"Fallacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to expose a logical fallacy, but I am not fond of the attempt to obscure by logic-chopping what is a writer's real meaning. I will therefore say that, as far as I can make out, what this particular writer really believes is that the ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... however, one further reason for Polemic Theology being put beside Mystic. It is only in some approach to mystic science that any man becomes aware of what St. Paul means by "spiritual wickedness in heavenly [Footnote: With cowardly intentional fallacy, translated 'high' in the English Bible.] places;" or, in any true sense, knows the enemies ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... of Masonry is the physical and moral amelioration and the intellectual and spiritual improvement of individuals and society. Neither can be effected, except by the dissemination of truth. It is falsehood in doctrines and fallacy in principles, to which most of the miseries of men and the misfortunes of nations are owing. Public opinion is rarely right on any point; and there are and always will be important truths to be substituted ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... betrayed to the same desertion of themselves by a contrary fallacy. It was said of Hannibal, that he wanted nothing to the completion of his martial virtues, but that when he had gained a victory he should know how to use it. The folly of desisting too soon from successful ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... to darkness; is convicted of error without difficulty. But arguments of the same kind, and quite as bad, are to be found in learned works on matters less familiar to us, and we often fail to detect the fallacy. ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... 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, ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... but in the Variata.—From the admonition 2 Cor. 5, 20: "Be ye reconciled to God," Strigel inferred that free will must to a certain extent be capable of accepting the grace offered by God. Flacius answered that it was a logical fallacy, conflicting also with the clear Word of God, to conclude that man by his own powers is able to perform something because God demands it and admonishes and urges us to do it.—From Acts 5, 32: "...the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey Him," Strigel argued that the will is ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the planets were inhabited; on another, what was the age of the world; then he proposed to consider the probability of the destruction of our globe, either by water or fire; at another time, the truth or fallacy of presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. I remember the circumstance which gave rise to the last proposition was an allusion to Joseph, of whom he happened to speak, as he did of almost everything connected with the country to which we were bound, and which ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... curious commentary on the present aspect of the "woman question" to see many who honestly advocate the elevation and enfranchisement of woman, oppose any movement or law that recognizes Nature's fundamental distinction of sex. There are those who insist upon the traditional fallacy that man and woman are identical, and that the identity is confined to the man, with the energy of infatuation. It appears from the Spectator, that Mr. and Mrs. Fawcett strongly object to the Ten-hour Act, on the ground that ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... interests, and the peace and happiness of their dead countrymen, imperiously required them speedily to immolate some victims to their revenge. But plans so dangerous to attempt, and of such doubtful issue, Magua found little difficulty in defeating. He exposed their risk and fallacy with his usual skill; and it was only after he had removed every impediment, in the shape of opposing advice, that he ventured ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... provisions are founded on a patent fallacy. Preferences are not expressed in the Hare system, as in true preferential voting, that they may be given effect to in deciding the election, but simply in order to allow the elector to say in advance to whom he would wish his vote transferred if it cannot be used for his first ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... real being, but it is not in itself a principle of being, so that "the One" could exist substantially by itself. To personify the barest of abstractions, call it God, and then try to imitate it, would seem too absurd a fallacy to have misled any one, if history did not show that it has had a long ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... 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 ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... inevitably laid for the fatal system of ascendency—a system under which the dominant party were paid for their services in keeping down rebels by a monopoly of power and emolument, and thereby strongly tempted to take care that there should always be rebels to keep down." There is a fallacy or two in this statement; but let it pass. The Irish were not rebels then, certainly, for they were not under English dominion; but it is something to find English writers expatiating on Irish wrongs; and if they would only act as generously ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Abbe Cochet seems to conclude, in the end, that the two letters are the initials of a passer-by. The revelations now made prove the fallacy of the theory. ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... 1776) by the Representatives of the U.S., which declares, "these truths to be self-evident:—that all men are created equal," etc. It is regretable that so trenchant a state-paper should begin with so gross and palpable a fallacy. Men are not born equal, nor do they become equal before their death-days even in condition, except by artificial levelling; and in republics and limited monarchies, where all are politically equal, the greatest social inequalities ever prevail. Still falser is the shibboleth-crow of the French ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... of the astounding tale of the previous night and strove in vain to find the slightest corroboration of it in her memory, the more deep sank the roots of her conviction of its fallacy. She had not realized how desperate Wiley's determination was to oust her from his path, nor dreamed that he would risk forged testimony, but now at length she had measured the strength of her adversary and her own courage rose ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... January Mr. Early sat alone. He had so many tentacles spread out through the world of men and women that solitude was unusual to him. Indeed it had often occurred to him, as an example