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Updated: May 24, 2025
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.
I understand him to mean that if we admit instinctive action, and the modifications of that action which more nearly resemble results of reason, to be actions of the same ultimate kind differing in degree only, and if we thus attempt to reduce instinctive action to the prophetic strain arising from old experience, we shall be obliged to admit that the formation of the embryo is ultimately due to reflection which he seems to think is a reductio ad absurdum of the argument.
The Council sat during the very months of the short "cold weather," when it is customary and alone practicable for heads of departments to undertake their annual tours of inspection. The reductio ad absurdum is surely reached in the case of the Commander-in-Chief and the Chief of the Staff.
I'm calling his attention to the now prevailing sun-spots, as bearing on Lattimore property." Mr. Elkins read the letter carefully, turned it over, and read it again. "Don't," said he; "he may be one of those asses who fail to see the business value of the reductio ad absurdum.... Fellows, we must push this L. & G. W. business with Pendleton. Some of us ought to be down there now."
By other routes, and upon far less fanciful principles, modern philosophy has at last come to the same melancholy conclusion. The doctrines of Parmenides were carried out by Zeno the Eleatic, who is said to have been his adopted son. He brought into use the method of refuting error by the reductio ad absurdum. His compositions were in prose, and not in poetry, as were those of his predecessors.
He praised certain portions very highly, but averred that these were exceptional, and concluded with what seems to be a "reductio ad absurdum," namely, that Longfellow's poem of "The Bridge" or Whittier's "School Days" was worth the whole body of Emerson's verse.
The constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing could be more happily imagined, as a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of the aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a great country.
In like manner, caste is speedily passing through its very excesses to a reductio ad absurdum; its spirit is so rampant, and its gross evils are becoming so intolerable, that even the patient inhabitants of India will soon cease to endure the ruin which this monster of their own creation carries on among them.
Since the argument in question proves so much, if it proves anything, we need not wonder that it was employed by Cicero and other ancient Stoics to establish the doctrine of an absolute and unconditional fate. “If the will is free,” says he, “then fate does not rule everything, then the order of all causes is not certain, and the order of things is no longer certain in the prescience of God; if the order of things is not certain in the prescience of God, then things will not take place as he foresees them; and if things do not take place as he foresees, there is no foreknowledge in God.” Thus, by a reductio ad absurdum, he establishes the position that the will is not free, but fate rules all things.
To say that organisms possess this innate power, and that by it new species are from time to time produced, is by no means a mere assertion that they are produced, and in an unknown mode. It is the negation of that view which deems external forces alone sufficient, and at the same time the assertion of something positive, to be arrived at by the process of reductio ad absurdum.
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