minor and conclusion, e.g.: (1) What you liked yesterday you like to-day, you liked this (fresh) bread yesterday, therefore you like this same (stale) bread to-day'; (2) 'I admire A.B. and C.D.; A.B. and C.D. are tall women; therefore I admire tall women' (as such); (3) Strychnine is a magnificent remedy (for certain diseases and in certain doses), A. B. needs a remedy, therefore he should take strychnine'.*

Direct or converse fallacies of accident of the first class are comparatively rare and trivial. Those in the two other classes (which are not always easily distinguished from each other) can be avoided by insisting upon accurate statements or explanations if the speaker is present and willing to make them; but when authoritative interpreters are not at hand they may cause interminable discussions and disputes. Everybody admits, for example, that lying is wrong; but does that mean that every act that involves a lie is wrong, or only that lies as such are wrong, and acts that involve a lie are wrong provided that there is no other and more important moral consideration involved? If we interpret the law in the first sense it is wrong to lie to a madman or a murderer to save the life of a child; if in the second it is right, provided that the obligation to save an innocent life is greater than the obligation to always refrain from lying, and that to tell a lie is the only available way of saving it. Human relations are so complex that we can only discuss one aspect of them at a time; and it may very well be that some moral laws at least have reference not to acts as a whole but to aspects of them, and that in interpreting such laws one aspect must be balanced against another and the one indissoluble concrete act judged by the most important moral consideration involved.

The interpretation of moral laws is a question of ethics, but

*The article 'a' lends itself easily to this kind of confusion. 'I admire a tall woman may mean that I admire some individual woman who happens to be tall or that I admire tallness in women. It is this confusion that gives point to the time-honored conundrum, 'What makes more noise than a pig under a gate?'

'Two pigs.'

L

if we accept a law in one sense and then apply it in the other we commit the logical fallacy of accident.

The fallacy of Accent' is essentially a fallacy of interpretation. It consists in misinterpreting an author (1) by unduly accenting some particular word in a sentence,

6

Accent. e.g., 'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor', or Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor'; or (2) by taking passages out of their immediate context, e.g., proving that Dr. Watts believed in dog-fights because he said "Let dogs delight to bark and bite", or proving future punishment by John xv. 6: "And men gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned", or by Matt. xxii. 13: "Cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth"; or (3) by appealing to some particular passage, even a long one, though it may be contrary to the whole spirit of the author quoted. This is a form of the fallacy of which the members of any Christian sect might very well accuse the members of all the others. The controversy as to the whole spirit of the gospels which such an accusation would raise would be much more profitable than any amount of quibbling over a few proof texts.

A remarkably clear exposition of this fallacy is given in the preface to Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Dogma", from which I quote a few sentences. It is of course his account of the fallacy in which we are interested, not his views on the Bible.

"The homo unius libri, the man of no range in his reading, must almost inevitably misunderstand the Bible, cannot treat it largely enough, must be inclined to treat it all alike, and to press every word. . . . He has not enough experience of the way in which men have thought and spoken, to feel what

...

* Jevons quotes the passage from the to his sons, saying, Saddle me the ass.

Book of Kings, 'And he spake And they saddled him'. But

this is surely a case of amphibology. The accent on the word 'him' changes the meaning of the passage only because it changes the antecedent to which the pronoun refers.

the Bible-writers are about; to read between the lines, to discern where he ought to rest with his whole weight, and where he ought to pass lightly. . . . And thus we come back to our old remedy of culture,-knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world; which turns out to be in another shape, and in particular relation to the Bible: getting the power, through reading, to estimate the proportion and relation in what we read. If we read but a very little, we naturally want to press it all; if we read a great deal, we are willing not to press the whole of what we read, and we learn what ought to be pressed and what not. Now this is really the very foundation of any sane criticism. such a scale, and progress is so gradual, and what one man can do is so bounded, that the moment we press the whole of what any writer says, we fall into error. He touches a great deal the thing to know is where he is all himself and his best self, where he shows his power, where he goes to the heart of the matter, where he gives us what no other man gives us or gives us so well.''

. . Things are on

...

The danger of this fallacy of accent is well recognized by jurists, and by their rules of evidence they try to guard against it. "I have always', said Lord Tenterden, acted most strictly on the rule, that what is in writing shall only be proved by the writing itself. My experience has taught me the extreme danger of relying on the recollection of witnesses, however honest, as to the contents of written instruments; they may be so easily mistaken that I think the purposes of justice require the strict enforcement of the rule'". This is one reason. But then Tenterden goes on to say: "By applying the rule to such cases the Court acquires a knowledge of the whole contents of the instrument, which may have a different effect from the statement of a part.'

So with confessions and other statements against the interest of the person who makes them. The law gives them * Greenleaf, "Law of Evidence", Vol. I, Sec. 88.

great weight, but it also insists that they shall not be garbled. "In the proof of confessions, as in the case of admissions in civil cases, the whole of what the person said on the subject at the time of making the confession should be taken together. . . It is not reasonable to assume that the entire proposition, with all its limitations, was contained in one sentence. . . . Unless the whole is received and considered. the true meaning and import of the part which is good evidence against him cannot be ascertained. "'*

.

On the same principle it is a rule of evidence that if a witness tells about a part of any conversation the lawyer who cross-examines him has a right to ask about any other part of the same conversation.

The difference between the fallacy of Accent and the fallacy of Accident in the broader sense of each is this: the former misinterprets a writer by confusing incidental statements with essential; the latter confuses aspects of things or situations (or statements about such aspects) with the things or situations (or statements about them) as a whole. †

* Greenleaf, op. cit., Sec. 218.

Whether we should call the over-emphasizing of some one aspect of the moral code accent or accident would thus depend upon whether we regarded the law as a revelation each part of which should be interpreted with reference to the whole, or as an analysis of conduct into various good and bad aspects, several of which may be combined in the complex whole. An aspect of a law taken for the whole law is accent; an aspect of an act taken for the whole act is accident.

CHAPTER IV.

DIVISION AND CLASSIFICATION.

To avoid confusion in the use of names we must define them; but all definition of names involves a classification of objects. If the words'animal', 'red', 'verte- Relation to brate' have any definite meaning at all there definition. must be some things to which they can be properly applied and some things to which they cannot, and the things to which any one of them can be applied must all have the qualities or relations which the name implies, and therefore resemble each other in this respect, while the things to which it cannot be properly applied must all resemble each other in not having these qualities or relations. Hence every time we use a name we imply the existence of two classes of things those that have the quality or relation which the name implies and those that have not. To define a name is to distinguish between these two classes, and the more clearly we understand this difference between the things the more clearly we can define the word. Hence we shall stop speaking about words for a little and speak about the principles of Division or Classification. At the end of the chapter we shall return to the discussion of words and their interpretation.

Principles of division

When we have made two classes to one or other of which every object in the world can be assigned according as it has or has not some given quality or relation, each of these classes can be subdivided subdivision. with reference to some other quality or relation; and this

and