of the fallacy of ancient sayings, that there was nothing in that old epigram about the loneliness of the great. The higher he had risen in the scale of greatness the more insistently and persistently had the world invaded his life, until even his ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... it was easier to make a convert than to keep him. Many of the Indians clung to the idea that baptism was a safeguard against pestilence and misfortune; and when the fallacy of this notion was made apparent, their zeal cooled. Their only amusements consisted of feasts, dances, and games, many of which were, to a greater or less degree, of a superstitious character; and as the Fathers could rarely prove to their own satisfaction ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... availability. This argument, of course, is based upon the assumption that what is true of Democratic States in this respect is not true of Republican States. The slightest investigation will easily establish the fallacy of this assumption. The truth is that the federal office-holders—especially those holding appointive offices,—can, with a few exceptions, always be depended upon to support the Administration candidate, whoever he may be. The ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... the fallacy hold in a magazine office that "a big name counts for everything and an unknown name for nothing." There can be no denial of the fact that where a name of repute is attached to a meritorious story or article the combination is ideal. But as between an indifferent story and a well-known ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... nonsense with which he is assailed, but often it happens that after a little while the social atmosphere in which he lives will begin to infect him, and if he has been unaccustomed to the cunning of fence by which Reason prepares the means of guarding herself against fallacy, he will yield himself at last to the faith of those around him, and this he will do by sympathy, it would seem, rather than from conviction. I have been much interested in observing that the mere “practical man,” however ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... evidence that something has existed before him. If this argument was to be admitted, are they aware how far it, would carry them? To maintain that the existence of one being demonstrably proves the existence of an anterior being, would be, in fact, denying that any thing was self- existent. The fallacy of such a position is ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... opinion upon any subject is illusion built upon the fallacy that there are positive ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... is being made over Irish potato-cakes. Why Irish? The tradition that the potato is the Irish national vegetable is a hoary fallacy that needs to be exploded once and for all. It is nothing of the sort. The potato was introduced into the British Isles by Sir WALTER RALEIGH, a truculent Elizabethan imperialist of the worst type, transplanted into Ireland by the English garrison, and fostered by them for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... these professions in England they intended to extinguish their "dear Mother" in Massachusetts, and banish every one from their Plantation who should use her Prayer Book, or worship as the "dear Mother" worshipped. Yet such is the theory, or fallacy, of some Puritan writers. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... 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 further need of ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... seventy articles of the Act of Accusation against her. The web of calumny that had been spun out of her replies then first must have been apparent to her, and though silent for the most part, she quickly contradicted some statements, and pointed out the fallacy of others. Reproached for her unwomanly behaviour, she replied at once, "As for woman's work, there are plenty of other women who can do that"; and asserted that before fighting at all, she had made every effort to obtain her wishes peacefully. She even recited the short prayer it was her ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... converted into wax or comb, a simple question will show its fallacy. Do not the bees belonging to a hive that is full of combs, and no more wax for that purpose needed, bring home as much and often more pollen than one half full? Any person who has watched two such hives five minutes when busily engaged ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... certainty of the Inconceivability Argument as applied to Theism and to mathematics shown to contain a virtual though not a formal fallacy. ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... become withered and atrophied. While this course of reasoning may seem rational and the conclusion may seem tenable, it is well known to physiologists and sociologists that the reasoning is fallacious; the fallacy rests in the premises. It was assumed above that the activity of the sexual glands was ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... The old fallacy is still renewed, that the elephant sheds his tusks. AELIAN says he drops them once in ten years (lib. xiv. c. 5): and PLINY repeats the story, adding that, when dropped, the elephants hide them under ground (lib. viii.) whence SHAW ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... into her ear as her head rested upon his bosom might have taught her the fallacy of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... in the May 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 ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the hollow ribs, The eyeless sockets and the grinning jaw; Reading for aye the sneer beneath the smile, The lie that lurks behind the seeming truth; To know that such, or haply worse, am I, A living lie, false prophet to myself, Clothed on with shimmering robes of fallacy And vain deceit! Ah God, where is the truth? Are all men false or lies the fault in me Who, vulture-like, seize only on the taint, And leave the pure? If haply thus it be In pity take away the subtle sight That pierces thought. Give back the old fond faith, The young belief in all humanity; ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... economists of the day, were unable to perceive this plain truth. Let me give another illustration. The capital exploit of Union Economics was, as has been said, its dealing with the land question, but perhaps its most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which it met the Great Famine. Now the singular thing about this famine is that during it there was no scarcity of food in Ireland; there was only a ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... you suppose, sir, that I would put the evidence of your "durbins" (telescopes) in opposition to that of the holy prophet? No, sir, depend upon it that there is much fallacy in a telescope—it is not to be relied upon. I have conversed with many excellent European gentlemen, and their great fault appears to me to be in the implicit faith they put in these telescopes—they hold their evidence above that of the prophets, Moses, Abraham, and Elijah. It is dreadful ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... 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
