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This mode of reasoning, by which a bad generalization is made to overrule all facts which contradict it, is Petitio Principii in one of its most palpable forms. None of the modes of assuming what should be proved are in more frequent use than what are termed by Bentham “question-begging appellatives;” names which beg the question under the disguise of stating it.
'Question-begging appellatives, particularly, are cases of Petitio Principii, e.g. the styling any reform an innovation, which it really is, only that innovation conveys, besides its dictionary meaning, a covert sense of something extreme.
But is this assumption warranted? If, then, the processes which bring these cases within the same category with the rest, require that we should assume the universality of the very law which they do not at first sight appear to exemplify, is not this a petitio principii? Can we prove a proposition, by an argument which takes it for granted? And if not so proved, on what evidence does it rest?
Petitio Principii, as defined by Archbishop Whately, is the fallacy “in which the premise either appears manifestly to be the same as the conclusion, or is actually proved from the conclusion, or is such as would naturally and properly so be proved.” By the last clause I presume is meant, that it is not susceptible of any other proof; for otherwise, there would be no fallacy.
The canon law itself commendeth this form and saith, Electio clericorum est petitio plebis. And was he not a popish archbishop who condescended that the city of Magedeburg should have jus vocandi ac constituendi ecclesiae ministros? Neither would the city accept of peace without this condition.
As for hell, we are in a burning fiery furnace all our lives for what is life but a process of combustion? Life i We have got into life by stealth and petitio principii, by the free use of that contradiction in terms which we declare to be the most outrageous violation of our reason.
The only counterbalancing danger is, that general inferences from insufficient premisses may become hardened into general maxims, and escape being confronted with the particulars. The major premiss is not really part of the argument. Brown saw that there would be a petitio principii if it were.
By a comprisal of the petitio principii with the argumentum in circulo,—in plain English, by an easy logic, which begins with begging the question, and then moving in a circle, comes round to the point where it began,—each of the two divisions has been made to define the other by a mere reassertion of their assumed contrariety.
Oh those hates and passions! They are the dialectical balls with which Mr. Brown goes through his performance in that circle of petitio principii so hated by all logicians, the middle sphere of intellects too light for the solid earth of fact and too gross for the aerial heaven of imagination. It will be a fitting conclusion to present to Mr. Brown a very serious matter which he has overlooked.
To speak of an uncoördinated diversity to which order is superadded is therefore to commit a veritable petitio principii; for in imagining the uncoördinated we really posit an order, or rather two. This long analysis was necessary to show how the real can pass from tension to extension and from freedom to mechanical necessity by way of inversion.
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