"Fallacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Pankhurst of England, received an ovation when she rose to speak and soon disarmed prejudice by her dignified and womanly manner. She began by pointing out the fallacy that the women of the United States had so many rights and privileges that they did not need the suffrage and in proof she quoted existing laws and conditions that called loudly for a change. She then took up the situation in Great Britain ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... remarks Y-ts'un smiled. "You now perceive," he said, "that my argument is no fallacy, and that the several persons about whom you and I have just been talking are, we may presume, human beings, who, one and all, have been generated by the spirit of right, and the spirit of evil, and come to life by the same royal road; but of course ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... smaller animals; and this doctrine had been especially welcomed by St. Augustine and many of the fathers, since it relieved the Almighty of making, Adam of naming, and Noah of living in the ark with these innumerable despised species. But to this fallacy Redi put an end. By researches which could not be gainsaid, he showed that every one of these animals came from an egg; each, therefore, must be the lineal descendant of an animal created, named, and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... most carefully watched, so that there may not be a single crack or flaw in your hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of daily life may be of little or no moment as affecting the general correctness of the conclusions at which we may arrive; but, in a scientific inquiry, a fallacy, great or small, is always of importance, and is sure to be in the long run constantly productive of mischievous if ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... then they would more wisely agree, and put up their fares above the present North-Western fares, till they had recouped themselves out of the public all they had lost by their fight." This did very well for the Parliamentary Committee; but it is a fallacy. At present the North-Western Railway, though empowered by law to charge three-pence a mile first-class, charge twopence a mile only: why?—because twopence a mile they find to be on the whole the most paying rate. Ergo, after the fight with their directly competing brother ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke
... patch or two there, and I'll Warrant you for pretending as much as any man; And who, you Fool, shall know the fallacy? ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... fallacy in the above is obvious; it assumes that CHRIST was in such a state as to be compelled to creep about, weak and ill, &c., and ultimately to die from the effects of his sufferings; whereas there is not a word of evidence ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... respect given to this calling; he longed for something else, not of a more active nature, it is true, but something that might embrace a broader swing. The soft atmosphere had turned the edge of his physical energy, but his mind was eager and grasping. His history was that dear fallacy, that silken toga which many of us have wrapped about ourselves—the belief that a good score at college means immediate success out in the world. And he had worked desperately to finish his education, ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... attachment for that which gives us pain!—of receiving an outrage with joy!—of loving those who subject us to misery and suffering! No; in the midst of these trials our firmness may perhaps be strengthened by the hope of a reward hereafter; but it is a mere fallacy to talk of our entertaining a sincere love for those whom we deem the authors of our afflictions; the least that we can do is to avoid them, which will not be looked upon as a very ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... was never a greater fallacy, although I am free to admit that under certain conditions it may conduce to that end. But tell me, have you never seen one happy ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... I to withhold a comforting fallacy from a hopeful soul. "Undoubtedly," I agreed. "But ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book; he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some unintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact and commonplace by ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... manifested in this example of what occurred in the period of the Witchcraft Delusion, when the words of an ignorant and barbaric Hebrew were taken by Christian followers to be the words of a god. And yet our Martian guest recognizes that in this day all men are aware of the fallacy of this utterance in a book which is still ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... built on Earth, and yet, again in terms of population, it was nowhere near as large as Tokyo or London. The solution to the paradox lies in discovering that the term "population" is used in two different senses, thus exposing the logical fallacy of the undistributed middle. If, in referring to London or Tokyo, the term "population" is restricted to those and only those who are actively engaged in the various phases of actual government—as it is when referring to Government City—the ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... so it was, as now she doubted not, a sight of her, or a future hope from her, would calm all his discontent, and beget a right understanding; she therefore resolves to write to him, and own her little fallacy: but before she did so, Octavio, whose passion was violent as ever in his soul, though it was oppressed with a thousand torments, and languished under as many feeble resolutions, burst at last into all its former softness, and ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... win your majesty by our arguments for the war and for the coalition, it has happened to us that we were converted by the arguments your majesty adduced against the war and against the coalition, and that your majesty convinced us of the fallacy of our opinion. It is, perhaps, very humiliating to admit that our conviction has veered around so suddenly, but your ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... take the children with her, and could not brook the idea of leaving them in the hands of the savage monster. She even trusted to the hope that he would withdraw, as soon as he could, without molesting any of them. A few minutes served to convince her of the fallacy of this expectation. When the opening had been made sufficiently large, he raised his tomahawk, sunk it deep into the brains of one of the children, and throwing the scarcely lifeless body into the back yard, ordered the mother to follow after. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... late Lord Lytton, "are too often merely a bonus to public indolence and vice. What a dark lesson of the fallacy of human wisdom does this knowledge strike into the heart! What a waste of the materials of kindly sympathies! What a perversion individual mistakes can cause, even in the virtues of a nation! Charity is a ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... I refer to the popular fallacy, that in the same ratio that you thoroughly educate women, you unfit them for the holy duties of daughter, wife, and mother. Is there an inherent antagonism ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... in appearance. One grand, serene, supreme will embraced the actual and the ideal in its circle, and all things were moved by a law as certain and irresistible as that which impels worlds in their orbits. The conviction was a part of Holden's self. He could no more be convinced of its fallacy than of his own non-existence, and his son left him with the full assurance that, even were he to know that his life was menaced, he would be the last one to take any precautionary measures for its protection. But, in truth, the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... mind, until recently, was imbued with the fallacy that the disease was hereditary. It was thought that if it "ran in the family" the victims of it were almost certain to die. We know definitely now that consumption is not hereditary, and that, instead of death being certain in a patient in whose family it has been, this fact ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... scientist, analysing the mechanical properties of air under chemical and physical action. Then he set to work to ascertain the power necessary for aerial flight, and was one of the first to enunciate the fallacy of the hopes of successful flight by means of the steam engine of those days, owing to the fact that it was impossible to obtain a given power with ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... fallacy of self-contradiction. Differences of condition are made by differences in the degree of honour thereto attached. If every man that did his work well were put on a level, in point of honour, with every other ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save his brother's soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying Dutchman"; it is avoided in "Tannhaeuser"—for, thank the gods, Tannhaeuser is not saved by that uninteresting young person Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... pleasures must be pursued, it would be perhaps of some benefit, since that pursuit must frequently be fruitless, if the practice of Savage could be taught, that folly might be an antidote to folly, and one fallacy be obviated by another. But the danger of this pleasing intoxication must not be concealed; nor, indeed, can any one, after having observed the life of Savage, need to be cautioned against it. By imputing none of his miseries to himself, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... had suffered far more than the North, and the South reaped the larger profit. The fallacy of the old Southern civilization had been the idea that labor is a curse and is to be shirked on to somebody else. Overthrow and impoverishment brought labor as a necessity to every one, and slowly it was revealed as ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... so," said he, sadly. "But really, sir, it isn't. You may think that love rules all things nowadays, but that is a fallacy. Of late years a rival concern has sprung up. I have found my office subjected to a most annoying competition which has attracted away from me a large number of my closest followers. In the days when we acknowledged ourselves to be purely heathen, love was regarded ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... authors,—the usual assortment to be found in a country farmhouse, whose occupants soon ceased to keep up with the times. But this little book seemed to me unusual,—an opinion subsequently confirmed by examination. I had long ago discovered the fallacy of that tradition of early youth that a memoir is, of necessity, dull, and I was in nowise unfavorably affected by the title, "Memoir of Mary Twining." There proved to be something to me singularly ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... but being not very well and other things advising me to the contrary, I did forbear going, and so Mr. Creed dining with me I got him to give my wife and me a play this afternoon, lending him money to do it, which is a fallacy that I have found now once, to avoyde my vowe with, but never to be more practised I swear, and to the new play, at the Duke's house, of "Henry the Fifth;" a most noble play, writ by my Lord Orrery; wherein Betterton, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of the Eleatic School, Xenophanes, who in a somewhat scornful spirit had urged on men's attention that, in their prayers and sacrifices to the gods, in all their various thoughts and statements, graceful or hideous, about them, they had only all along with much fallacy been making gods after their own likeness, as horse or dog too, if perchance it cast a glance towards heaven, would after the same manner project thither the likeness of horse or dog: that to think of deity you must think ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... call them blessed; yet they do not know God. What are we to say of such men and women? You know what some people do say about them. They use them as arguments against religion. They say, See these fine men living without God. That is an utter fallacy. They