summary expression for the general
result of all the causes, it is accepted as _the_ law of human changes,
past and even future. So, empirical generalisations, from present to
past time, and from the character of one nation to that of another, are
similarly fallacious when employed as causal laws. 4. This Fallacy
occurs, not only when an empirical is confounded with a causal law, but
when causation is inferred improperly. The mistake sometimes lies in
inferring _a posteriori_ that one fact must be the cause of another
(e.g. the National Debt, or some special institution, of England's
prosperity), because of their casual conjunction; at other times, in
assuming _a priori_ that one of several coexisting agents is the sole
cause, and then deducing the effects from it exclusively. The latter is
properly False Theory. It has been exemplified in medicine by the
tracing of all diseases by one school, to viscidity of the blood, by
another, to the presence of some acid or alkali, and, in politics, by
the assumption that some special form of government or society is
absolutely good. 5. In False Analogies (which fall under this Fallacy)
there is no pretence of a conclusive induction. The argument from
Analogy is the inferring, in the absence of evidence either way, that an
object resembles a second object in one point, because it is seen to
resemble it in another point, which either is not known to be connected
with the first by causation (as, that the planets must be inhabited
because they obey the same astronomical laws with the earth, which is),
or which is known to be, not, indeed, its cause or its effect, but
either one of a set of conditions, which together are its cause, or an
occasional effect of its cause. Now, persons (usually from poverty, not
from luxuriance, of imagination) often overrate the weight of true
analogies; but the fallacy specially consists in inferring resemblance
in one point from resemblance in another, when the evidence is not only
not in favour of, but even positively against the connection of the two
by way of causation. It is so in the argument in favour of absolutism,
on the ground of its resemblance to paternal government in the one point
of irresponsibility, as though the assumed benefits of paternal rule
flowed from this quality. Similarly fallacious are the inferences,
through analogies, from the liability to decay of bodies natural to that
of bodies politic; from the supposed need of a _primum m