Page:System of Logic.djvu/568

 this belongs. The premise is, that the owner of tithed land receives less rent than the owner of tithe-free land; the conclusion is, that therefore he receives less than he himself would receive if tithe were abolished. But the premise is only true conditionally; the owner of tithed land receives less than what the owner of tithe-free land is enabled to receive _when other lands are tithed_; while the conclusion is applied to a state of circumstances in which that condition fails, and in which, by consequence, the premise will not be true. The fallacy, therefore, is _à dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter_.

A third example is the opposition sometimes made to legitimate interferences of government in the economical affairs of society, grounded on a misapplication of the maxim, that an individual is a better judge than the government of what is for his own pecuniary interest. This objection was urged to Mr. Wakefield's principle of colonization; the concentration of the settlers, by fixing such a price on unoccupied land as may preserve the most desirable proportion between the quantity of land in culture and the laboring population. Against this it was argued, that if individuals found it for their advantage to occupy extensive tracts of land, they, being better judges of their own interest than the legislature (which can only proceed on general rules), ought not to be restrained from doing so. But in this argument it was forgotten that the fact of a person's taking a large tract of land is evidence only that it is his interest to take as much as other people, but not that it might not be for his interest to content himself with less, if he could be assured that other people would do so too; an assurance which nothing but a government regulation can give. If all other people took much, and he only a little, he would reap none of the advantages derived from the concentration of the population and the consequent possibility of procuring labor for hire, but would have placed himself, without equivalent, in a situation of voluntary inferiority. The proposition, therefore, that the quantity of land which people will take when left to themselves is that which is most for their interest to take, is true only secundum quid: it is only their interest while they have no guarantee for the conduct of one another. But the arrangement disregards the limitation, and takes the proposition for true simpliciter.

One of the conditions oftenest dropped, when what would otherwise be a true proposition is employed as a premise for proving others, is the condition of time. It is a principle of political economy that prices, profits, wages, etc., "always find their level;" but this is often interpreted as if it meant that they are always, or generally, at their level, while the truth is, as Coleridge epigrammatically expresses it, that they are always finding their level, "which might be taken as a paraphrase or ironical definition of a storm."

Under the same head of fallacy (_à dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter_) might be placed all the errors which are vulgarly called misapplications of abstract truths; that is, where a principle, true (as the common expression is) in the abstract, that is, all modifying causes being supposed absent, is reasoned on as if it were true absolutely, and no modifying circumstance could ever by possibility exist. This very common form of error it is not requisite that we should exemplify here, as it will be particularly treated of hereafter in its application to the subjects on which it is most frequent and most fatal, those of politics and society.(262)