United States or Montserrat ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To complete the examination of the second of our five classes, we have now to speak of Mal-observation; in which the error does not lie in the fact that something is unseen, but that something seen is seen wrong.
This was why the rapidly spent capital of the prodigal was supposed formerly to employ more labour than the invested savings of the parsimonious, and the purchase of native goods to encourage native industry more than the purchase of foreign. The error in Mal-observation, which is the positive kind of Mis-observation, is not the overlooking facts, but the seeing them wrong.
We feel our labours cannot be in vain, but we are faced by such a complexity of fraud, deliberate and unconscious, mal-observation, denial of scientific restrictions, and ignorance of what is trustworthy in evidence and deduction, that at times our search for truth seems as futile as the search of past alchemists for the philosopher's stone."
The others were declared not to exist, or to be the result of imposture and mal-observation, and perhaps they were. Whether Home's incredulity should be reckoned as a proof of his belief in his own powers, might be argued either way. Evolutionary Theory of the Origin of Religion. Facts misunderstood suggest ghosts, which develop into gods. This process lies behind history and experience.
It must be remembered that, in the days of witchcraft, virtually nothing was known of hysteria, epilepsy, the varied forms of insanity, hallucination, hypnotism, or of the possibilities of mal-observation and lapse of memory: while such a matter as first-hand circumstantial evidence seems to have been lost to sight entirely.
And as Proof, in its widest extent, embraces one or more, or all, of three processes, Observation, Generalization, and Deduction, we shall consider in their order the errors capable of being committed in these three operations. And first, of the first mentioned. A fallacy of misobservation may be either negative or positive; either Non-observation or Mal-observation.
No one would be more willing than I to admit their fallibility and untrustworthiness especially when we are dealing with conditions and phenomena where mal-observation is possible; but I do not think that any negative conclusion can be drawn from this.
It is non-observation, when all the error consists in overlooking, or neglecting, facts or particulars which ought to have been observed. It is mal-observation, when something is not simply unseen, but seen wrong; when the fact or phenomenon, instead of being recognized for what it is in reality, is mistaken for something else.
But they also know that a man is not a bird to be in two places at once, like Pythagoras, and that nobody can see through a stone wall. These, and similar allegations, they reckon impossible, and, if the facts happen, so much the worse for the facts. They can only be due to imposture or mal-observation, and there is an end of the matter. This is the view of official science.
Ten years after Mesmer left Paris Alexandre Bertrand pointed out that after the elimination of errors due to fraud or mal-observation, the results which Mesmer and his associates had produced were due not to animal magnetism, but to expectation induced by suggestion and intensified by the peculiar setting which Mesmer had contrived for his so-called treatments.
Word Of The Day