"Fallacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... question there is always considered to be two antagonistical interests—that of the employers, and that of the employed; the former contending for the minimum, and the latter for the maximum rate. But this is a fallacy. The interest of the two is identical; and for these obvious reasons, that if wages be too high, the capitalist must cease to produce and to employ; and if too low, the working population must sink to the position ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... looks all very plain sailing, indeed, to say that they did; and yet there is no proof of anything of the kind. As the former Director of this Institution, Sir H. De la Beche, long ago showed, this reasoning may involve an entire fallacy. It is extremely possible that 'a' may have been deposited ages before 'b'. It is very easy to understand how that can be. To return to Figure 4; when A and B were deposited, they were 'substantially' contemporaneous; A being simply the finer ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... in which suggestions for a levy on capital have been put forward, some of the difficulties and injustices inherent in it have already been pointed out. Its advocates seem as a rule to base the demand for it upon an assumption which involves a complete fallacy. This is that, since the conscription of life has been applied during the war, it is necessary that conscription of wealth should also be brought to bear in order to make the war sacrifice of all classes ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... of Generals. Longings for Home. Exemptions and "Details". The Substitute Law. Mr. Davis' Wisdom Vindicated. Governor Joe Brown kicks. State Traits of the Conscripts. Kentucky's Attitude. Tennessee's "Buffaloes". The "Union Feeling" Fallacy. Conscript Camps. Morals of the "New Ish". Food and Money Scarcer. Constancy of the Soldiers. The Extension Law. Repeal of the Substitute Act. Home-Guards. "The ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... upon the waves; he turned the water into wine; he healed the sick and the sinner; he raised the dead, and rolled away the stone from the door of his own tomb. His demonstration of Spirit virtually van- [20] quished matter and its supposed laws. Walking the wave, he proved the fallacy of the theory that matter is substance; healing through Mind, he removed any sup- position that matter is intelligent, or can recognize or express pain and pleasure. His triumph over the grave [25] was an everlasting victory ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... whole-wheat meal as ordinarily prepared is, as has generally been assumed, weight for weight more nutritious than ordinary bread flour is an utter fallacy founded on theoretical text-book dicta, not only entirely unsupported by experience, but inconsistent with it. In fact, it is just the poorer fed and the harder working that should have the ordinary flour bread rather than the whole-meal bread as hitherto ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... that there is no better term than sentimentalism with which to indicate that variety of formalism which is characteristic of the purposive economy. The fallacy consists essentially in the abstraction of the purpose from its constituent interests. The true value of a purpose lies in its function of organization; and is, therefore, inseparable from the interests to which it gives unity and fulfilment. But its form, or even its mere ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... cholera had got within three miles of Edinburgh, and to show the fallacy of any theory about it, and the inutility of the prescribed precautions, at one place (Newport, I think) one person in five of the whole population was attacked, though there was no lack of diet, warmth, and clothing for the poor. This disease escapes from all speculation, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... are at once freed from a common fallacy of biographical writing—that vicious mental attitude, as vain as it is egotistical on part of the over-partial historian, who would warp some manifest destiny on ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... not another, in one's own prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had been through the long reign of these quiet Antonines, in like manner, discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon it? Would not a future generation, looking back upon this, under the power of the enchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to view, in contrast with its own languor—the languor that for some reason (concerning which Augustine will one day have his view) seemed to haunt men always? Had Homer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... to stultify the findings of the Commission on the ground that its report was based on a fallacy, since Ireland has no more right to be considered as a separate entity than an English county, is remarkably disingenuous in view of the acknowledgment of this in the separate treatment which she received in the matter of grants ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... is that Kentucky should have chosen to hold to an antiquated legal conception for fifty years after Virginia had proved its fallacy by her experience in the eighteenth century. While it did little harm, it had few advantages. The existence of the theory was chiefly noticeable in the frequent legal battles over technicalities ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... American, puffing and blowing like a grampus, who was placed in possession of statement (c) referred to above. He appeared either not to hear, however, or to incline to the view that it was a mere theory based upon a fallacy.... ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... offer of service at home, "to defend the shores of Ireland," and forthwith Sir Edward Grey proclaimed, with an applauding Empire to support him, that "Ireland was the one bright spot." Yes, but at what a cost to Ireland herself! It is a fallacy, widely believed in, that Mr Redmond proposed a definite war policy. He did not. He did not at first promise a single recruit for the front. He did not put England upon her honour even to grant "full self-government" in return for Irish ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... 