are not living without God. They only think they are. They are the supreme examples of the work of the unrecognized God. One wishes that those men and women would recognize God. God can do much more through ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... that he should live and die celibate. If you will try to put your mind into that attitude towards women, you will, I think, see that it is not a paradox to say that a woman may and does suffer if she does not fulfil the whole of her nature, and yet that it is a monstrous fallacy to affirm that, because of that, she ceases to have any reason for existence; that she is a futile life, a person who does not really "count." Sex is a great and a mighty power, but it is something more than the mere satisfaction ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... Origines d'Etretat. The Abbe Cochet seems to conclude, in the end, that the two letters are the initials of a passer-by. The revelations now made prove the fallacy of the theory. ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... thoroughly than usual. He arrives directly and clearly at the moral of the Ilias Americana, and sees that Christianity is the life of our political system, and that this principle, without which democracy is a passing dream, and equality an idle fallacy, triumphed forever in the downfall of slavery. He has been the first of our commentators to discern that the heroism displayed in the war could only come from that principle which made our social life decent and orderly, built the school-house and the church, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... difficulty in the art of government. Undoubtedly the very best Administration must encounter a great deal of opposition, and the very worst will find more support than it deserves. Sufficient appearances will never be wanting to those who have a mind to deceive themselves. It is a fallacy in constant use with those who would level all things, and confound right with wrong, to insist upon the inconveniences which are attached to every choice, without taking into consideration the different weight and consequence ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... more indebted for whatever capacity of thinking I have attained. The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained, was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... some years ago. The fallacy of this conservative (shall we not say short-sighted, for sometimes they are mistaken for one another) man's conclusion has been revealed by recent events. And these events are only an index of similar possibilities. Not that we want war; not that it is desirable; not that it should ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... lies in support of it. Moreover, I knew my subject thoroughly, and understood what points to dwell upon and what to gloze over, how to twist and turn the statistics, and how to marshal my facts in such fashion as would make it very difficult to expose their fallacy. Then, when I had done with general arguments, I went on to particular cases, describing as a doctor can do the most dreadful which had ever come under my notice, with such power and pathos that women in the ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... for there is no other fixed point, from which as a first principle those differences may be deduced, and to which as the focus of their direction they may be referred, and thus may appear truly and without fallacy. This is the reason why we here undertake to describe that love in its essence; and as it was in this essence when, together with life from God, it was infused into man, we undertake to describe it such as it was in its primeval state; and as in this state it was ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... seems clever reasoning; but it is in fact a stupendous fallacy. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Philip conquered and subsequently things went ill with Greece. A man looked at Mars and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... even slighter than in the Phaedo and Republic. Because men had abstract ideas in a previous state, they must have always had them, and their souls therefore must have always existed. For they must always have been either men or not men. The fallacy of the latter words is transparent. And Socrates himself appears to be conscious of their weakness; for he adds immediately afterwards, 'I have said some things of which I am not altogether confident.' (Compare Phaedo.) It may ...
— Meno • Plato
... come, as some commentators say, like a thief in the night or have fallen upon the world like a bolt from the blue! All available information of an exact character, all the preparation of the preceding few years, all the inner statecraft of the world as revealed in policy and action, prove the fallacy ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... on Sunday and then forgetting Him all the week is a fallacy that is fostered by the Reverend Doctor Sayles and his coadjutor, Deacon Buffum, who passes the Panama for the benefit of those who would buy absolution. Or, if you prefer, salvation being free, what we place in ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... life is not mine." The solemn declaration does not seem to me to be so annihilating to the said "view" (really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently assumed. Surely it embodies a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic. Next, a knowing reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks, with some rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his article, of "Mr. Hardy refusing consolation," ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... men. Such a conception is shocking to the Christian notion of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God, but we question if there be not times when the most pious and perfect Christian may not find comfort and relief from a fallacy which was a matter of faith in less enlightened creeds, and over which the apostle, writing to the Hebrews, throws the sanction of his authority, so far as angels are concerned. [Heb., xiii, 1: 'Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... and polished. Thomson had thus the merit of representing a growing sentiment—and yet he has not quite solved the problem. His philosophy is not quite fused with his observation. To make 'Nature' really interesting you must have a touch of Wordsworthian pantheism and of Shelley's 'pathetic fallacy.' Thomson's facts and his commentary lie in separate compartments. To him, apparently, the philosophy is more important than the simple description. His masterpiece was to be the didactic and now forgotten poem on Liberty. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... liked, to the workhouse or the asylum, or the roadside, his little clearing would make pasture, and this, at the price of beef cattle, would be still more profitable. For any landlord in this part of Donegal to speak of freedom of contract is a fallacy. It does not exist. ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... their town and Manchester. They had no sooner stated their errand than Mr. Huskisson, angrily throwing down his pen, in very few words refused their request, winding up his reply with these memorable words—remarkable not only for the fallacy of his then opinions, but also in connection with the calamitous event of the next day—"Gentlemen, I supported the scheme of the railway between Liverpool and Manchester as an experiment, but as long ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... due to the one great fallacy on which the prosperity of the New South was built, and that was that the labor of the Negro existed only for the good of the white man. To this one source may be traced most of the ills borne by both white man and Negro during ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... out without a protest from me against a certain extremeness in his views, more pardonable in the poet than the philosopher. While I agree with him that the only cure for rebellion is suppression by force, yet I must animadvert upon certain phrases where I seem to see a coincidence with a popular fallacy on the subject of compromise. On the one hand there are those who do not see that the vital principle of Government and the seminal principle of Law cannot properly be made a subject of compromise at all, and on the other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called "ethics of evolution." It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent "survival of the fittest;" ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... for education in the broadest sense of the word. Criticism is the operation by which suggestion is limited and corrected. It is by criticism that the person is protected against credulity, emotion, and fallacy. The power of criticism is the one which education should chiefly train. It is difficult to resist the suggestion that one who is accused of crime is guilty. Lynchers generally succumb to this suggestion, especially if the crime ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... to be true the time-honored fallacy that the only equipment for successful teaching is a thorough knowledge of the subject. They do not stop to square their belief with actual facts. They overlook the examples of their colleagues possessed of undisputed scholarship ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... secession supported, as a constitutional remedy? If there be any real difference, the former is check, and the latter a check-mate, to the movements of the Government of the Union. The same reasoning demonstrates the fallacy of nullification or secession, with equal clearness and certainty. A State cannot nullify a law of the Union, because the Constitution and laws of the State are made subordinate to the Constitution and laws of the Union, by a compact to which the people of each State were one party, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The popular fallacy that ducks require a stream or pond is gradually passing away. There was a time when nearly all ducks were raised in this way, feeding on fish as the principal diet, but experience has proved that ducks raised ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... mistake to accept the sitting of the crow as the cause of the fall. The perching was only an accident. Yet men very frequently, in tracing causes, accept accidents for inducing causes. Such men are said to be deceived by 'the fallacy of the crow ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... fallacy of such argument as Alec's too often remains undetected when no stubborn fact arises to support justice, Sophia, with her knowledge of Eliza, could not fail to see the absurdity of it. Her mind was ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... have suggested is enough to indicate the fallacy of the whole Malthusian theory of the increase of population on which this objection to better social conditions was founded. Malthus, as you know, held that population tended to increase faster than means of subsistence, and therefore ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... argument, the Senate would not venture to inflict capital punishment on their friends, that they evinced their approbation by loud cheers; while many of the patrician party were shaken in their previous convictions; and many of those who perceived the fallacy of his sophistical reasoning, and detected his latent determination to screen the parricides of the state, felt the hazard and difficulty of proceeding as the exigencies of the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... examine the question of the Second Sight. Of an opinion received for centuries by a whole nation, and supposed to be confirmed through its whole descent, by a series of successive facts, it is desirable that the truth should be established, or the fallacy detected. ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... without being conscious of its object. On this Mr. Mill retorts that if, as Hamilton admits, we are conscious of a belief in the Infinite and the Absolute, we must be conscious of the Infinite and the Absolute themselves; and such consciousness is Knowledge. The fallacy of this retort is transparent. The immediate object of Belief is a proposition which I hold to be true, not a thing apprehended in an act of conception. I believe in an infinite God; i.e., I believe ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... with their common nature. The religious experience must not only be found, but must also be reconciled with "the varieties of religious experience." The inadequacy of the well-known definitions of religion may be attributed to several causes. The commonest fallacy is to define religion in terms of a religion. My definition of religion must include my brother's religion, even though he live on the other side of the globe, and my ancestor's religion, in spite of his prehistoric remoteness. Error may easily arise ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... chronic cases in the houses of industry or at large been fortunate enough to be placed under asylum treatment in the first stage of their malady, they would also have been cured in like proportion. Unfortunately, the accumulation of incurables, even in asylums, opened the eyes of many to the fallacy of this inference.[256] Other asylums were, therefore, it was ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... knew later that she had been silenced by a fallacy. For, is youth the most critical period of life? Neither brother nor sister, however, were talking absolutely for the argument. Beneath this dialogue, the current in her mind pressed to elicit some avowal of his personal feeling ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... went Into life's battle. We perchance, have dream'd That the sweet smile the sunbeam of our home The prattle of the babe the Spoiler seiz'd, Had but gone from us for a little while,— And listen'd in our fallacy of hope At hush of eve for the returning step That wake the inmost pulses of the heart To extasy,—till iron-handed Grief Press'd down the nevermore into our soul, Deadening us with its weight. The man of Uz As the slow ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... in the completion of one class of life before the other, that the fallacy of the period theory lies—for completion is essential to that theory which supposes "the Mosaic author" to have intended to describe the ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... are formed in the man exactly in the same way as in the animal. But, in men endowed with speech, the mental state which constitutes the potential belief is represented by a verbal proposition, and thus becomes what all the world recognises as a belief. The fallacy which Hume combats is, that the proposition, or verbal representative of a belief, has come to be regarded as a reality, instead of as the mere symbol which it really is; and that reasoning, or logic, which deals with nothing but propositions, is supposed to be necessary ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... moulded and controlled society in all its forms, destroying ideals old as history, reversing values, confusing issues and wrecking man's powers of judgment. Until the war it seemed irresistible, now its weakness and the fallacy of its assumptions are revealed, but it has become so absolutely a part of our life, indeed of our nature, that we are unable to estimate it by any sound standards of judgment, and even when we approximate this we cannot think in other terms when we try to devise our schemes ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... don't succeed,' you know follow out the inestimable Watts's advice, and 'try again.' There's nothing like it: it gets to be quite a game in the long run. I thank my stars," laughing, "I have never been a slave to the 'pathetic fallacy' called love; yet it has its good ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... bore to the weight, he demonstrated by successive experiments that the weight of the engine would of itself produce sufficient adhesion to enable it to draw upon a smooth railroad the requisite number of waggons in all kinds of weather. And thus was the fallacy which had heretofore prevailed on this subject completely exploded, and it was satisfactorily proved that rack-rails, toothed wheels, endless chains, and legs, were alike unnecessary for the efficient traction of loaded waggons ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... corroborate Mr. Reed's point about the success of the pecan on high land. One man is, I believe, responsible for that widely circulated statement that the pecan will grow only on alluvial land. I have travelled a thousand miles in investigating that fact, and found it a fallacy. Some of the biggest pecan trees I have ever seen were growing at 900 feet elevation down in Georgia. This was on clay hills. I have seen the same thing in Raleigh. That alluvial ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... with those who were older in sin than themselves—who prided themselves on knowing where the best oysters were sold, the cheapest horses to be hired, or the cheapest boats to be engaged for the Sunday's excursion. Young men were ready to think, "If I don't do this, I may do something worse." The fallacy and danger of this mode of reasoning were exposed. It might be employed to excuse any sin. Public places of amusement were highways to destruction. Ah! how those old people in that little cottage—surrounded with a stone wall—on the hill side—far away—would weep, if they knew their son ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... whole-wheat meal as ordinarily prepared is, as has generally been assumed, weight for weight more nutritious than ordinary bread flour is an utter fallacy founded on theoretical text-book dicta, not only entirely unsupported by experience, but inconsistent with it. In fact, it is just the poorer fed and the harder working that should have the ordinary flour bread rather than ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... L100,000 in England; yet he will be able to enjoy his learned and cultured leisure, just as he does at home, because all the work will be done for him by the servants he employs. For three or four years this agreeable fallacy made quite a stir in England: famous authors, distinguished soldiers, learned bishops were deceived by it; noblemen, members of Parliament, bankers and merchants, all combined to applaud this novel and excellent idea of ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... were divinely ignorant; they