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This is the major premiss, divested of the petitio principii, and cut down to as much as is really known by direct evidence.
These considerations are not designed to imply that in the relations between States the code of individual ethics is necessarily annulled; but to suggest that the laws which regulate the actions or the suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily been assumed to be, by nature and the ground-plan of the universe, identical with the laws of individual life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is something of a petitio principii, in the present stage of our knowledge, to judge the one by the standards applicable only to the other.
This is perhaps to the advantage of both natural science and religion: to the advantage of religion because it can with difficulty co-exist with the universal dominance of the mathematical way of looking at things; to the advantage of natural science because, in giving up the one-sidedness of the purely quantitative outlook, it does not give up its “foundations,” its “right to exist,” but only a petitio principii and a prejudice that compelled it to exploit nature rather than to explain it, and to prescribe its ways rather than to seek them out.
We must show, moreover, the misconceptions and illusions that intrude into syllogisms, the major proposition of which pure reason has supplied a proposition which has perhaps more of the character of a petitio than of a postulatum and that proceed from experience upwards to its conditions.
But if it be answered, "Aye! but we must not interpret St. Paul as we may and should interpret any other honest and intelligent writer or speaker," then, I say, this is the very petitio principii of which I complain. Still less do the words of our Lord apply against my view.
It is needless to remark that this whole argument, whatever may be said of the former one, is a pure fallacy, and a petitio principii throughout. The Cartesian form of it is the most glaringly fallacious, and indeed exposes itself; for by that reasoning we might prove the existence of a fiery dragon or any other phantom of the brain. But even King's more concealed sophism is equally absurd.
Thus it is manifest that the title, Palæozoic, as applied to the earliest known fossiliferous strata, involves a petitio principii; and that, for aught we know to the contrary, only the last few chapters of the Earth's biological history may have come down to us. On neither side, therefore, is the evidence conclusive.
History, which attests it, is the voice of every generation, checked and countersigned in effect by all the men who compose it. This is the last 'moment, to use the language of Mechanics, which we shall notice in this discussion. And here there is a remarkable petitio principii in Hume's management of his argument.
The assumption that each series is complete without a break, and that an all-including analysis of vital processes in terms of mechanical processes must ultimately be possible, is a petitio principii, and breaks down before the objections raised by the vitalists. The most central problem in the whole matter, namely, the relation of the causal to the teleological, has not been touched.
These definitions must commend themselves as true, either by their own self-evidencing light, or by their manifest conformity with experience, before they can be assumed and founded on in any process of reasoning; and we are very sure that those which have been specified cannot be candidly examined without appearing to be, as they really are, the grossest instances of a petitio principii that have ever been offered to the world.
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