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 in a patient ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... steadily brooding over the chaos in which thought and emotion first appear to the mind, and giving shape and life to both, before uttering them in words, he has obtained a singular mastery over expression. By this we do not mean that he has a large command of language. No fallacy is greater than that which confounds fluency with expression. Washerwomen, and boys at debating clubs, often display more fluency than WEBSTER; but his words are to theirs, as the roll of thunder to the patter of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... expense either of growth, or of bodily activity, or of mental activity; as constitution and circumstances determine? We believe no logical intellect will question it. To think otherwise is to entertain in a disguised form the old fallacy of the perpetual-motion schemers—that it is possible to get power out ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... became evident that 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
... there 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 was much too tired to work out a theoretic ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... that such and such a person 'has met with a disappointment,' we all understand what is meant. The phrase, though it is conventionally intelligible enough, involves a fallacy: it seems to teach that the disappointment of the youthful heart in the matter of that which in its day is no doubt the most powerful of all the affections, is by emphasis the greatest disappointment which a human being can ever know. Of course that is an entire mistake. People get over that disappointment ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... before it came to be distinctly articulated in the "Contrat Social" of Jean Jacques Rousseau, was familiar to the minds of those by whom the paper was drawn. Thoughtful men at the present day universally recognize the fallacy of this plausible hypothesis, which once had such wide currency and so serious an influence on the course of political history in America. But whether or not they were affected by the theory, the practical good sense of the men and their deference to the teachings of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... and many others one incessant fallacy, when alluding to slight differences of physical conditions as being very important; namely, oblivion of the fact that all species, except very local ones, range over a considerable area, and though ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... 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 ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good things that Athelred is most to he 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 ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 of the word, meant a spirit broken down altogether and brought into subjection ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... the House of Commons to inquire into the existing King's Printers' Patent for printing Bibles and Acts of Parliament, the period for the renewal of which was near at hand. The principle upon which the patent was originally granted appeared to be correctness secured only by protection—a fallacy which the voluminous evidence of the Committee most completely exposed. The late Alderman Besley, a typefounder, and a great friend of John Childs, as well as Robert Childs, practical printers, gave conclusive evidence on this head, and the result was that, although ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... which I think myself more indebted for whatever capacity of thinking I have attained. The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained, was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... 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 to act upon the same principles, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... of the 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... 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
... country excessively hot, from the scarlet fever, and other inflammatory diseases. But at the Orinoco, the banks of which are very insalubrious, the sick blame the mosquitos for all their sufferings. It is unnecessary to refute the fallacy of the popular belief that the action of the mosquitos is salutary by its local bleedings. In Europe the inhabitants of marshy countries are not ignorant that the insects irritate the epidermis, and stimulate its functions by the venom which they deposit in the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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 ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... 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 ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... sequi opinionem, qui perinde scribendum ac loquamur, existiment (Octavius. c. 88).] This, namely that writing should in every case and at all costs be subordinated to speaking, which is everywhere tacitly assumed as not needing any proof, is the fallacy which runs through the whole scheme. There is, indeed, no necessity at all for this. Every word, on the contrary, has two existences, as a spoken word and a written; and you have no right to sacrifice one of these, or even to subordinate it ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... without seeing; his cheek burned; he was too full of his sense of injury. It was certain that he had never been treated that way before; he was not used to being thought not good enough. He knew how good he was, and if such a fallacy had not been so pernicious he could have laughed at it. He searched again for Pansy, but she had disappeared, and his main desire was now to get out of the house. Before doing so he spoke once more to ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... an old monk live, practising all this with punctilious care as the essence of a holy life, and resting upon the fallacy that these cruel mortifyings of the flesh would greatly facilitate the acquisition of everlasting ease and joy in a better world; as if God knew not, better than themselves, what chastisements and afflictions were needful for them. We may sigh with pain over such instances of mistaken ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... of these intricate 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 ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... 'his being's end and aim,' was his legitimate and covenanted reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and inasmuch as God was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to be. There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is idle to talk of inward consolations. Job felt them, but they were not everything. They did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of his children, or his friends' unkindness, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... courage of a fruitful issue, wherein, as in the truest chronicle, they seem to outlive themselves, can with greater patience away with death. This conceit and counterfeit subsisting in our progenies seems to be a mere fallacy, unworthy the desire of a man, that can but conceive a thought of the next world; who, in a nobler ambition, should desire to live in his substance in heaven, rather than his name and shadow in the earth. And therefore, at my death, I mean to take a total adieu of the world, not ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... of fuss 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... 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, and that of this ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... Johnson, while he was at Pembroke College, 'was caressed and loved by all about him, was a gay and frolicksome[222] fellow, and passed there the happiest part of his life.' But this is a striking proof of the fallacy of appearances, and how little any of us know of the real internal state even of those whom we see most frequently; for the truth is, that he was then depressed by poverty, and irritated by disease. When I mentioned to him this account as given me by Dr. Adams, he said, 'Ah, Sir, I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... had toyed with her hair, made him shrink not as a man of starch and patent leather, but as a man potentially himself a poet or even a faun. The girl was really more candid than her costume, and the best proof of it was her supposing her liberal character suited by any uniform. This was a fallacy, since if she was draped as a pessimist he was sure she liked the taste of life. He thanked her for her appreciation—aware at the same time that he didn't appear to thank her enough and that she might think him ungracious. He was ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... grand, serene, supreme will embraced the actual and the ideal in its circle, and all things were moved by a law as certain and irresistible as that which impels worlds in their orbits. The conviction was a part of Holden's self. He could no more be convinced of its fallacy than of his own non-existence, and his son left him with the full assurance that, even were he to know that his life was menaced, he would be the last one to take any precautionary measures for its protection. But, in ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... 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
... only hardened against his preceptor. But it must be remembered, that the present work is addressed to those who acknowledge the authority of the holy Scriptures. And in order to convince all such that there is somewhere or other, a fallacy in our objector's reasoning, it will be sufficient to establish that though the word of God clearly asserts the justice and goodness of the Supreme Being, and also the natural depravity of man, yet it no less clearly ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... most distinguished and fruitful concepts of trained minds; it rules out of court what are to the majority of men real and precious factors in the religious experience. It would appear to be another instance, among the many, of the fallacy of identifying the part with the whole. But the effect of such pervasive thought currents, the more subtle and unfightable because indirect and disguised in popular appearance and influence, upon the ethical and spiritual temper of religious leaders, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... also important 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 and Venice, vindicated for themselves, with as much dignity ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it that, in the teeth of this insidious argument, the Senate would not venture to inflict capital punishment on their friends, that they evinced their approbation by loud cheers; while many of the patrician party were shaken in their previous convictions; and many of those who perceived the fallacy of his sophistical reasoning, and detected his latent determination to screen the parricides of the state, felt the hazard and difficulty of proceeding as the exigencies ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... p. 59: Two alleged reasons, p. 60: First reason, Retention of Irish members concession to Unionists, p. 60: Futility of plea, ib.: Second reason, England will not suffer any greater evil than she does at present, p. 63: Answer. Fallacy of statement, ib.—Explanation of Gladstonian policy, p. 65.—Powers of Irish Government, p. 66: I. Irish Executive, ib.: Importance of Executive, p. 68: Powers of Irish Executive, p. 68: Position of military forces, p. 74: II. The ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... appearance would only gratify the sight of a few members of her own sex who were generally too much taken up with their own ailments or complaints to care what their fellow-sufferers looked like, it shows the fallacy of a popular superstition that women only care to dress for men. Believe me, no—they dress for critics, the critics of their own sex, who with one contemptuous glance can sweep a toilette into insignificance, ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... much as himself. The simplicity of his vanity and selfishness was only equalled by the simplicity of Captain Jim's admiration of it. It was a part of my youthful inexperience of humanity that I was not above the common fallacy of believing that a man is "known by the company he keeps," and that he is in a manner responsible for its weakness; it was a part of that humanity that I felt no surprise in being more amused than ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... may 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 intermingled ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... and his followers, created a sensation among the Spaniards such as had not been felt since the first voyage of Columbus. The discovery of the New World had filled the minds of men with indefinite expectations of wealth, of which almost every succeeding expedition had proved the fallacy. The conquest of Mexico, though calling forth general admiration as a brilliant and wonderful exploit, had as yet failed to produce those golden results which had been so fondly anticipated. The splendid promises held out by Francis Pizarro on his recent visit to ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... of 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 ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... nature has willed it so. My poor conscience, are you still struggling in the fallacy ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... known as a debater of singular 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 ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... her soul of this gloomy fallacy, she suffered so terribly that my heart will never be quite at peace so long as I can remember that dreadful time!—Do you know why she left me? Simply to prove to me what is not true—that she is base. But ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 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.' When some days afterwards he read this passage, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... necessity of keeping up Pitt's measure, and also from his expressly stating the larger amount of this sinking fund of five millions in proportion to debt when compared with Pitt's original million in proportion to the debt of 1786. The fallacy of such a comparison would be monstrous, if the one was a fund working at compound interest, and the other be meant to work only at simple interest. Besides, even if this were to be done, the annual interest set free by the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... adequately in hand both the vocational and recreational interests of youth. With this accession of educational territory will come a proportionate increase in the number of male teachers, and a further diminution of the fallacy that the only kind of order is silence and the prime condition of mental concentration inaction. The system will become less and the ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... of comparison and inference, natural as it is, is one prolonged fallacy exemplifying the very essence of all mythological construction in contrast both with inspired perception and logical reasoning. The revealing arrival of a truth in consciousness is when an intuitive thrill announces the action ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and 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 ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... legislative power of 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 method practised for erecting monopolies. Where the statutes laid any branch of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... delusion, 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... and the spirit of its institutions. From first to last he always declared the really valuable tie with a colony to be the moral and the social tie.[217] The master key with him was local freedom, and he was never weary of protest against the fallacy of what was called 'preparing' these new communities for freedom: teaching a colony, like an infant, by slow degrees to walk, first putting it into long clothes, then into short clothes. A governing class was reared up for the purposes which the colony ought ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... 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
... own use and comfort the fallacy which has since become standard for all journalists unwilling or unable to face the issue of their own responsibility to the public. He now gave ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... The fundamental fallacy of the inquiry is apparent from one consideration. Legends are possible in any age; myths, strictly so called, only in the earliest ages of a nation. Comparative philology has lately shown that mythology is connected with the formation ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... come to the conclusion that she could never love any man well enough to marry him, when one day so small a thing as a piece of paper fluttered into her vision, and showed her the fallacy ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... George McDonald a little audacious, though I like him in the main. There is a fallacy in this cavil, you may depend. Some years ago, when I was a little befogged by plausible talk, Dr. Skinner came to our house, got into one of his best moods, and preached a regular sermon on the glory of God, that set me all right again. I am not skilled in argument, but my heart ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... upon the subject, and it gives us pleasure to reflect, that our objections will be reviewed by a Minister, possessed of candor to acknowledge their force on the one hand, and talents to detect and discover to us their fallacy on the other. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but, at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... never a greater fallacy, although I am free to admit that under certain conditions it may conduce to that end. But tell me, have you never seen one happy amid ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... listening to the back-view remarks of their statelier neighbors, the brown-stone fronts—all these things she amused herself telling Paul, playfully begging him not to confront her with the oft-quoted pathetic fallacy of Ruskin. Hadn't Dickens, she asked, discerned human expression in door-knockers, and on the faces ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the divine right of a child to dig in the dirt, why isn't it the divine right of the grown-up? It is, and would be so recognized were it not for the fact that we have been obsessed by a fallacy called "the divine right of property." This idea has come down to us from the Reign of the Barons, when a dozen men owned all of England, and plain and unlettered people could not legally own a foot of land. All paid tribute to the Barons, who were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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
... than one husband thinks he ought to be separated from his wife and children so as not to spoil them. There is no need of a long explanation to show the fallacy of this idea. To be complete, love should be reciprocal, and to remain mutual it requires mutual education in marriage. Every husband should above all be separated from himself, and not from his wife. If each one ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... shall only be lookers on, from the clouds above, as now we look down on the labors, the hurry, and bustle of the ants and bees. Perhaps, in that super-mundane region, we may be amused with seeing the fallacy of our own guesses, and even the nothingness of those labors which have filled and agitated our ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... dreamer, and entertained certain little romantic exaggerated opinions, out of which it was impossible to argue her—sometimes her actions ran contrary to these opinions, and we would fancy that surely now she would admit the fallacy of her arguments in favor of them; but when taxed with it, she would in the most earnest, sincere manner defend her original position, proving to us that no matter how her actions appeared to others, they were in her own mind entirely in keeping with these first expressed opinions, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... up to a certain point was accurate. In July, August, and for part of September it was, I believe, almost impossible for the Germans to send troops to Transylvania, which accounts for the rapidity of the Rumanian advance at the beginning of their operations. The fallacy in the Allied reasoning seems to me to have been that every one overlooked certain vital factors in the German situation. First, that she would ultimately support any threat against Hungary to the limit of her capacity, even if she had to evacuate Belgium to get troops for this purpose. ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... who seek to explain life's perplexities rather than to condemn them discovered—Some of them, that the defiant tone of her writings and her love of opposition bespoke a degree of vanity sufficient to have led her into fallacy. Others maintained that hers was essentially a romantic nature which might cause her to form a false estimate both of her own powers and of the circumstances of life. Others, again, had heard something of how this husband and wife lived, ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... 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, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... men and 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 ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... severe in his condemnation of the emotional or sensational practices of the latter. He said, what was never before known by me, that the word pardon is not in the New Testament, but remission was. His point against the Methodists was their fallacy of believing that conversion was sudden and miraculous, and accompanied by a happy feeling. Happy feeling, he said, would naturally follow a consciousness of remission of sins, but was no evidence of conversion, ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... points:—(i) the need of missionaries, at the present day, being not only men of holy and devoted lives, but also fully equal in intellectual equipment and culture to our home clergy; and (ii) the fallacy of trusting to the circulation of the Bible, as an instrument of mission work, unless it be accompanied—or rather preceded—by the ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... believed to be largely responsible for pneumonia, that is, exposure to severe weather, is curiously negatived by the fact that children and old people are not those generally exposed to weather. Perhaps no fallacy in any disease has been more prevalent than that pneumonia is usually contracted by exposure to wet or to cold. It has, indeed, been noticed that the disease has been practically non-existent under conditions where it would be prevalent if exposure ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... Britain, nor prior to her own acknowledgment of it, nor previous to the reception of an American Minister by Great Britain.—The Count declines delivering these objections in writing.—Mr Dana replies to these objections.—Is advised to send a memorial to the Vice Chancellor, showing the fallacy of his ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... puzzled. Dr. O'Grady's line of argument was quite new to him. He felt sure that a fallacy underlay it somewhere, but he could not at the moment see what the ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... in the canonical book, and speaks his mind a little more freely and intimately perhaps, as becomes his added years and experience. He still acts as a divine messenger to a heathen king, and he successfully unmasks his fallacy of judging by appearances in the matter of Bel's food. His laughter in vv. 7,19, may have been amusement at the king's simplicity or at the priests' cunning, the king's wrath in vv. 8, 21, being compatible with either. But ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... the reductio ad absurdum—the lawyers' argument, technically flawless, though proceeding upon a transparent fallacy. That fallacy I shall consider hereafter; the question of the moment is the reporters'—"Have ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... EVERY KNOWN DISEASE. A New Theory. A Complete Demonstration of the Advantages of the Hydropathic System of Curing Diseases; showing also the fallacy of the Allopathic Method, and its Utter Inability to Effect a Permanent Cure. With an Appendix, containing Hydropathic Diet, and Rules for Bathing. By J. H. Rausse. Translated from the German. Paper, 62 cents; Muslin, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... to this viewpoint, that we begin to understand the mistake of ordinary opinion in identifying the hero with the soldier. Especially in this age of waxing militarism, it is well for us to note the fallacy which is involved in this primeval superstition. Heroism, at its truest and best, is spiritual. It is "an obedience," says Emerson, "to a secret impulse of an individual's character." It needs no other stimulus, hides in no gorgeous trappings, craves no companionship ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... 