Page:System of Logic.djvu/527

 practical cautions, respecting the forms in which such unwarranted assumptions are most likely to be made.

§ 2. In the cases in which, according to the thinkers of the ontological school, the mind apprehends, by intuition, things, and the laws of things, not cognizable by our sensitive faculty; those intuitive, or supposed intuitive, perceptions are undistinguishable from what the opposite school are accustomed to call ideas of the mind. When they themselves say that they perceive the things by an immediate act of a faculty given for that purpose by their Creator, it would be said of them by their opponents that they find an idea or conception in their own minds, and from the idea or conception, infer the existence of a corresponding objective reality. Nor would this be an unfair statement, but a mere version into other words of the account given by many of themselves; and one to which the more clear-sighted of them might, and generally do, without hesitation, subscribe. Since, therefore, in the cases which lay the strongest claims to be examples of knowledge a priori, the mind proceeds from the idea of a thing to the reality of the thing itself, we can not be surprised by finding that illicit assumptions a priori consist in doing the same thing erroneously; in mistaking subjective facts for objective, laws of the percipient mind for laws of the perceived object, properties of the ideas or conceptions for properties of the things conceived.

Accordingly, a large proportion of the erroneous thinking which exists in the world proceeds on a tacit assumption, that the same order must obtain among the objects in nature which obtains among our ideas of them. That if we always think of two things together, the two things must always exist together. That if one thing makes us think of another as preceding or following it, that other must precede it or follow it in actual fact. And conversely, that when we can not conceive two things together they can not exist together, and that their combination may, without further evidence, be rejected from the list of possible occurrences.

Few persons, I am inclined to think, have reflected on the great extent to which this fallacy has prevailed, and prevails, in the actual beliefs and actions of mankind. For a first illustration of it we may refer to a large class of popular superstitions. If any one will examine in what circumstances most of those things agree, which in different ages and by different portions of the human race have been considered as omens or prognostics of some interesting event, whether calamitous or fortunate; they will be found very generally characterized by this peculiarity, that they cause the mind to think of that, of which they are therefore supposed to forbode the actual occurrence. "Talk of the devil and he will appear," has passed into a proverb. Talk of the devil, that is, raise the idea, and the reality will follow. In times when the appearance of that personage in a visible form was thought to be no unfrequent occurrence, it has doubtless often happened to persons of vivid imagination and susceptible nerves, that talking of the devil has caused them to fancy they saw him; as even in our more incredulous days, listening to ghost stories predisposes us to see ghosts; and thus, as a prop to the _a priori_ fallacy, there might come to be added an auxiliary fallacy of malobservation, with one of false generalization grounded on it. Fallacies of different orders often herd or cluster together in this fashion, one smoothing the way for another. But the origin of the superstition is evidently that which we have assigned. In like manner, it has been universally considered unlucky to speak of misfortune.