Page:System of Logic.djvu/551

 in hiring spinners and weavers, or carriers and the crews of merchant vessels, not only gives immediate employment to at least as much industry as A employs during the whole of his career, but coming back with increase by the sale of the goods which have been manufactured or imported, forms a fund for the employment of the same and perhaps a greater quantity of labor in perpetuity. But the observer does not see, and therefore does not consider, what becomes of B's money; he does see what is done with A's; he observes the amount of industry which A's profusion feeds; he observes not the far greater quantity which it prevents from being fed; and thence the prejudice, universal to the time of Adam Smith, that prodigality encourages industry, and parsimony is a discouragement to it.

The common argument against free trade was a fallacy of the same nature. The purchaser of British silk encourages British industry; the purchaser of Lyons silk encourages only French; the former conduct is patriotic, the latter ought to be prevented by law. The circumstance is overlooked, that the purchaser of any foreign commodity necessarily causes, directly or indirectly, the export of an equivalent value of some article of home production (beyond what would otherwise be exported), either to the same foreign country or to some other; which fact, though from the complication of the circumstances it can not always be verified by specific observation, no observation can possibly be brought to contradict, while the evidence of reasoning on which it rests is irrefragable. The fallacy is, therefore, the same as in the preceding case, that of seeing a part only of the phenomena, and imagining that part to be the whole; and may be ranked among Fallacies of Non-observation.

§ 5. To complete the examination of the second of our five classes, we have now to speak of Mal-observation; in which the error does not lie in the fact that something is unseen, but that something seen is seen wrong.

Perception being infallible evidence of whatever is really perceived, the error now under consideration can be committed no otherwise than by mistaking for conception what is, in fact, inference. We have formerly shown how intimately the two are blended in almost every thing which is called observation, and still more in every Description.(255) What is actually on any occasion perceived by our senses being so minute in amount, and generally so unimportant a portion of the state of facts which we wish to ascertain or to communicate; it would be absurd to say that either in our observations, or in conveying their result to others, we ought not to mingle inference with fact; all that can be said is, that when we do so we ought to be aware of what we are doing, and to know what part of the assertion rests on consciousness, and is therefore indisputable, what part on inference, and is therefore questionable.

One of the most celebrated examples of a universal error produced by mistaking an inference for the direct evidence of the senses, was the resistance made, on the ground of common sense, to the Copernican system. People fancied they saw the sun rise and set, the stars revolve in circles round the pole. We now know that they saw no such thing; what they really saw was a set of appearances, equally reconcilable with the theory they held and with a totally different one. It seems strange that such an instance as this of the testimony of the senses pleaded with the most entire conviction in favor of something which was a mere inference of the