each tricked themselves with the age-old fallacy of a unique position, each wandered onward in the dream-like fields of romance, content to believe that the other knew ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... we hear a performer of our day, whom the public has long and deservedly applauded, extolled as a perfect representative of lady Macbeth, and find this part held forth and distinguished as the pattern of her excellence, true criticism must reject the fallacy of the assertion, and the injustice it imposes upon that great actress herself, who in many other situations of the drama, sustains an eminence above all rivalship; physical defects may often be lessened or concealed; but they will sometimes be too stubborn for the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... is manifestly unanswerable, if there be no fallacy in the distribution of its major and minor terms. But wherein lies the incompatibility of reversing the order of its terms, so as to prove that neither matter nor motion is indestructible? And would such a judgment, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... about the fallacy of history, and what you will do about it, is also vain; yet, if you could do so, the bible is a sufficient rule in this case. You have therefore made but two and a half days and two nights, and work it which ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... Mr. Jenkins, he began to shake him with all his feeble strength. The latter soon extricated himself, and he succeeded in impressing on the man the fallacy of his suspicion. "Don't I want to get home to my supper and my wife? Don't I tell you that she'll set upon me like anything for keeping it waiting?" he meekly remonstrated. "Do I want to be locked up in these unpleasant cloisters? Give me the keys ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... now alarmed. It will be remembered that the universal belief among the natives is, that to go into these caves unbidden, means death. True, John had shown the fallacy of this on several occasions, but here was positive evidence that death had visited the dogs, and this might be the fate of those who ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... dependance of the Laity on the Clergy, or of the Temporall Officers on the Spirituall; but of both on the Civill Soveraign; which ought indeed to direct his Civill commands to the Salvation of Souls; but is not therefore subject to any but God himselfe. And thus you see the laboured fallacy of the first Argument, to deceive such men as distinguish not between the Subordination of Actions in the way to the End; and the Subjection of Persons one to another in the administration of the Means. For to every End, the Means are determined ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... fretful. She reproached her tractable and distressed little General with having encouraged her to walk much too far. In future he swore to insist on the carriage, however confidently she might assert the need of active exertion. She pointed out the fallacy of rushing to extremes; which rather cruelly floored him, since "rushing," in any shape or form, had conspicuously passed out of his programme some ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Here the prime fallacy of his school misled him: he believed that if he had represented the types and scenes of his particular region once he had done all he could, when of course had he let imagination serve him he might have found in that microcosm ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... concrete description is branded as either false or insufficient. The bridge of intermediaries, actual or possible, which in every real case is what carries and defines the knowing, gets treated as an episodic complication which need not even potentially be there. I believe that this vulgar fallacy of opposing abstractions to the concretes from which they are abstracted, is the main reason why my account of knowing is deemed so unsatisfactory, and I will therefore say a word more ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... to convince me that the need of avoiding a northern winter was not a fallacy, and likewise to make Tibbie insist on coming here for fear Maister Colin should not be looked after. It is rather a responsibility to have let her come, for she has never been farther south than Edinburgh, but she would not be denied. So she ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as the velocity of the aeroplane is a vital factor in flotation. At first thought, the propeller and similar adjuncts being equal, the inexperienced mind would naturally argue that a 50-horsepower engine should produce just double the speed of one of 25-horsepower. That this is a fallacy is shown by actual performances. The Wrights, using a 25-horsepower motor, have made 44 miles an hour, while Bleriot, with a 50-horsepower motor, has a record of a short-distance flight at the rate of 52 miles an hour. The fact is that, so far as speed is concerned, ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... Jackson had gone that he saw the fallacy of his own reasoning. If to live were disappointment, then to die, still dreaming the great dream, was not wholly evil. He ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his cruel malice could invent. He now shall know I can produce a man 150 Of female Seed, far abler to resist All his sollicitations, and at length All his vast force, and drive him back to Hell, Winning by Conquest what the first man lost By fallacy surpriz'd. But first I mean To exercise him in the Wilderness, There he shall first lay down the rudiments Of his great warfare, e're I send him forth To conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes, By Humiliation and strong Sufferance: 160 His weakness shall o'recome ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... saving so far as God sees fit to set any man above or below his standard, some are below Adam in rational endowments and some are above him, of the latter he thinks Sir Isaac Newton was one (doctrine of original sin, page 235. supplement, page 85.) The fallacy of which is so obvious and absurd that it deserves no observation, for every man to his dear bought experience may