... certain lassitude, and a lounging, easy mode of life, which is fatal both to the precision of manners and the vivacity of conversation. The mind of a smoker is contemplative rather than active, and if the weed cures our irritability, it kills our wit. I believe that it is a fallacy to suppose that it encourages drinking. There is more drinking and less smoking in England than in any other country of the the civilized world. There was more drinking among the gentry of last century, who never smoked at all. Smoke and wine ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... would be practically debarred by the circumstances of the case, from taking slave property into a territory where the sense of the inhabitants was opposed to its introduction. So much for the oft repeated fallacy of forcing slavery upon ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... European states, whose territorial, economic, and military interests have been religiously safeguarded by the Treaty of Versailles. True, the statesmen of Tokio shrink from the hybrid combination of two contradictions linked together by a sentimental fallacy. Their unpopularity among Anglo-Saxons is the result of speculations about their future intentions; in other words, they are being punished, as certain of the delegates at the Conference have been eulogized, not for what they actually did, but for what it is assumed ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... The fallacy of the argument employed by the advocates of the treaty, that the Americans would honourably fulfil the recommendations of Congress, was illustrated ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... is extremely difficult to assign to them a meaning in accordance with that which they bear in this statement of his law; as, for instance, in his application of them to his own science of social physics. But we need not pause on this. What a palpable fallacy it is to suppose, because M. Comte find the positive and theologic methods incompatible, that, historically speaking, and in the minds of men, which certainly admit of stranger commixtures than this, they should "mutually exclude each ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... enclose what appears to me a demonstration on your own principles, that Natural Selection could produce sterility of hybrids. If it does not convince you, I shall be glad if you will point out where the fallacy lies. I have taken the two cases of a slight sterility overcoming perfect fertility, and of a perfect sterility overcoming a partial fertility,—the beginning and end of the process. You admit that variations in ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Flint, protesting as to the manner in which he had been treated concerning committees. In the course of a week he received a kind but necessarily brief letter from the Northeastern's president to remind him that he persisted in a fallacy; as a neighbour, Mr. Flint would help him to the extent of his power, but the Northeastern Railroads could not interfere in legislative or political matters. Mr. Crewe was naturally pained by the lack of confidence of his friend; it seems useless to reiterate that he was far from being ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... demonstrated by successive experiments that the weight of the engine would of itself produce sufficient adhesion to enable it to draw upon a smooth railroad the requisite number of waggons in all kinds of weather. And thus was the fallacy which had heretofore prevailed on this subject completely exploded, and it was satisfactorily proved that rack-rails, toothed wheels, endless chains, and legs, were alike unnecessary for the efficient traction of loaded waggons upon a ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... occurrence in districts, both in this country and elsewhere, to which the Danes, properly so called, were either utter strangers, or wherein they at no time established any permanent footing. The truth is, there seems to be a fallacy in this Danish theory, in so far as it rests upon the testimony of language; for, upon investigation, we generally find that the word or phrase adduced in its support was one recognised, not in any single territory alone, but throughout the whole of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... expend compassion on a man who, etc., were surely a pathetic fallacy." Al. "Is not the man who has it in his power, etc., ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... question of the Second Sight. Of an opinion received for centuries by a whole nation, and supposed to be confirmed through its whole descent, by a series of successive facts, it is desirable that the truth should be established, or the fallacy detected. ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... be a woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and the interest 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 intricate puzzled me and I sat smiling, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... many years ago, I have pointed out the marks of their imposture; and I have since seen no cause to change my views. Regarding all these letters as forgeries from beginning to end, I have endeavoured, in the following pages, to expose the fallacy of the arguments by which Dr. ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... at the time to doubt the infallibility of these two generals in all matters pertaining to their profession. I supposed they moved in small bodies because more men could not be passed over a single road on the same day with their artillery and necessary trains. Later I found the fallacy of this belief. The rebellion, which followed as a sequence to the Mexican war, never could have been suppressed if larger bodies of men could not have been moved at the same time than was the custom under ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." He supported this in a long and comprehensive speech covering the whole ground on which the demand is based, quoting from the favorable reports of the judiciary committees, exposing the weakness and fallacy of the objections, and making an unanswerable argument on the justice of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... an illusion is a false sense perception, so a false inference is called a "fallacy". One great cause of fallacies consists in the confused way in which facts are sometimes presented, resulting in failure to see the relationships clearly. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... of which had been burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously. They were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really a creditable or even glorious circumstance, that the old monk had been intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfortune was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to understand their argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael, and the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our Western civilization, had, however, as I have said, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... 'nerves,' which is about as sensible as talking about a man suffering from ten fingers. We speak of 'liver' and 'digestion' when we mean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion. And in the same manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the danger of fallacy. ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... but still, recollect they have been instilled, perhaps, from the earliest period, by one from whom they must have been received with all confidence—from a father to a son; and that son has never yet been sufficiently in the world to have proved their fallacy." ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... flight. He approached the subject after the manner of the trained scientist, analysing the mechanical properties of air under chemical and physical action. Then he set to work to ascertain the power necessary for aerial flight, and was one of the first to enunciate the fallacy of the hopes of successful flight by means of the steam engine of those days, owing to the fact that it was impossible to obtain a given ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... somewhat military 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 to controvert ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... least hazard an experiment, to attest the truth or fallacy of my supposition," returned the father. "Do you see your destined bridegroom yonder?" continued ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... organization of military strength involves provocation to war is a fallacy, which the experience of each succeeding year now refutes. The immense armaments of Europe are onerous; but nevertheless, by the mutual respect and caution they enforce, they present a cheap alternative, certainly in misery, probably in money, to the frequent devastating wars ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... a common fallacy of this dream in most stages of life, that a vast number of persons employ their time chiefly in spying ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... the delusions which prevail upon the subject, it is curious to observe that there is a strong current towards a rectification of what is amiss. The interests of the individual, which produce so much fallacy, after all bring a correction. The active, original-minded tradesman, seeing that, with an ordinary share of the entire business of his department, he can scarcely make bread and butter, bethinks him of setting up a leviathan shop, in which he may ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... adventitious and foreign pleasures must be pursued, it would be perhaps of some benefit, since that pursuit must frequently be fruitless, if the practice of Savage could be taught, that folly might be an antidote to folly, and one fallacy be obviated by another. But the danger of this pleasing intoxication must not be concealed; nor, indeed, can any one, after having observed the life of Savage, need to be cautioned against it. By imputing none of his miseries to himself, he continued ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... all events within a given time, capital, however abundant it may be, cannot create labour. It has passed into a sort of truism that there is nothing which money cannot accomplish—analyse it, and you will find that it is not a truism but a popular fallacy. There are many, many things which money cannot accomplish. It has no power to clear the social atmosphere from crime; it may mar the morals of a people, but it cannot make them; and still less can it usurp the stupendous functions of the Deity. It may rear labour, but it cannot by any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... interests fairly, but which still obtain the idolatrous veneration of mankind. Nor are chivalry and religion alone liable to fall into this moral superstition. It arises wherever an abstract good is substituted for its concrete equivalent. The miser's fallacy is the typical case, and something very like it is the ethical principle of half our respectable population. To the exercise of certain useful habits men come to sacrifice the advantage which was the original basis and justification ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... object, "Oh, but Kentigern was a real person," I reply that I know many myths concerning 'real' people. For the matter of that, we assist in the manufacture of these every day of our lives, and it is quite a fallacy that legends cannot spring up concerning veritable historical personages, and even around living, breathing folk. And for the rest of it mythology and hagiology are hopelessly ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... said Charles, shaking his head, "if that is your own experience, I bow before it; but for my own part, I must confess I have not found it so. Flourish like a green bay-tree! No, Aunt Mary, it is a fallacy; they don't: I am sure I only wish they did. But I see the rehearsal is beginning. May I give you an ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... natives were now alarmed. It will be remembered that the universal belief among the natives is, that to go into these caves unbidden, means death. True, John had shown the fallacy of this on several occasions, but here was positive evidence that death had visited the dogs, and this might be the fate of those who ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... bear any sensible ratio to the puissance of the uji no Kami and other local lords, the Imperial authority received scanty recognition, and the tillers of the soil were required to pay heavy taxes to their landlords. It is a fallacy to suppose that the Emperor in ancient times not only ruled the land but also owned it. The only land held in direct possession by the Throne was that constituting the Imperial household's estates and that belonging to members of the Imperial family. The ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... was imbued with the fallacy that the disease was hereditary. It was thought that if it "ran in the family" the victims of it were almost certain to die. We know definitely now that consumption is not hereditary, and that, instead of death being certain ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... to the erroneous conclusion that "tillage is manure." In recent days we