully assailed by any troops who simply assault. Of course you can make the regular approaches and dig up to them. The fallacy of that proposition was made very manifest that day when the men composing the advance marched as deliberately over those breastworks as they ever did when they fought with arms that you could only load about twice in a minute and of the range of only 200 ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... to these great spokesmen of the Hellenic people, we cannot deny something of like honour to the race among whom they were reared. Let us apportion our debt of gratitude to our forerunners as it is justly due. There would seem to be much of fallacy and of the injustice of a shallow judgment in the contrast as popularly drawn between 'Hellenism' and 'Hebraism,' according to which the former is spoken of as exclusively proclaiming to the world the value of Beauty, the latter the value of Righteousness. In this there is surely much ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar

... said Reginald. There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically, through the ears, as it were, of a sceptic. Reginald, seeing Northcote's keen eyes gleam at the sound of the Rector's voice, instinctively fell into sympathy with him, and heard the ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... darts of its own will in a curious way. Thus, the unconsciousness of muscular action on the part of savages engaged in the experiment with sticks would lead them to believe that spirits were animating the wood. The same fallacy beset the table-turners of 1855-65, and was, to some extent, exposed by Faraday. Of course, savages would be even more convinced by the dancing spoon of Mr. Darwin's tale, by the dancing sticks of the Zulus, and the rest, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... young American of the period, who found some features of it not altogether to his liking. Chief among these was that essential part of discipline, subordination. To one imbued from infancy with the fascinating fallacy that all men are born equal, unquestioning submission to authority is not easily mastered, and the American volunteer soldier in his "green and salad days" is among the worst known. That is how it happened that one of Buell's men, Private ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce

... 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 sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct, which have become the curses ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... by the exact weight of the fish." "Thou art right," said the sapient king; "I did not think there had been so much sense among you." Now, although I do not mean to say that A SKATER propounds for elucidation what he knows to be a fallacy, yet I do assert that he is mistaken as to the fact alleged. He recommends any one who is "incredulous" to make the trial—in which case, the experimenter would undoubtedly find himself in the water! I advise an appeal to common sense and philosophy: the former will show that a person in skates ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various

... out by two letters which Lincoln had written during the year; one declaring his opposition to the waning fallacy of know-nothingism, in which he also defined his position on "fusion." Referring to a provision lately adopted by Massachusetts to restrict naturalization, he wrote: "Massachusetts is a sovereign and independent State; and it is no privilege of mine to scold her ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay

... be urged, it is just the same thing to drive a large body of water astern at a slow speed as a small body at a high speed. This is the favorite fallacy of the advocates of hydraulic propulsion. The turbine or centrifugal pump put into the ship drives astern through the nozzles at each side a comparatively small body of water at a very high velocity. In some early experiments we believe that a velocity of 88 ft. per second, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various

... to heap so much blame upon any one man. But the odium of this defeat has for years been borne by those who are guiltless of the outcome of the campaign of Chancellorsville; and the prime source of this fallacy has been Hooker's ever-ready self-exculpation by misinterpreted facts and unwarranted conclusions, while his subordinates have held their peace. And this is not alone for the purpose of vindicating the fair fame of the Army of the Potomac and its corps-commanders, ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge

... skill. His mind was fertile in resources. He was a master of logic. No man perceived more quickly than he the strength or the weakness of an argument, and no one excelled him in the use of sophistry and fallacy. Where he could not elucidate a point to his own advantage, he would fatally becloud it for his opponent. In that peculiar style of debate which in intensity resembles a physical combat, he had no equal. He spoke with extraordinary readiness. There was no halting in his phrase. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... prepared about the sixth century by one Moschion has come down to us in an almost contemporary manuscript.[92] It is interesting as opposing the Hippocratic theory that the male embryo is originated in the right and the female in the left half of the womb, a fallacy derived originally from Empedocles and Parmenides, but perpetuated by Latin translations of the Hippocratic treatises until the seventeenth century. His work was adorned by figures, and some of these, naturally greatly altered by ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial. Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted as a truth, that there is one immutable standard of conduct for all men and all women." But the difficulty of writing a sufficient letter on a subject so large and so ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... Nonconformists. Orangemen are members of the Church of Ireland, and have always been regarded as Conservative. On the contrary, Presbyterians and Methodists are considered to be advanced Liberals, and herein lies a popular English fallacy—Gladstonians often refer to the Orange agitation against the disestablishment of the Irish Church, which they would fain compare with the present opposition to Home Rule, forgetting or ignoring the fact that the strength of Ulster resides in the Nonconformist bodies, and that these were all ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... a single night. The hearts and heads of three or four millions of men are not suddenly endowed with faculties and habits which render them capable of diverting one-third of their energies to work which is new, disproportionate, gratuitous, and supererogatory.—A fallacy of monstrous duplicity lies at the basis of the political theories of the day and of those which were invented during the following ten years. Arbitrarily, and without any examination, a certain weight and resistance are attributed to the human metal employed. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... pity that life is so short, that there are only twenty-four hours in the day, and that, owing to the general scarcity of money among the intellectual portion of the community, the possession of free-will is a pathetic fallacy. Nobody, in these bonds of time and space, can do precisely what he would like to do. Mr. T. P. O'Connor once said that, if he were master of his fate, and his feet in every way clear, he would at once proceed ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... have reasoned in accordance with the laws of logic, with the laws of valid thought. All logical reasoning is, of course, not so simple as the example given, but it may be stated generally that when there is no logical fallacy, a correct conclusion may be arrived at, provided, too—and herein lies the difficulty—provided that the premises are also true. These premises may be in themselves general statements—how is their truth established? They may ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones

... the Sun in the Ecliptic, proved to be uniform in a circular orbit ... with preliminary observations on the fallacy of the Solar System. By Bartholomew ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... culture, and imply that if a man has spent his time in making money he will not be cultivated—fallacy of fallacies! As though there could be a greater aid to culture than the having earned an honourable independence, and as though any amount of culture will do much for the man who is penniless, except make him feel his position more ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... shameless lies would have been exposed; the stupendous but weak structure of auricular confession would fall to the ground with sad havoc and ruin to its upholders. Men and women would open their eyes, and see its weakness and fallacy. "If God," they might say, "can forgive our most grievous sins, against modesty, he can and will certainly do the same with those of less gravity; therefore there is no necessity or occasion for us to confess ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... often said that those who live among evils best understand them and know how to meet them. This is a fallacy. The missionaries in China knew better what was for the good of China than did the Emperor himself. There are people in the United States, also, who could give some good points to the new Emperor of Russia, and if he would take them and ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 49, No. 3, March, 1895 • Various

... even tenor of her mind, and she wanted to think. Any other Sunday evening she would have told the landlady something about her motor-ride, for she and Dudley had now been in the same rooms for seven years, and it is quite a fallacy to condemn all London landladies as ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page

... plea in support of indirect taxation, which must be altogether rejected as grounded on a fallacy. We are often told that taxes on commodities are less burdensome than other taxes, because the contributor can escape from them by ceasing to use the taxed commodity. He certainly can, if that be his object, deprive the Government of the money; but he does so by a sacrifice ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... in big nature not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... 'political economy.' There is also a confused notion in the minds of many persons, that the gathering of the property of the poor into the hands of the rich does no ultimate harm; since, in whosesoever hands it may be, it must be spent at last, and thus, they think, return to the poor again. This fallacy has been again and again exposed; but grant the plea true, and the same apology may, of course, be made for black mail, or any other form of robbery. It might be (though practically it never is) as advantageous for the nation that the robber should have the spending of the money he extorts, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... made by the positivists in classification is the claim that their favorite system can be applied to all libraries alike. That this is a fallacy may be seen in an example or two. Take the case of a large and comprehensive Botanical library, in which an exact scientific distribution of the books may and should be made. It is classified not ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... science upon a piece-meal basis by framing special and separate theories of wages, rent, value, the functions of money, and so forth, are now recognised to be in large measure failures precisely because they involve the fundamental scientific fallacy of supposing that the several parts of an organic whole can be separately studied, and that from this study of the parts we can construct a correct idea of the whole. As in economic theory so in the comprehension ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... little work. How 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 ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... flashed to a 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 ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... haste the less speed fallacy all to pieces." You could see that the man was glowing with pride. And he began to boast about her, and though she tried to stop him, she couldn't help looking perfectly delighted with herself, like some radiant child in the new dress for ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris

... Ballot," she realized that, in order to be assured of return engagements, she must occasionally vary her subjects, but she was unwilling to wander far afield while women's needs still were so great. By means of this new lecture she hoped to dispel the widespread, deeply ingrained fallacy that single women were unwanted helpless creatures wholly dependent upon some male relative for a home and support. Aware that this mistaken estimate was slowly yielding in the face of a changing economic ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... 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 recognition, was deduced as a logical sequence from theoretical (Galenic and Aristotelian) premises. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... on very ill. To quote a few remarkable instances of longevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on the average in old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of fancying that savages were peculiarly healthy, because those who were seen were active and strong. The simple answer is, that the strong alone survived, while the majority died from the severity of the training. Savages do not increase in ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... Maine is infected, that a history of the 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 ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... don't profess to be a scientific man," said I, "though I have heard somewhere that the science of one generation is usually the fallacy of the next. But it does not take much common sense to see that, as we seem to know so little about ether, it might be affected by some local conditions in various parts of the world and might show an effect over there which would only ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle

