fallacies an author needs a large space, that he may quote no
inconsiderable part of literature ancient and modern.

As to the means of avoiding fallacies, a general increase of sincerity
and candour amongst mankind may be freely recommended. With more honesty
there would be fewer bad arguments; but there is such a thing as
well-meaning incapacity that gets unaffectedly fogged in converting A.,
and regards the refractoriness of O., as more than flesh and blood can
endure. Mere indulgence in figurative language, again, is a besetting
snare. "One of the fathers, in great severity called poesy _vinum
daemonum_," says Bacon: himself too fanciful for a philosopher. Surely,
to use a simile for the discovery of truth is like studying beauty in
the bowl of a spoon.

The study of the natural sciences trains and confirms the mind in a
habit of good reasoning, which is the surest preservative against
paralogism, as long as the terms in use are, like those of science, well
defined; and where they are ill defined, so that it is necessary to
guard against ambiguity, a thorough training in politics or metaphysics
may be useful. Logic seems to me to serve, in some measure, both these
purposes. The conduct of business, or experience, a sufficient time
being granted, is indeed the best teacher, but also the most austere and
expensive. In the seventeenth century some of the greatest philosophers
wrote _de intellectus emendatione_; and if their successors have given
over this very practical inquiry, the cause of its abandonment is not
success and satiety but despair. Perhaps the right mind is not to be
made by instruction, but can only be bred: a slow, haphazard process;
and meanwhile the rogue of a sophist may count on a steady supply of
dupes to amuse the tedium of many an age.

FINIS.

QUESTIONS

_The following questions are chiefly taken from public examination
papers: Civil Service_ [S], _Oxford_ [O], _Cambridge_ [C], _London_ [L].

I. TERMS, ETC.

1. What is a Term? Explain and illustrate the chief divisions of Terms.
What is meant by the Connotation of a Term? Illustrate. [S]

2. "The connotation and denotation of terms vary inversely." Examine
this assertion, explaining carefully the limits within which it is true,
if at all. [S]

3. Exemplify the false reasoning arising from the confusion of Contrary
and Contradictory Terms. [S]

4. Discuss the claims of the doctrine of Terms to be included in a
Logical Sys