have learned the value of tillage in conserving moisture and in enabling plants to reach maturity with the least amount of water, and we may be tempted to believe that "tillage is moisture." This, like Tull's statement, is a fallacy and must be avoided. Tillage can take the place of moisture only to a limited degree. Water is the essential consideration in dry-farming, else there ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... change, too much permanence to a given state of affairs. The fact that Ethel was the wife of another man seemed to me so fixed and unalterable that I allowed my imagination to play with the picture of what might happen if that unalterable fact were altered. Secure in this fallacy, I worked myself up to the pitch of believing that I was actually and passionately in love with a woman whose inaccessibility was, after all, her most winning attraction. Moreover, by writing down, in this journal, the events and words of the hours we spent together, I confirmed myself ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... body; and much of the ice was lying crosswise and edgeways, so that a person desirous of looking at the Wellington Channel floe, as the accumulation of many years of continued frost, might have some grounds upon which to base his supposition. A year's observation, however, has shown me the fallacy of supposing that in deep-water channels floes continue to increase in thickness from year to year; and to that subject I will return in a future chapter, ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... sufficient illustration of this prevalent fallacy may be drawn from Mr. Whistler's "Ten O'Clock," ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... outside seeming, and put his belief in her love for him as a fallacy behind him. And it said something for a certain goodness of heart, with all his faults and vanity, that he was more relieved than mortified to think that he had been mistaken. Yet he liked to be loved by women, and the character which he had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... logical fallacy, petitio principii; and the first explanation of the phrase is to be found in Aristotle's "Topica," viii. 13, where the five ways of begging the question are set forth. The earliest English work in which the expression is found is ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... of the constitutional machinery would of itself remedy all evils, and failed to recognise that behind the institutions lie all the instincts and capabilities of the men who are to work them. A similar fallacy is prevalent, I fancy, in regard to what we call social reforms. Some scheme for a new mode of distributing the products of industry would, it is often assumed, remedy all social evils. To my thinking, no such change would ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Florentine or Athenian citizens in 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 ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... had been the intention of tapestry to replace painting. Whenever it leaned that way a deterioration was evident. It was by the lure of this fallacy that Brussels lost her pre-eminence. It was through this that the number of tones was increased from the twenty or more of Arras to the twenty thousand of the Gobelins. It was through this that the true mission of tapestry was lost, which was the mission of supplying a soft, undulating lining ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... was a fallacy somehow, in the working of the Dabney field as he understood it. If there was less inertia in the Dabney field—why—a rocket shouldn't push as hard in it, because, it was the inertia of the rocket-gases that gave the rocket-thrust. But Cochrane ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... 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 . . . but Sir James, when he got into his ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... theory 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 brain is limited, ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... that every one tells a story with some addition of his own, knowing that his hearers like it. It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully. The secret of it lies in a fallacy, For, assuming that if one thing is or becomes, a second is or becomes, men imagine that, if the second is, the first likewise is or becomes. But this is a false inference. Hence, where the first thing is untrue, it is quite unnecessary, provided the second ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... flaw in your hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of daily life may be of little or no moment as affecting the general correctness of the conclusions at which we may arrive; but, in a scientific inquiry, a fallacy, great or small, is always of importance, and is sure to be in the long run constantly productive of ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 this consciousness ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... been united in some respects, separate in others. We have acted as one people for some purposes, as distinct societies for others. I think you have shown this clearly, and in so doing have demonstrated the fallacy of the principle on which either nullification or the right of ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the women who came to the train were disappointing in appearance. They were both shabby and sad, he thought, and he wondered why but looking closely at them he thought, with the fallacy of youth, that they ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... return across Minnesota we had an experience which I have always remembered as illustrative of the fallacy of all human testimony about ghosts, rappings, and other phenomena of that character. We spent two nights and a day at Fort Snelling. Some of the officers were greatly surprised by a celestial phenomenon of a very extraordinary character which had been observed for several ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... force available is drawn from the general body of 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 ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... of which we have so frequently demonstrated the fallacy, that so many persons, otherwise extremely enlightened, look upon it as an impossibility that a society formed of atheists, as they are termed, could subsist for any length of time. It does not admit a question, that a numerous society, who should neither have religion, morality, government, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... reflection you have suggested is enough to indicate the fallacy of the whole Malthusian theory of the increase of population on which this objection to better social conditions was founded. Malthus, as you know, held that population tended to increase faster than means of subsistence, and therefore ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... 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