... be doubted that there must have been some great fallacy in the notions of those who uttered and of those who believed that long succession of confident predictions, so signally falsified by a long succession of indisputable facts. To point out that fallacy is the office rather of the political economist ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... 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 victory ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... world, if they do not always shout themselves into the imperial purple, are sure at least of receiving attention. If they cannot sell everything at their own price, one thing—silence—must, at any cost, be purchased of them. Harold accordingly had to be consoled by the employment of every specious fallacy and base-born trick known to those whose doom it is to handle children. For me their hollow cajolery had no interest, I could pluck no consolation out of their bankrupt though prodigal pledges I only waited till that hateful, well-known ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... the benefit of the people it must therefore have the power to do whatever may seem to conduce to the public good is an error into which even honest minds are too apt to fall. In yielding themselves to this fallacy they overlook the great considerations in which the Federal Constitution was founded. They forget that in consequence of the conceded diversities in the interest and condition of the different States it was foreseen at the period of its adoption ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson

... blood, whereby he hath been doubtless moved to play a jest upon thee. I pray thee heed him not! He is as free to declare thy Prophecy is of the PAST, as thou art to insist on its being of the FUTURE,—in both ways 'tis a most foolish fallacy! Nevertheless, continue thy entertaining discourse, Sir Graybeard! . . . and if thou must needs address thyself to any one soul in particular, why let it be me,—for though, thanks to mine own excellent good sense, I have no faith in angels ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... can remain in the tropics indefinitely without being actually sick, if infectious diseases are avoided. This is fast leading to the fallacy that we can advantageously remain many years in these latitudes. The fact that while a man may never be sick, he yet may have his physical and mental vigour greatly impaired by prolonged exposure to heat is thus lost sight of. No man can do his ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... personal ambition before the cause. To insure an ardent opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in the United States Senate, he had at one time given up his chance for the senatorship. To show the fallacy of Douglas's argument, he had asked a question which his party pleaded with him to pass by, assuring him that it would lose him the election. In every step of this six years he had been disinterested, calm, unyielding, and courageous. He knew he was right, and could afford to wait. "The ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... others. If any separation between the bodily self and the environment is to be made at all, it is putting the cart before the horse to make out that modesty is derived from our repugnance at the conduct of others, more immediately than through attention to the meaning of our own activities. The fallacy of the disgust theory lies, in fact, in the attempt to separate the copies for imitation derived from our own activities from those derived from our observation of ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... that the injury he received was undesigned. The groom, on the other 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 ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... table seems to make little darts of its own will in a curious way. Thus, the unconsciousness of muscular action on the part of savages engaged in the experiment with sticks would lead them to believe that spirits were animating the wood. The same fallacy beset the table-turners of 1855-65, and was, to some extent, exposed by Faraday. Of course, savages would be even more convinced by the dancing spoon of Mr. Darwin's tale, by the dancing sticks of the Zulus, and the rest, whether ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... differing in kind from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry, then here is a case where the essential difference could surely be perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is a fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is concerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to a mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is as poignant as his; if he achieves ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater

... foiro. Fair (complexion) blonda. Fair justa. Fair copy neto. Fairly juste. Fairy feino. Faith fido. Faithful fidela. Falcon falko. Fall fali. Fall falo. Fall (in price) malplikarigxo. Fall off, away defali. Fall out (disagree) malpaci. Fall (in ruins) ruinigxi. Fallacy sofismo. Fallow senkulturega. False falsa. Falsehood mensogo. Falsify falsi. Falsification falsado. Falsifier falsinto. Fame famo. Familiar kutima. Familiarize kutimigi. Familiarity ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... in its mode of manifestation from every other manifestation of force, even more than they do from each other, in that it possesses a potency inherent to it, which they have not, and this potency it is which creates emotion and generates ideas. The fallacy which underlies the whole of this system of philosophy is contained in the assumption that there is only one description of physical force ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant

... 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 which ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... is extracted in the same manner as that from the true Spanish liquorice plant, the Glycyrrhiza glabra. Recently the claim was made that the weather could be foretold by certain movements of the leaves of this plant, but experimental tests have proved its fallacy. ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders

... and all the ladies of the Eagle stamp did not think so. They did not believe that a strong mind means a mind strong enough to exercise its own powers to the ascertainment and reception of truth and the rejection of falsehood and fallacy; strong enough, under the influence of God's love, to perceive the paths of duty in all their ramifications, and to resolve to follow them. They did not believe that a high spirit, in the true sense ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... 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 ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... that enthrallment, to descend to cold and sober reality, to remember he was a clerk, his companion a shop-girl, rather than a Prince disguised as Calander esquiring a Princess dedicated to Fatal Enchantment—that Kismet was a quaint fallacy, one with that whimsical conceit of Orient fatalism which assigns to each and every man his Day of Days, wherein he shall range the skies and plumb the abyss of his Destiny, alternately its ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... ready for the craftsmen to work up into bows. A few years ago bow makers demanded very dense wood under the impression that it would be advantageous to have them as slender as possible, for the denser the wood the thinner must be the stick to preserve a normal weight. The fallacy of this method, however, soon made itself apparent, for, though you may thin down a stick ad libitum, the head must be a certain height and breadth, consequently these bows were all more or less top heavy. A much lighter variety of wood therefore is now being ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George

... least hazard an experiment, to attest the truth or fallacy of my supposition," returned the father. "Do you see your destined bridegroom yonder?" continued he, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... himself thereby also clearly to have proved that the Deity is so. Exclude the Deity, space will still exist and still be eternal and immense. Dr. Priestley knew well that Dr. Clarke's argument in this respect was all a fallacy, and therefore he shews his sense in not adopting it. It is in fact an abuse of terms ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner

... wearying the reader, who tries to do the unwisest of all things with a book of this kind—to read on. This trick of bandying words is, of course, common in Shakespeare. Other marks of Sidney's style belong similarly to poetry rather than to prose. Chief of them is what Ruskin christened the "pathetic fallacy"—the assumption (not common in his day) which connects the appearance of nature with the moods of the artist who looks at it, or demands such a connection. In its day the Arcadia was hailed as a reformation by men nauseated by the rhythmical ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... 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 ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... the Laity on the 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 End, the Means are determined ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... the Pope of Rome has the power to bless and sanctify a piece of cloth, a ring, or any dead and inert object, he undoubtedly is "the real thing," and if such is the case the Bible is a lie, the gospel a fallacy, and God Almighty becomes a hireling, and we have no ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg

... change that has come over our society, that he noticed the type of the oriental and cosmopolitan financier without even knowing that it was oriental or cosmopolitan. He had, in fact, fallen a victim to a very simple fallacy affecting this problem. Somebody said, with great wit and truth, that treason cannot prosper, because when it prospers it cannot be called treason. The same argument soothed all possible Anti-Semitism in men like Dickens. Jews cannot ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... his published writings that the fertility of a soil depended really upon its humus; for this substance, with the exception of water, is the only source of plant-food. De Saussure, however, by his experiments—the results of which he had published in 1804—had shown the fallacy of this humus theory; and his statements had been further developed and substantiated by the investigations of the French chemist Braconnot and the German chemist Sprengel. Despite, however, the experiments of Saussure, Braconnot, and Sprengel, ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman

... have had enough of that from my sister;' then softening instantly: 'it was self-deceit; a deception first of myself, then of you. You had not experience enough to know whither I was leading you, till I had involved you; and when the sight of death showed me the fallacy of the salve to my conscience, I had nothing for it but to confess, and leave you to bear the consequences. O Laura! when I think of my conduct towards you, it seems even worse than that ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the result. The study of the Bible had been advocated in the first Sermon; but it was urged from a hundred quarters that a considerable amount of unbelief prevailed respecting that very Book for which it was evident that the preacher claimed entire perfection and absolute supremacy. The singular fallacy of these last days, that Natural Science, in some unexplained manner, has already demolished,—or is inevitably destined to demolish[1],—the Book of Divine Revelation, appeared to be the fallacy which had emerged into most offensive prominence; and to this, he ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... these remarks Y-ts'un smiled. "You now perceive," he said, "that my argument is no fallacy, and that the several persons about whom you and I have just been talking are, we may presume, human beings, who, one and all, have been generated by the spirit of right, and the spirit of evil, and come to life by the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... 34,800 persons charged with serious crimes before the criminal tribunals, or 1 in 514—in other words, serious crime is fourteen times as prevalent in Great Britain as it is in France. Nothing can more clearly demonstrate the deplorable fallacy of those who ascribe the present extraordinary frequency and uninterrupted growth of crime in this country, as attested by the criminal returns, to the vigilance of the police in bringing it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... have had a very true notion of civil liberty, engaged the enemies of the new government, and levelled the force of his satire against those, who valued themselves for being true-born Englishmen. He exposes the fallacy of that prepossession, by laying open the sources from whence the English have sprung. 'Normans, Saxons, and Danes, says he, were our forefathers; we are a mixed people; we have no genuine origin; and why should not our neighbours be as good as we to derive ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber

... Remembering. A popular fallacy is expressed in the saying "Easy come, easy go." The person who is the best learner is also the best in retaining what is learned, provided all other conditions are the same. This matter was determined in the following way: A logical ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle

... French was spoken not only by members belonging to the smaller nations of Europe, from the north and from the south, by the Russians, by most of the Turkish and Asiatic members, but also by all the Mexicans and South Americans. These figures may not be absolutely free from fallacy, due to temporary causes of fluctuation. But that they are fairly exact is shown by the results of the following Congress, held at Moscow. If I take up the programme for the department of psychiatry and nervous disease, in which I was myself chiefly interested, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... if I had time, to attempt to demonstrate the fallacy of that opinion. I have examined the view of the Supreme Court of the United States on the question of the power of the Constitution to carry slavery into free territory belonging to the United States, and I tell you that I believe any tolerably ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... aims because the British Empire has received, as a result of the War, some Turkish provinces and German colonies. It is said that, in view of these notorious facts, the Italian Nationalists and their friends cannot bear to be criticized by the pens of British authors and journalists. The fallacy in logic known as the argumentum ad hominem becomes a pale thing in comparison with this new argumentum ad terram. If a passionless historian of the Eskimos had given his attention to the Adriatic, I believe he would have come to my conclusions. But then it ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... stumbling-block. And they will always read with exceptional surprise and indignation the narrow obscurantism of the speech which Milton, scholar and artist as he was, is not ashamed to put into the mouth of Christ in the fourth book. He cannot himself have been a victim of the shallow fallacy expressed in line 325 (he who reads gets little benefit unless he brings judgment to his reading "and what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?"); and his lifelong practice shows that he did not think Greek ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... "The fallacy is that what seems to be play to a mind like Daniel's, is really seen to be work by a larger mind," explained Arthur Waldron. "Sport, for instance, which is the backbone of British character, is a thousand times more important to the nation than spinning yarn; and we, who keep ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... was correct? In the drama, e.g., the observance of the unities was almost universally recommended, but by no means universally practiced. Johnson, himself a sturdy disciple of Dryden and Pope, exposed the fallacy of that stage illusion, on the supposed necessity of which the unities of time and place were defended. Yet Johnson, in his own tragedy "Irene," conformed to the rules of Aristotle. He pronounced "Cato" "unquestionably ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... community. I have not words strong enough—at least, I could not, without shocking you, use the words which would be strong enough—to express my estimate of the absurdity and the mischievousness of this popular fallacy. So, putting a great restraint upon myself, and using no hard words, I will simply try to state the nature of it, and the ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin

... Happily, ataste for furniture and all the appliances of every-day life in the Gothic style is gradually becoming prevalent; and this is inseparable from the use of Heraldry for the purposes of ornamentation. Ipresume that the fallacy of regarding the Gothic style of Art as exclusively ecclesiastical in its associations and uses, or as no less necessarily inseparable from medival sentiments and general usages, is beginning to give way to more correct views, as the true nature of ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell

... and unanswerable "Advertisement to the Jurymen of England, touching Witches, together with a difference between an English and Hebrew Witch," first published in 1653, 4to., he has addressed himself so cogently and decisively to the main fallacy of the arguments in favour of witchcraft which rested their force on Scripture misunderstood, and has so pertinently and popularly urged the points to be considered, that his tract must have had the greatest weight on the class to whom his reasoning was principally addressed, and on whose ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts

... conscious of a mental operation without being conscious of its object. On this Mr. Mill retorts that if, as Hamilton admits, we are conscious of a belief in the Infinite and the Absolute, we must be conscious of the Infinite and the Absolute themselves; and such consciousness is Knowledge. The fallacy of this retort is transparent. The immediate object of Belief is a proposition which I hold to be true, not a thing apprehended in an act of conception. I believe in an infinite God; i.e., I believe that God is infinite: I believe that the attributes which I ascribe ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... in the completion of one class of life before the other, that the fallacy of the period theory lies—for completion is essential to that theory which supposes "the Mosaic author" to have intended to describe the ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... murderer who slays another in his own private quarrel; but we do not give that name to one who two centuries ago killed his man in a duel. We decline to recognise the validity of the reasoning by which men justified such acts to themselves; but before the fallacy in that reasoning was understood, the degree of guilt involved in acting upon it was something very different from what it would be to-day. In the same way, a century ago honourable and honest men countenanced smuggling; but we do not classify them with footpads. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... Bodies 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 ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... rock, should be colder than cones of snow. The phenomenon was first described by De Saussure, who gives the same explanation as Tyndall; and from whom, in the first volume of 'Modern Painters,' I adopted it without sufficient examination. Afterwards I re-examined it, and showed its fallacy, with respect to the cap or helmet cloud, in the fifth volume of 'Modern Painters,' page 124, in the terms given in the subjoined note,[A] but I still retained the explanation of Saussure for the lee-side cloud, engraving ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... The fallacy that politics are primarily intellectual decisions upon stated issues, the going forth of the popular mind to decide between programs presented to it by circumstances, receives a brilliant refutation ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... same since his wife's death," replied Virginia, who was a victim of this sentimental fallacy. "It's strange—isn't it?—because we used to think they got ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... of the natives of this district afflicted with goitre, and I was informed that cretinism was also prevalent,—a fact which proves clearly the fallacy of the old doctrine that these complaints are attributable to snow-water, for all the water drunk by the inhabitants of the Terai rises in the Cheriagotty hills, on which snow rarely if ever falls. This would be strongly corroborative of the correctness of the idea ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant

... matter of which they consist. We find in every page words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest rules of grammar. We have the vulgarism of "mutual friend," for "common friend." We have "fallacy" used as synonymous with "falsehood." We have many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that which follows: "Lord Erskine was fond of this anecdote; he told it to the editor the first time that he had the honour of being in his company." Lastly, we have a plentiful supply of sentences resembling ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... me she speaks; she moves me for her theme: What, was I married to her in my dream? Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this? What error drives our eyes and ears amiss? Until I know this sure uncertainty I'll entertain the offer'd fallacy. ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... reply from the guns of the forts, the warships ceased firing and went in closer to the shore, the allied commanders believing that the forts had not replied because they all had been put out of action. The fallacy of this belief was discovered when, at the shortened range, shells began to fall about the ships. None was hit; when dusk ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... of yesterday, but another like self or person coming up in its room and mistaken for it, to which another self will succeed to-morrow." This view the Bishop proceeds to reduce to absurdity by saying, "It must be a fallacy upon ourselves to charge our present selves with anything we did, or to imagine our present selves interested in anything which befell us yesterday; or that our present self will be interested in what will befall us to-morrow. This, I say, must follow, for if the self or person of ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... younger geologists) do not accept strict Uniformitarianism as the final form of geological speculation. We should say, if Hutton and Playfair declare the course of the world to have been always the same, point out the fallacy by all means; but, in so doing, do not imagine that you are proving modern geology to be in opposition to natural philosophy. I do not suppose that, at the present day, any geologist would be found to maintain absolute Uniformitarianism, to deny that the rapidity ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... stone balcony, which, by a popular fallacy, is supposed to be a necessary appurtenance of my window, has long been to me a source of curious interest. The fact that the asperities of our summer weather will not permit me to use it but once or twice in six months does not alter ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte

... technical navigation. Yet Dryden was of opinion, that a seafight ought to be described in the nautical language; "and certainly," says he, "as those, who in a logical disputation keep to general terms, would hide a fallacy, so those who do it in any poetical description ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... Men failed to foresee the opening of millions of acres of virgin soil in other parts of the world, and the improvement of transport to such an extent that wheat has occasionally been carried as ballast. About twenty-five or thirty years after these prophecies their fallacy ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... Dawn of Universal Peace Democracy and Peace Diplomacy and Peace Disillusionment The Dominant Ideal The End; and the Means The Evolution of a Higher Patriotism The Evolution of Justice The Evolution of Law The Evolution of National Greatness as a World Peacemaker The Evolution of World Peace The Fallacy of the Economics of War The Federation of the World Forces of War and Peace The Foundations From Chaos to Harmony From History's Pages—Peace Fruits of War and Fruits of Peace Government and International Peace The Growing Sentiment The ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... seduces her away." No, Lady Constantine, dearest, best as you are, that element of distraction would still remain, and where that is, no sustained energy is possible. Many erroneous things have been written and said by the sages, but never did they float a greater fallacy than that love serves as a stimulus to win the ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... were now sworn enemies and the stringing of the wires became a matter of intense interest, as this was the test which would prove the truth or fallacy of Jennings' cantankerous harping that the cross-arms were ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... might readily have been supposed that the limited space and comparative uniformity of the underground stations would afford but little opportunity for architectural and decorative effects. The result has shown the fallacy ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous

... trick, and fallacy: a new scheme of commercial arrangement is proposed to the Irish as a boon; and the surrender of their Constitution is tacked to it as a mercantile regulation. Ireland, newly escaped from harsh trammels and severe discipline, is treated like a high-mettled horse, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... of 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 perpetually recurring fraction ...
— Parmenides • Plato

... are numberless.—We may lie by our faces; by our general bearing; by our silence, as well as by our lips. There is "the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian; the provident lie of the politician; the zealous lie of the partisan; the merciful lie of the friend; the careless lie of each man to himself." The mind of man was made for truth: truth is ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... of things Christ had not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had some. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with a yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed with the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John; which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic tone. I am no judge ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... a fallacy to suppose that a white witch, in Devon, at any rate, is necessarily a woman. The few that I ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue

... 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

... remote regions was such as to constitute any one of them the line of least resistance from the Entente point of view, was based on a complete misreading of the military situation. That theory was founded on the fallacy that the Western Front represented the enemy's strongest point. It was, on the contrary, the enemy's weakest point, because this front was from its geographical position the one where British and French troops could most easily be assembled, and it was the ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... 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 powers of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... obedience to the fundamental law of a moral system of eugenics. We must go further and assert that children must be cared for through the mother. It has been the practice to divorce the improvident mother from her dependent children. This has been demonstrated to be not only an altruistic fallacy. It has proved to ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.

