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The uniformity of nature, in the above sense, although it is assumed in the practice of science, must not, in its generality, be regarded as a kind of major premiss, without which all scientific reasoning would be in error.
It will be enough to make a point of putting every argument into logical form; in the case of bad reasoning the major premiss is generally monstrous to an appalling degree. If the reasoning leaves the least doubt, no attempt must be made to draw a conclusion; the point treated must be left in the conjectural stage, clearly distinguished from the definitively established results.
Truly 'the whirligig of Time brings round its revenges. To this point the reason of civilised nations has come, or at least is coming fast, after some fifteen hundred years of unreason, and of a literature of unreason, which discoursed gravely and learnedly of nuns and witches, hysteria and madness, persecution and torture, and, like a madman in his dreams, built up by irrefragable logic a whole inverted pyramid of seeming truth upon a single false premiss.
Supposing God to possess perfect holiness, he would certainly prevent all moral evil, says the atheist, unless his power were limited. This inference is drawn from a false premiss; namely, that if God is omnipotent, he could easily prevent moral evil, and cause virtue to exist without any mixture of vice.
It needed the horrors of this latest development of the principle of slavery, the horrors of the middle passage, of whole regions of Africa decimated to supply the slave market, of mothers torn from their children, or, worse still, compelled to bear them to their slave masters, only to see them in their turn sold to some far-off station; of the degradation of men and women brought up in heathen ignorance lest they should use their knowledge to rebel it needed all this weight of evil and disaster at last to rouse the conscience of Europe to recognize that slavery was wrong in itself and to cast out the evil premiss on which it rested.
All that is worth while saying on these points is that the suffragist is here manufacturing grievances for herself, first, by reasoning from the false premiss that every legal distinction which happens to press hardly upon a few individuals ought for that to be abrogated; and, secondly, by steady leaving out of sight that logical inconsistencies can, for the more part, be got rid of only at the price of bringing others into being.
He, therefore, contended that the conclusion in reasoning follows from the minor premiss alone, thus suppressing the appeal to experience. He argued, that to reason is merely to analyse our general notions or abstract ideas, and that, provided that the relation between the two ideas, e.g. of man and of mortal, has been first perceived, we can evolve the one directly from the other.
But in the way of such an attempt comes the prompt objection that the Articles were actually drawn up against "Popery," and therefore it was transcendently absurd and dishonest to suppose that Popery, in any shape, patristic belief, Tridentine dogma, or popular corruption authoritatively sanctioned, would be able to take refuge under their text. This premiss I denied.
Obviousness is always the enemy to correctness. Hence we invent some new and difficult symbolism, in which nothing seems obvious. Then we set up certain rules for operating on the symbols, and the whole thing becomes mechanical. In this way we find out what must be taken as premiss and what can be demonstrated or defined.
But in the way of such an attempt comes the prompt objection that the Articles were actually drawn up against "Popery," and therefore it was transcendently absurd and dishonest to suppose that Popery, in any shape patristic belief, Tridentine dogma, or popular corruption authoritatively sanctioned would be able to take refuge under their text. This premiss I denied.
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