... house a lady gets a chance to scream Taste usually implies a sort of selection To read anything or study anything we resort to a club Vast flocks of sheep over the satisfying plain of mediocrity Vitality of a fallacy is incalculable Want our literature (or what passes for that) in light array We move in ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... Your threat about the fallacy of history, and what you will do about it, is also vain; yet, if you could do so, the bible is a sufficient rule in this case. You have therefore made but two and a half days and two nights, and work it which way you will, you will fail. You cannot ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... Rotch executed his commission with fidelity, but a pass could not be obtained, his Excellency excusing himself in his refusal that he should not make the precedent of granting a pass till a clearance was obtained, which was indeed a fallacy, as it had been usual with him in ordinary cases,—Mr. Rotch returning in the evening reported as above; the Body then voted his conduct to be satisfactory, and recommending order and regularity to the People, dissolved. Previous to ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... hundred years had passed away before men ventured to question the truth of the statement that the gardens along the canal of Chalco ever floated, and then it seemed like temerity to raise the question, even if it were only a popular fallacy. It has therefore been treated by all modern writers as a well-established matter, and one of not sufficient importance to justify its minute investigation. With me the question was a far different one. I had, after careful inquiry and observation, come to the conclusion ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... went Into life's battle. We perchance, have dream'd That the sweet smile the sunbeam of our home The prattle of the babe the Spoiler seiz'd, Had but gone from us for a little while,— And listen'd in our fallacy of hope At hush of eve for the returning step That wake the inmost pulses of the heart To extasy,—till iron-handed Grief Press'd down the nevermore into our soul, Deadening us with its weight. The man of Uz As the slow lapse of days ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... still, even at forty-six, a very graceful woman. Small—very small—a sort of pocket Venus as it were, but so carefully preserved that at forty-six she might easily be called thirty-five. If it were not for her one child, the present Sir Maurice Rylton, this fallacy might have been carried through. But, unfortunately, Sir Maurice is now twenty-eight by the church register. Lady Rylton hates church registers; they tell so much; and ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... grown into a maxim for ever repeated, is remarkable for the grossest fallacy: Ars longa, vita brevis(9). I would fain know, what art, compared with the natural duration of human life from puberty to old ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... 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 ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... the whispering of the ducks' wings, etc., was good. Ruskin invented that phrase "the pathetic fallacy." You will probably find it in your rhetoric. It was all right ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... almost unique illustration here of the antiquity of savage customs. That an experience of fourteen hundred years should have failed to convince people of the futility of feeding salt waves is a striking demonstration of the widespread fallacy, that what is old must needs ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... the man during his troubles, but this only rendered the sight of his buffoonery more distressing, and as Randall had not provided himself with his home suit, they were the more cut off from one another. Thus there was all the less to counteract or show the fallacy of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... to the popular fallacy, that in the same ratio that you thoroughly educate women, you unfit them for the holy duties of daughter, wife, and mother. Is there an inherent antagonism ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... "This view of life is not mine." The solemn declaration does not seem to me to be so annihilating to the said "view" (really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently assumed. Surely it embodies a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic. Next, a knowing reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks, with some rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his article, of "Mr. Hardy refusing consolation," ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... living—may well ask a consideration of the topic from another standpoint. Is this increased cost resulting in higher efficiency? Are the people growing more healthy, well-favored, well-proportioned, stronger, happier? If not, then is there not a fallacy in the common idea that more money spent means ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... club that such a topic had been selected. But—and he smiled down on his amused colleagues— that lady member had lately shown such strong tendencies toward the new-woman movement that, one and all, the members hoped that she might be convinced of the fallacy of her really ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... The first kind of Fallacy—'Fallacious Premisses'—you will detect when, after marking them on the larger Diagram, you try to transfer the marks to the smaller. You will take its four compartments, one by one, and ask, for each in turn, "What ...
— The Game of Logic • Lewis Carroll
... that the matter must come to issue, and he was not of that type which shrinks from putting to the touch a question of vital consequence. He knew that her happiness as well as his own was in the balance. He was not embittered or deluded, as a narrower man might have been, into the fallacy that her treatment of him denoted fickleness. Adrienne was merely running the boundary line that separates deep friendship from love, a boundary which is often confusing. When she had finally staked out the disputed frontier, it would never again ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... housekeeper, or spiritual adviser) who, entering the vineyard at the eleventh hour, (the precise moment at which his patience and humility become exhausted,) carries off the golden prize, and adds another melancholy confirmation, to those already upon record, of the fallacy of all human anticipations. It matters little what may have been the motives of his conduct; whether duty, affection, or that more powerful incentive self-interest; how long or how devotedly he may have humoured the foibles or eccentricities of his relative; or what sacrifices he may have made ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... distressed me was that she blamed herself, indirectly, for what had happened. Again and again did she declare to me that, had she not given him leave to take the afternoon off the tragedy would not have happened. In vain I tried to make her see the fallacy of her argument—she would not ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... been fortunate enough to be placed under asylum treatment in the first stage of their malady, they would also have been cured in like proportion. Unfortunately, the accumulation of incurables, even in asylums, opened the eyes of many to the fallacy of this inference.