know, that man now unassisted by all the dark remains of original, natural, moral and political knowledge he is master of, can acquire ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... a ridiculous fallacy to assume, as many do, that such fullness of life is an attribute of youth alone and slips out of the back door when middle age knocks at the front. It is no more bound to go as the wrinkles and gray hairs arrive than your ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... not mistake—not under their sublime form as duties. I claim the honour to have first exposed a fallacy too common: duties never did, never will, arise save under Christianity, since without it the sense of a morality lightened by religious motive, aspiring to holiness, not only of act, but of motive, had not before it even arisen. It is the pressure of society, its mere needs and palpable claims, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... called out by two letters which Lincoln had written during the year; one declaring his opposition to the waning fallacy of know-nothingism, in which he also defined his position on "fusion." Referring to a provision lately adopted by Massachusetts to restrict naturalization, he wrote: "Massachusetts is a sovereign and independent State; and it is no privilege of mine ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... indeed. You say you are superstitious, but if these numbers don't win you mustn't draw the conclusion that I don't love you; that would be a dreadful fallacy." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... case. This is now a recurrence of what takes place in gases, and proves the fallacy of the hypothesis; for if these compounds could be volatilized the vapor densities would necessarily vary in the inverse proportion of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... love and esteem the man during his troubles, but this only rendered the sight of his buffoonery more distressing, and as Randall had not provided himself with his home suit, they were the more cut off from one another. Thus there was all the less to counteract or show the fallacy ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... needle, which, instead of pointing to the north star, varied about half a point. He remarked that this variation of the needle increased as he advanced. He quieted the alarm of his pilots, when they observed this, by assuring them that the variation was not caused by any fallacy in the compass, but by the movement of the north star itself, which, like the other heavenly bodies, described a ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... if a freeman in the common acceptation of the term, then a freeman in every acceptation of it. This pithy and syllogistic sentence comprises the whole argument, which, however elaborated, perpetually goes back to the point from which it started. The fallacy of it is its assumption that the term 'freedom' signifies nothing but exemption from involuntary service; and that it has not a legal signification more specific. The freedom of a municipal corporation, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... organization of military strength involves provocation to war is a fallacy, which the experience of each succeeding year now refutes. The immense armaments of Europe are onerous; but nevertheless, by the mutual respect and caution they enforce, they present a cheap alternative, certainly in misery, probably in money, to the frequent devastating ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... however, to point out the fallacy of a popular idea that the world could easily stamp out defectives and degenerates by merely adopting a vigorous policy of segregation and sterilization. Even if it were possible by these means to prevent all manifest mental defectives from ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... instantly detected the fallacy of all the so-called mediaeval jargon he had read,—"is the Helectric Bell, which does away with our hold, hordinary 'orn blowin', and the hattendant waitin' in the 'all for the usual 'Without there, who waits?' which all of us was accustomed to ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... independence of thought, a faculty of felicitious generalisations and diacritical judgment, long-sustained intellectual effort, an unselective mirroring of the world in the mind, and that relative immunity to fallacy which goes together with a stable and comparatively unresponsive ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk—squalid, if you like—but not touching your real relationships. Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools. They believe in the same law for both sexes. It is a ridiculous fallacy. Only Edmond was different. He loved women—psychologically. He was therefore inconstant, which is the real sin against marriage. He was a great lover, an artist. Every woman was to him what a canvas is to a painter, a violin to a violinist. The colours and the sounds he got were marvellous. ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... train, to take one example out of millions, speak of it as going or running, instead of rolling on its wheels, thus being no less guilty of anthropomorphising than the most unregenerate savages. Of this same fallacy we are guilty every time we think of anything whatsoever with the least warmth—we are lending this thing some human attributes. The more we endow it with human attributes, the less we merely know it, the more we realise it, the more does it approach ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... several manners, leaders of revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine monstrous to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less sanguine, into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... from that very moment, their shameless lies would have been exposed; the stupendous but weak structure of auricular confession would fall to the ground with sad havoc and ruin to its upholders. Men and women would open their eyes, and see its weakness and fallacy. "If God," they might say, "can forgive our most grievous sins, against modesty, he can and will certainly do the same with those of less gravity; therefore there is no