Page:Educational Review Volume 23.djvu/50

 may belong to the class to which Huxley refers when he speaks of “the downright lying of people whose word it is impossible to doubt”; he may be more or less consciously or subconsciously misled by his imagination; he may be hopelessly deficient in his powers of observation, or in his knowledge of fact, or in his capacity to handle evidence and argument; and none of these ethical or logical shortcomings seems to interfere at all in certain persons with their powers of holding and publishing opinions on all manners of subjects—even on those on which no human soul has the possibility of possessing knowledge. To Clifford’s dual conditions of logical responsibility must be added another pair; namely the distinction as to how far the issue involved is a matter of fact or of the interpretation of fact. Both facts and their interpretation, or arguments, appear as prominently on the side of error as of truth; yet, tho not reducible to anthropometric measurements, the physiognomies of the two are recognizably different to the trained observer.

It seems ludicrously easy to collect facts of any desired quality and to point them in any desired direction. Dr. Holmes effectively describes these abuses: “Foremost of all, emblazoned at the head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant disputant, held up as paramount to all other considerations, stretched like an impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent monosyllable which has been the patrimony of cheats and the currency of dupes from time immemorial,—Facts! Facts! Facts!” Yet in the crucible of logic it is possible to separate the dross from the gold. The arguments employed have a like suspicious appearance: they “have been so long bruised and battered round in the cause of every doctrine and pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less reputable classes, to the officers of police.” The former type of credulity—the rash acceptance of facts—is the more simple and the more usually considered; the latter type—the rash