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 ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... of Spinoza's abstract, dialectical psychology; but its truth or its practical applicability is because of that not in the least impaired. Indeed, because of its dialectical form its range of meaning is greatly increased. Spinoza's dictum applies to what William James called the "psychologist's fallacy." It also applies to what John Ruskin called the "pathetic fallacy." Again, it applies to the fallacy Franz Boas exposed and which he may justly have called the "anthropologist's fallacy." And it applies also to what one may, with a great deal of benefit, dub the "ethicist's fallacy." ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... popular ground on which such a policy could be defended is the fallacy that landlords transmit to tenants the fluctuations in taxes, in the form of increased or diminished rents. Even if this were true, the tenants would be as likely as not to profit by enlarged municipal expenditures (i.e. in spite of paying for a minor part of their cost). But in ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... not concur in that most commonplace fallacy of criticism, the belief that not more than one genius is vouchsafed to any one period of an art, though this opinion can be justified, of course, by a very exclusive definition of the word genius. To the average ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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. ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... free commerce between nations. That any industry, no matter how young might be the nation practicing it, or how peculiar the difficulties of its prosecution, should ever be the subject of home protection, he stamped as a fallacy too absurd to be argued. The journals venturing such an opinion were childish drivelers, putting forth views long since exploded before the whole world. He was still loud in this opinion when his little book of epigrams, The Raven of Zurich and Other Rhymes, came out, and being bright and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... 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 loved ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... The fallacy of this argument is twofold; for in the first place, a man may know justice and not be just—here is the old confusion of the arts and the virtues;—nor can any teacher be expected to counteract wholly the bent of natural character; and secondly, a man may have a degree of justice, ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... Presbyterian Church in England. We, it is true, baptized a majority, say two-thirds. Are they, then, two-thirds of an integral part in America, and one-third of an integral part in England? No. The whole is a fallacy. Each individual Church there is an integral part of the whole of them. All together, they form an integer. They might by the act of our Church, and a correlative act on their own part, become an integral part of the Church in America? ...
— History and Ecclesiastical Relations of the Churches of the Presbyterial Order at Amoy, China • J. V. N. Talmage
... not been able successfully to apply them. If their professor has but once fairly and undoubtedly succeeded in ascertaining the facts on which the principle is based, their failure for a thousand times is no proof that the ascertained principle is really a fallacy. In like manner, any important principle in education, if once satisfactorily ascertained, is a truth in the science, and will remain a truth, whoever may believe or deny it. If it has been proved to produce certain effects in certain given ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... a simple change 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 ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Mr. Graeme. "I confess you have the better of me.—But is there not a fallacy in ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers that death may take it from ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... cathedral from a Roman basilica, such an idea may seem to be only the maunderings of a mystical imagination, a theory evolved from the inner consciousness, entitled to no more consideration than the familiar fallacy that vaulted nave of a Gothic church was an attempt to imitate the green aisles of a forest. It should be remembered however that the habit of the thought of that time was mystical, as that of our own age is utilitarian and scientific; and ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... employees of a large factory in Ohio, the president of the company expressed himself as bitterly disappointed by the results of his many kindnesses, and evidently considered the employees utterly unappreciative. His state of mind was the result of the fallacy of ministering to social needs from an individual impulse and expecting a socialized return of gratitude and loyalty. If the lunch-room was necessary, it was a necessity in order that the employees might have better food, and, when they had received the better ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... the position of a power on earth will come to you by itself; but oh! do not trust to this fallacy; a position never comes by itself; it must be taken, and taken it never will be ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... a wonderful illustration of the popular fallacy in woodcraft that moss is always found on the north side of the trees. Here the moss is mainly on the west. The fact is the moss is generally found on the side from which the rain-storms come, and here they are mainly from ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... consists in the remarkably early age at which girls begin to be reasonable! After expressing such a high opinion of you, I hope you will all prove me right, by seeing the truth that underlies the theory I am putting before you, which I am sure you will all be inclined to reckon as a fallacy! ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... 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. Lightfoot ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... for long years and might have borne it many more under the assurance of our Northern friends that such fanaticism does not represent the true heart of the Northern people. But the fallacy of these promises and the folly of our hopes have been too clearly proven in the late election. The platform of the political party on which you have swept every Northern State and elected a sectional President is a foul libel upon our character and a declaration of open ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... 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 |