necessity or occasion for us to confess ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... known,—that he had all the exuberance of genius and none of its excesses; that he was at once equitable and generous—that his heart was ever open to charity—that his life has probably been shortened by his scrupulous regard for justice. His career was one splendid refutation of the popular fallacy, that genius has of necessity vices—that its light must be meteoric—and its courses wayward and uncontrolled. He has left mankind two great lessons,—we scarcely know which is the most valuable. He has taught ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the French Revolution provoked the Reflections of Burke; and, though much of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... is capable of learning any lessons from history, the events leading up to the World War should have exploded the fallacy that the way to preserve peace is to prepare for war. Competition in armament, whether on land or sea, inevitably leads to war, and it can lead to nothing else. And yet, after the terrible lessons of the recent war, the race for armaments continued with ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... effectually dissipate the fallacy by which the horizontal lightning-rod has duped so many people in certain portions of the West; for if the wire be cut off from the ground-connections (in which condition it accords with the conductor in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... prayers avail for one another? and that happiness is good for the soul? Pray, then, for me, that I may have a little peace,—some green and flowery spot, 'mid which my thoughts may rest; yet not upon fallacy, but only upon something genuine. I am deeply homesick, yet where is that home? If not on earth, why should we look to heaven? I would fain truly live wherever I must abide, and bear with full energy on my lot, whatever ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the fallacy of our own judgment; to be ashamed of what we love, yet still to love, are feelings most unpleasant; and though they assume not the dignity of deep distress, yet philosophy has scarce any power to soothe their worrying, incessant annoyance. Douglas was glad to forget ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Khan should not, in this case, perceive the fallacy of his own argument, or see that the power of the sword must always virtually rest with the holder of the purse; since immediately afterwards, after enlarging on the enormous amount of taxes levied in England, the oppressive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... denunciations of natural selection, I have only one fault to find with them, namely, that they do not speak out with sufficient bluntness. The difficulty of showing the fallacy of Mr. Darwin's position, is the difficulty of grasping a will-o'-the-wisp. A concluding example will put this clearly before the reader, and at the same time serve to illustrate the most tangible feature of difference between Mr. Darwin ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... them for security only, or for greater dignity and greater seclusion. They may have looked chiefly for comfort and have reared them in order to receive the benefit of every breeze, and at the same time to be above the elevation to which gnats and mosquitoes commonly rise. Or there may be a fallacy in concluding, from the very slight data furnished by the excavations of M. Botta, that a palace platform was, in any case, skirted along its whole length, by a six-foot parapet. Nothing is more probable ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... the errors which crept into the church at this time, arose from placing human reason in competition with revelation; but the fallacy of such arguments being proved by the most able divines, the opinions they had created vanished away like ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... that free ships should make free goods; and urged the injustice, while French cruisers were restrained by treaty from taking English goods out of American bottoms, that English cruisers should be liberated from the same restraint. No demonstration could be more complete than was the fallacy of this complaint. But the American government discovered a willingness voluntarily to release France from the pressure of a situation in which she had ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... the phenomenon of motion; but its real one, to embarrass an opponent. It has always attracted the attention of logicians; and even to them it has often proved embarrassing enough. The difficulty does not lie in proving that the conclusion is absurd, but in showing where the fallacy lies. From not knowing the precise kind of information required by [Greek: Idiotaes], I am unwilling to trespass on your valuable space by any irrelevant discussion, and confine myself to copying a very judicious note from Dr. Whateley's Logic, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... signs of legs and wings, feeling it was an easy way of taking it and I should thus be exempt for twelve glad months; but I had to run up and down the terrace with clenched hands while I swallowed it. And when I discovered the fallacy of the annual fly, I was just as particular in my dread of an accidental one. I don't believe I ever sat down to sardines on toast at a restaurant without looking under the toast for my bugbear, though as I lifted it I felt rather like the old woman who always looks ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... have been instilled, perhaps, from the earliest period, by one from whom they must have been received with all confidence—from a father to a son; and that son has never yet been sufficiently in the world to have proved their fallacy." ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of curious phenomena. I don't know that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS. There is a tacit understanding in every community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various reasons for this forbearance: one is old; one is rich; one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss him from ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes |
