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In the ordinary way of business he went to the Lord Mayor, complained of our blasphemy and his own lacerated feelings, and applied for a summons against us as a first step towards punishing us for our sins. What a reductio ad absurdum of the Blasphemy Laws!
Starting from a hypothesis, namely the contradictory of what we desire to prove, we use the same process of analysis, carrying it back until we arrive at something admittedly false or absurd. Aristotle describes this method in various ways as reductio ad absurdum, proof per impossibile, or proof leading to the impossible. But here again, though the term was new, the method was not.
This must be obvious; for, if you say that the passage in vacuo of this cannon-ball, now held in my hand, would describe otherwise than a series of right lines, etc., then you are brought to the Reductio ad Absurdum, that the diagonals of parallelograms are " "All hands reef top-sail!" was now thundered forth by the boatswain's mates.
But let us first pass in review the general style of argumentation of that philosophy. As I read it, its favorite way of meeting pluralism and empiricism is by a reductio ad absurdum framed somewhat as follows: You contend, it says to the pluralist, that things, though in some respects connected, are in other respects independent, so that they are not members of one all-inclusive individual fact.
To choose such adventures for subjects and then deliberately to make no use of them and concentrate all attention on style and atmosphere, is really a tour de force, the crowning glory and the reductio ad absurdum of this imperfective tendency. These extremities, which are largely conditioned by the whole past of Russian Literature, must naturally lead to a reaction.
Well, your position is absurd on either point. Admit, on the other hand, the most incipient minimum of relation between any two things, and again you can't stop until you see that the absolute unity of all things is implied. If we take the latter reductio ad absurdum first, we find a good example of it in Lotze's well-known proof of monism from the fact of interaction between finite things.
The horse's legs are said to be beautiful because they are fit to run, the eye because it is made to see, the house because it is convenient to live in. An amusing application which might pass for a reductio ad absurdum, of this dense theory is put by Xenophon into the mouth of Socrates.
Supposing, however, for the sake of a reductio ad absurdum, that the full boiler pressure had been maintained upon the pistons for the whole length of their strokes, the adhesion of the coupled driving wheels, not deducting the internal resistances of the engine, would have been 15028/40050 3/8 of the weight upon them.
In the meantime, you had better go back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave me to correct my proofs. CYRIL. Writing an article! That is not very consistent after what you have just said. VIVIAN. Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice.
It hands over the discussion of all important topics to pedants and blockheads, and bans the argumentum ad absurdum which has been employed by all the great satirists from Aristophanes to Voltaire.
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