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Updated: June 18, 2025
Clear thinkers recognized its untenableness long ago, and surely Grottewitz and the whole band of Darwinian devotees as well, could have known that as early as twenty-five years ago this doctrine had been subjected to a reductio ad absurdum with classic clearness in Wigand's great work.
They ended in an application of the method of a reductio ad absurdum to everything; and this fact I finally indicated in the words of a Greek epigram which I placed as a motto on the title-page: "All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for all the things that are arise out of the unreasonable."
We remember that he intended in his philosophy to carry ad absurdum the hypothesis that 'the images of the external objects are conveyed by the organs of sense to the brain and are there perceived by the mind'. Common Sense makes Reid speak as follows: 'If any man will shew how the mind may perceive images of the brain, I will undertake to shew how it may perceive the most distant objects; for if we give eyes to the mind, to perceive what is transacted at home in its dark chamber, why may we not make the eyes a little longer-sighted?
The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May Sinclair's novel, The Divine Fire, who is irresistibly impelled to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only a reductio ad absurdum of a rather popular theory.
"Now, papa thinks we have been foolish," said Marianne, "and he has his own way of making a good story of it; but, after all, I desire to know if people are never to get a new carpet. Must we keep the old one till it actually wears to tatters?" This is a specimen of the reductio ad absurdum which our fair antagonists of the other sex are fond of employing.
This was the result! It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, a reductio ad absurdum of the claims of any church to superintend the education of a people; and if it be insisted that there is anything exceptional in Italy, one may point for examples of the same results to Spain, the Spanish republics, Poland, and sundry other countries.
Of course the consistent determinist would evade this reductio ad absurdum by saying that he is as much necessitated in blaming his opponent for holding wrong views as the opponent is for refusing to give them up. He might also tell me that I am arguing for free will in an obscurantist fashion by admitting at the outset that in strict logic I can find no place for it.
Here we find two opposing propositions the thesis that the universe occupies only a finite space and is of finite duration; the antithesis that it is infinite both as regards extent in space and duration in time. Both of these opposing propositions are shown to admit of demonstration with equal force, not directly, but by the methods of reductio ad absurdum.
You remember my fad for mathematics? I have followed it up, and I find your theory a 'reductio ad absurdum. I must have everything demonstrable and clear. This is neither." "Yet it was a great mathematician who said, 'Omit eternity in your estimate of area and your solution is wrong." Reginald shook his head. "I have nothing to do with this faith business. I go as far as I see, no further."
It is wonderful to think that she might have been the mother of that other Mary so different yet still more sadly fated, who in that case never could have been the Mary Stewart she was. We are led to something like a reductio ad absurdum by such speculations, very vain yet always attractive as they are.
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