[256] Other asylums were, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... 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 ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... child deserved. Was it not an appropriate thing for people in a higher station to take a charge off the hands of a man in a lower? It seemed an eminently appropriate thing to Godfrey, for reasons that were known only to himself; and by a common fallacy, he imagined the measure would be easy because he had private motives for desiring it. This was rather a coarse mode of estimating Silas's relation to Eppie; but we must remember that many of the impressions which Godfrey was likely to gather ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... 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
... sacredness of places as distinguished from other places. This error is so widespread that one feels all alone when he tries to combat it. It has acted as a kind of dye to color the thinking of religious persons and has colored the eyes as well so that it is all but impossible to detect its fallacy. In the face of every New Testament teaching to the contrary it has been said and sung throughout the centuries and accepted as a part of the Christian message, the which it most surely is not. Only the Quakers, so far as my knowledge goes, have had ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... Section H, British Association'—so on, so on!—'Publications: "Some Observations Upon a Series of Kalmuck Skulls"; "Outlines of Vertebrate Evolution"; and numerous papers, including "The underlying fallacy of Weissmannism," which caused heated discussion at the Zoological Congress of Vienna. Recreations: Walking, Alpine climbing. Address: ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... co-existence of two facts does not necessarily imply that one is the cause of the other; and, as is often the case, they may have no relation to each other, and each may exist independently of the other. Many illustrations of this fallacy might be presented were it necessary to do so; but I will refer to only one of them. I have heard it asserted that more murders and other crimes are committed in Christian countries than in any others. Whether this be true or false, I am not prepared ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... and most important requisites for having healthy children is to avoid the eating-for-two fallacy. Most people overeat, anyway, and there should be ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... 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 or death, I might, principle aside, infuriate ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... natural acknowledgment of the monarchy of small things, the same idea that made Dickens believe that common men could be kings—that is, in the same category as the Divine care of the hairs of the head. It gives the lie to the rather popular fallacy that events are important by their size. It is once more a position that the stone on the hillside is as mighty as the mountain of which it is only a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... 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 dormant there for an unknown time, and were stimulated into germination when ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... not expect to become professional readers or public speakers, but surely this is a great mistake, and they might as well object to the study of literature because they do not expect to become an author; and still more mischievous in its results is the fallacy, only too current even among persons of intelligence, that those who display great and successful oratorical powers, possess a genius or faculty that is the gift of nature, and which it would be in vain to endeavour to acquire by practice, as if orators "were born, not made," as ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... 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 ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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, and that of this country; and the problem to be solved was, "how to do the most ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... by previous example and general knowledge. Great faults, it is true, may be avoided, but great excellencies can never be attained in this way. If Sir Joshua's hypothesis of progressive refinement in art was anything more than a verbal fallacy, why does he go back to Michael Angelo as the God of his idolatry? Why does he find fault with Carlo Maratti for being heavy? Or why does he declare as explicitly as truly, that 'the judgment, after it has been long passive, by degrees loses its power of becoming ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the parliament was a mere fallacy, while the sovereign was universally acknowledged to possess a dispensing power, by which all the laws could be invalidated, and rendered of no effect. The exercise of this power was also an indirect ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Round Towers in place of the Vestal mounds into Ireland, combining their fire-worship with our Druidism—and that the present towers were built in imitation of the Magian Towers. This is all, as Mr. Petrie says, pure fallacy, without a particle of authority; but we should think "twelfth" is a misprint for "seventh" in the early part of Beauford's passage, and, therefore, that the last clause of ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the question from a popular fallacy which treats oldtime operations as insignificant, in view of large modern armies and campaigns, it is pertinent to state, just here, that the issues of the battle-field for all time, up to the latest hour, have not been determined by the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... a community is not, as mathematicians would say, always of the same sign. To ignore this is the essential fallacy of the cult called Individualism. But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... one grand fallacy; for, whereas this wretch is endeavouring by a supercilious conduct to lead the beholder into an opinion of his superiority to the despised person, he inwardly flatters his own vanity with a deceitful presumption that this ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... the economist, then, is that the value of everything is proportionate to its cost. It requires no little hardihood to say that this proposition is a fallacy. It lays one open at once, most illogically, to the charge of being a socialist. In sober truth it might as well lay one open to the charge of being an ornithologist. I will not, therefore, say that the proposition that ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... remarks Yue-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 same royal road; but of course ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... 