... had never contemplated his death as a possible thing. That another revolution might occur, and carry the country back under the dominion of the British crown, would have seemed to me far more possible than that my father could die. Bitter truth now convinced me of the fallacy of such notions. ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... Although the fallacy of such argument as Alec's too often remains undetected when no stubborn fact arises to support justice, Sophia, with her knowledge of Eliza, could not fail to see the absurdity of it. Her mind was dismayed at the thought of what the girl had apparently done and ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... L20,000 will obtain as large an income from it as could be 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 of ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland

... of a portion of matter is the result of the action on it of another portion of matter.' This represents a truth if it is taken to describe a certain kind of causation. In the axiomatic form in which it is given it is a fallacy. The kind of causation it describes is, indeed, the only one which has been taken into consideration by the scientific mind of man. We are wont to call it 'mechanical' causation. Obviously, man's onlooker-consciousness is unable to conceive of any other kind of causation. For ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... egotism. Apparently it is more modest to be conceited in the third person, like the child who says "Tommy is a good boy," or in the first person plural, like the leader-writer of "The Times," who bids the Continent tremble at his frown. By a singular fallacy, which ought scarcely to deceive children, it is forgotten that everything that has ever been written since the world began has been written by some one person, by an "I," though that "I" might have been omitted from the composition or replaced by the journalistic "we." To some extent ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... amazed at the number and quality of those accused, of late, we do not know but Satan by his wiles may have enwrapt some innocent persons; and therefore should earnestly and humbly desire the most critical inquiry, upon the place, to find out the fallacy."—Wonders, 11. ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... only by the toleration of the legislative 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

... emphatical prohibition to Mr. Adams to mention the question of slavery may have contributed to strengthen in England the above-mentioned fallacy. This is a blunder, which before long or short Seward will repent. It looks like astuteness—ruse; but if so, it is the resource of a rather limited mind. In great and minor affairs, straightforwardness is the best policy. Loyalty always gets the better of astuteness, and the more so ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... moment in the cave of an old 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

... attempt the discovery of its differences by any investigation; for there is no other fixed point, from which as a first principle those differences may be deduced, and to which as the focus of their direction they may be referred, and thus may appear truly and without fallacy. This is the reason why we here undertake to describe that love in its essence; and as it was in this essence when, together with life from God, it was infused into man, we undertake to describe it such as it was in its primeval state; and as in this state it was truly conjugial, therefore we ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the development of 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 ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... been content to appear as descending with modification like other people from those who went before him. It will take years to get the evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... burning. I am talking quickly and articulately to myself all the time, under my breath; it seems to me to relieve a little the inarticulate thoughts. I will not wink at it any longer, indeed I will not; nobody could expect it of me. I will not be taken in by that transparent fallacy of old friends! Nobody but me is. They all see it; Algy, Musgrave, all of them. At the thought of the victory written in Musgrave's eyes just now—at the recollection of the devilish irony of his wish, as ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... you some concession in a few minutes, but I am not going to yield to such logic. You have committed the fallacy of the undistributed middle term, if you care to know the proper name for it. I did not say that all men, saving you, were ungrateful. I said that, saving you, the persons I have met in my life have been ungrateful. You ought ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford

... disgrace to Christianity, and a sad burden to the Christian cause. Does such a man think that he can add a little zest to a leisure hour and a humdrum life, by toying with a tender friendship, and giving lease and latitude to his desire for personal conquest, and yet that no one shall know it? Ah, the fallacy! I know of eminent clergymen— earnest workers—who, by yielding to this desire once, have been shorn of their power for good forever, so far as those are concerned who really know them and their weakness. There are ministers in America ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... 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. S.," Vol. VI, p. 407; and Williams, "History ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... by two letters which Lincoln had written during the year; one declaring his opposition to the waning fallacy of know-nothingism, in which he also defined his position on "fusion." Referring to a provision lately adopted by Massachusetts to restrict naturalization, he wrote: "Massachusetts is a sovereign and independent State; and it is no privilege of mine to scold her for what she does. Still, if from ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay

... for a long time. Then he said: "It sounds sensible; but there is some vile fallacy at the bottom of it. Anyhow, I'll try. Father, give ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... active nature, it is true, but something that might embrace a broader swing. The soft atmosphere had turned the edge of his physical energy, but his mind was eager and grasping. His history was that dear fallacy, that silken toga which many of us have wrapped about ourselves—the belief that a good score at college means immediate success out in the world. And he had worked desperately to finish his education, had taken care of horses and waited upon table at a ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read

... his own case; and building up, with easy grace, a superstructure equally unsubstantial and imposing, and defeating all attempts to assail or overthrow it. Even very strong heads would be often at fault, conscious that they were the victim of some subtle fallacy, which yet they could not then and there detect and expose; and by their hazy and inconsistent efforts to do so, only supplied additional materials for the use of their astute and skilful enemy, to whom nothing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... happened to Winsome Charteris to meet any one to whom she was attracted with such frank liking. She had never known what it was to have a brother, and she thought that this clear-eyed young man might be a brother to her. It is a fallacy common among girls that young men desire them as sisters. Ralph himself was under no such illusion, or at least would not have been, had he had the firmness of mind to sit down half a mile from his emotions and coolly look them over. But in the meanwhile he was only conscious ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... no means "even" as between the righteous and the wicked, stills shows kindness to both. Now, in view of the great plausibility of the parallels which are thus presented to the public—parallels whose subtle fallacy the mass of readers are almost sure to overlook—one can hardly exaggerate the importance of thoroughly sifting the philosophy that underlies them, and especially on the part of those who are, or are to become, the ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... imagination, and frequently eminently fanciful and graceful in its peculiar manifestations. However, I cannot now make leisure to write about this, but while I read it I scored the passage as one from which I dissented. That, however, of course does not establish its fallacy; but I think, had I time, I could convince you of it. I acted Juliet on Wednesday, and read your analysis of it before doing so. Oh, could you but have seen and heard my Romeo!... I am sure it is just as well that an actress on the English stage at the present day should not ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... indeed, of profound significance, and is too often ignored. It is often asserted that we have to explain the lower by the higher, and we can only understand the significance of religion in its lower forms by bearing in mind the higher manifestations. This is sheer fallacy. In nature the higher develops out of the lower, of which it is compounded. In biology, for example, it is now generally conceded that the secret of animal life lies in the cell. This may be modified in all kinds of directions, the resulting organic ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... Draper'S(727) Letter about the Manilla money. George Grenville took up the defence of the Spaniards, though he said he only stated their arguments. This roused your brother, who told Grenville he had adopted the reasoning of Spain; and showed the fallacy of their pretensions. He exhorted every body to support the King's government, "which I," said he, "ill-used as I have been, wish and mean to support-not that of ministers, when I see the laws and independence ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... foul coal-tar some, who know the secret, craftily distil most delicate perfumes and colours exquisite. The bard of the future ... h'm! Will he ever appear? As an atavism, perhaps. Take away from modern poetry what appeals to primitive man—the jingle and pathetic fallacy—and the residue, if any, would ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... well aware, moreover, that this is not the only calumny which has been circulated against my person and reputation; nor is it the first time that the Marechal d'Ancre has been designated as the instigator of my unpopular measures; every new cabal inventing some fallacy to undermine my authority and to throw discredit upon my government. Since, however, you give it as your opinion that I shall better serve the King by retaining the regency until he shall be of fitting age to act upon his own responsibility, I will continue to exercise ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... companies might fight for a week or two, then they would more wisely agree, and put up their fares above the present North-Western fares, till they had recouped themselves out of the public all they had lost by their fight." This did very well for the Parliamentary Committee; but it is a fallacy. At present the North-Western Railway, though empowered by law to charge three-pence a mile first-class, charge twopence a mile only: why?—because twopence a mile they find to be on the whole the most paying ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke

... so. He had heard it all before; the worthy Baronet's views, were such as are delivered daily by the old order in every part of the country. And the thing that perplexed Vane more and more as he listened, and periodically returned a non-committal "Yes" or "No," was where the fallacy lay. These were the views he had been brought up on; they were the views with which, in his heart of hearts, he agreed. And yet he felt dimly that there must be another side to the question: he knew there was another side. Otherwise . . ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... operation in the United States during the last twenty years, double-dealing, sharp practice, and jobbery have entered; and, what is more, the men interested have participated in and profited thereby. To correct a popular fallacy I want to say that I am not referring here simply to moral derelictions but to actual legal crimes. If the details of the great reorganization and trustification deals put through since 1885 could be laid bare, eight out of ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... iceberg theory loomed large and larger before the geological world, observations were making in a different field that were destined to show its fallacy. As early as 1815 a sharp-eyed chamois-hunter of the Alps, Perraudin by name, had noted the existence of the erratics, and, unlike most of his companion hunters, had puzzled his head as to how the bowlders ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams









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