United States or United States Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But in opposition to this reasoning, it is asserted, that it is a necessary power, because the states might omit making rules for the purpose, and thereby defeat the existence of that branch of the government; this is what logicians call argumentum absurdum; for the different states, if they will have any security at all in this government, will find it in the house of representatives, and they, therefore, would be very ready to eradicate a principle in which it dwells, or involve their country in an instantaneous revolution.
"and he was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible!" and his sublime credo quia absurdum! the scandal of the rationalists. How far from the il faut s'abêtir of Pascal and from the "human reason loves the absurd" of our Donoso Cortés, which he must have learned from the great Joseph de Maistre!
But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as essentially a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of life, he was fully conscious of the fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of force beyond which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude of the mind which is, from the first, continually influenced by habits, education and circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good and the bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the one is morally unable to sin, the other physically incapacitated for reformation.
It is, at best, speculation run mad, and is based on no other assumption than that of the inherent imperfectibility of the universe as it came from the hand of God, or from the dynamic play of molecules extending throughout vast geognostic epochs. From a materialistic stand-point this assumption of imperfectibility inevitably runs into the reductio ad absurdum.
Zeno of Elea, the friend and pupil of Parmenides, born B.C. 500, brought nothing new to the system, but invented Dialectics, that logic which afterwards became so powerful in the hands of Plato and Aristotle, and so generally admired among the schoolmen. It seeks to establish truth by refuting error by the reductio ad absurdum.
He was a voluminous writer, and among his best known works are his treatises on Logic and Rhetoric , his Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte , intended as a reductio ad absurdum of Hume's contention that no evidence is sufficient to prove a miracle, Essays on some Peculiarities of the Christian Religion , Christian Evidences , and ed. of Bacon's Essays with valuable notes, and of Paley's Evidences.
His pictures look like a visible reductio ad absurdum of it all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting in modern war; and, being men, they ought not to look so. That, at least, is the effect the pictures produce on us. They are a bitter satire on all the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it.
We have but one way of thinking derived from what we know, and we incontinently apply it to things of which we can know nothing, and then we quarrel with the result, which is a mere reductio ad absurdum, showing how utterly false and meagre are our hypotheses, premisses, and so-called axioms.
But the recent discoveries in Fossil Osteology have proved that the earth, for ages before the last 5,000 or 6,000 years, was left to the lower animals; nay, that in a still earlier period of its existence no animal life at all was maintained upon its surface. So that, in fact, the foundation is removed of the reductio ad absurdum attempted by the learned prelates.
When the reason alleged for ranking the symphony above the oratorio leads us likewise to rank the sonata above the symphony, we seem to have reached a reductio ad absurdum. Now within two years, Mr. Paine's C-minor symphony has followed the completion of his oratorio. These peculiar associations are no doubt what is chiefly enjoyed in music, antecedent to a properly musical culture.
Word Of The Day