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 process ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... said that the purchases of the foreign consumer give employment to capital which would otherwise yield no profit to its owner, the same political economists reject this proposition as involving the fallacy of what has been called a "general glut." They say, that the capital, which any person has chosen to produce and to accumulate, can always find employment, since the fact that he has accumulated it proves that he had an unsatisfied desire; ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... went and co-operated so far as to form one of that lady's audience. Her subject—the "Political Status of Women"—was evidently attractive, not only to what we used in our innocence to call the weaker sex, but also to those who are soon to have proved to them the fallacy of calling themselves the stronger. A goodly assemblage had gathered in the fine hall of the Co-operators to join in demolishing that ancient myth as to the superiority of the male sex. My first intention was to have reported verbatim or nearly so the oration of Praxagora ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... be regarded, rather as the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe; and between us, on this unequal division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known him to battle the same question night after night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous or grave intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor taking an unfair ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... should be omitted from the symptomatic category: it would be fallacy to assume that one is a maniac because one admires the ample margins and paramount qualities of these large-paper copies, which Dibdin himself says are "printed upon paper of a larger dimension and superior quality ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... fallacy," says Florence Nightingale, "to suppose that night air is injurious; a great authority told me that, in London, the air is never so good as after ten o'clock, when smoke has diminished; but then it must be air ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... subjects, should have been made, as usual, the battle-ground of literary fancy and of that general tendency of mankind to ferocity, which, unluckily, the study of belles lettres does not seem very appreciably to soften. Assisted by the usual fallacy of antedating MSS. in the early days of palaeographic study, and by their prepossessions as Germans, some early students of the Reynard story made out much too exclusive and too early claims, as to possession by right of invention, for the country in which Reynard has no doubt, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... daughters of Ran (the sea-goddess) came and wooed them and offered them rest in their embraces,"—a conceit which might possibly be mistaken by a modern reader for the fancy of Hans Andersen, but which is really something quite different, not "pathetic fallacy," but an irruption of metaphorical rhetoric from the poetical dictionary. There is another metaphorical flare-up on the next page, equally ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Stay! there is a fallacy here. In our transition period which is still quite dominated by the monopoly of culture, I have nothing to say against the abrogation of every educational test, even though in a few years we shall feel ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... of Catastrophism, a Geology so out of line with Nature as revealed by the other sciences, that on a priori grounds a thoughtful mind might have been justified in dismissing it as a final form of any science. And its fallacy was soon and thoroughly exposed. The advent of modified uniformitarian principles all but banished the word catastrophe from science, and marked the birth of Geology as we know it now. Geology, that is to say, had fallen at last into the great scheme of Law. Religious ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... same principle serves to keep the internal politics of the Germans quiet, and prevent Socialism being the practical hope or peril it has been in so many other countries. It operates in two ways; first, by a curious fallacy about "the time not being ripe"—as if time could ever be ripe. The same savage superstition from the forests had infected Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he made a personality out of the Zeitgeist—perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely fabulous. It is tricked by a biological ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... vaguely troubled by the fallacy which she felt in this speech without being quite willing or able to bring it ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... to note that the modern fallacy according to which republics being impersonal should not be represented by ambassadors had not appeared in that important epoch in diplomatic history. On the contrary, the two great republics of the age, Holland ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... my church. I prayed for light and I saw none. Oh, Clear Eyes, why is light given to a man whose way is hid? I went forth from that church convinced that it was all a sham. That the lights meant nothing; that the music meant less, and that what I had preached had been a poetic fallacy. ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... boy commenced growin' up, lazy-like an' shiftless," enlightened the parson. "Ther old man 'lowed thet hit wouldn't hardly be no fallacy ter name him Lizzie or Lake Erie, but he swore on a hull stack of Bibles thet he aimed ter make a man of ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 rate. Ergo, after the fight with their directly ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke
... women, and when we had briefly explained our plan they decided to join forces with us, though it was evident that it was with some considerable misgivings that they thus tempted fate by opposing an ancient superstition, even though each knew through cruel experience the fallacy of its entire fabric. ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs |
