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Since I myself have been an inmate of a lunatic asylum, I cannot but notice that the sophistic tendencies of some of its inmates lean towards the errors of non causa and ignoratio elenche." I positively opened my eyes at this new development.
and he then concludes that 'Irrationality and externality cannot be the last truth about things. Somewhere there must be a reason why this and that appear together. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoratio elenchi? It is impossible to admit it to be such.
The favorite argument against Berkeley’s theory of the non-existence of matter, and the most popularly effective, next to a “grin” —an argument, moreover, which is not confined to “coxcombs,” nor to men like Samuel Johnson, whose greatly overrated ability certainly did not lie in the direction of metaphysical speculation, but is the stock argument of the Scotch school of metaphysicians—is a palpable Ignoratio Elenchi.
Thus the second mode employed by speculative reason of demonstrating the existence of a Supreme Being, is not only, like the first, illusory and inadequate, but possesses the additional blemish of an ignoratio elenchi professing to conduct us by a new road to the desired goal, but bringing us back, after a short circuit, to the old path which we had deserted at its call.
To deny or ridicule any of these beliefs on physical grounds is to commit the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi. It is to commit an absurdity analogous to that of saying a blind child could not recognize his father because he could not see him, forgetting that he could hear and feel him.
A man of sense syllogises in celarent and cesare all day long without suspecting it; and, though he may not know what an ignoratio elenchi is, has no difficulty in exposing it whenever he falls in with it; which is likely to be as often as he falls in with a Reverend Master of Arts nourished on mode and figure in the cloisters of Oxford.
He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what being good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor the restrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice, which keep them from doing ill. Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis.
The learned term the rhetorical device an ignoratio elenchi. My young friend's patriotism rose in furious defence of his countrywomen's beauty. I looked round the luxuriously furnished vestibule, wondering from which of the many doors the object of my hatred would emerge, and my young friend's talk continued to ruffle the fringe of my mind.
The works of controversial writers are seldom free from this fallacy. The attempts, for instance, to disprove the population doctrines of Malthus, have been mostly cases of ignoratio elenchi.
"It will make me simply ill I could never describe to you," said Miriam, with her face aglow, "what it is to me to hear some silly man drone away with an undistributed middle term." "They're not all like that." "Oh, well, then it will be ignoratio elenchi or argumentum ad hominem " "Oh, yes, but they're not the service." "The service I can't make head or tail of think of the Athanasian." "Yes."
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