Lectures and addresses. With an appendix containing the funeral sermon and memorial services occasioned by the death of the author, ed. by D.W. Clark - Softcover
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864 edition. Excerpt: ... indulge in inventing plausible arguments for the support of error, without so warping his own faculties as to connect doubt with all truth. This self-perversion is the penalty of voluntary misapplication. It issues not in mental discipline, but in mental unhingement. Of this many of the acute disputants of the seventeenth century are painful illustrations. But by cultivating the discriminating faculty the earnest student will judge of arguments not by their number, but by their weight--he will yield his convictions to them not as they are plausible, but as their steps are consecutive--as every link is seen to draw after it the other in the chain. It is no less palpable that the false element in argument cancels the true, than that the negative quantity in the solution of an algebraic problem cancels, to its own full amount, the positive. The habit of thorough investigation can alone enable you to avoid this error and detect it in others. The primary signification of the word investigate--to follow an object by the traces it has left in its road to its unknown place--this primary meaning is expressive of the caution and persistency demanded for success. The point at which one starts is known--the point he would reach is unknown. The distance dividing them can be free from peril only as it is traversed by the rule of logical cause and consequence. Any departure from this rule would sunder the everlasting connection of thought. If you supply by mere conjecture a single link in this eternal chain, you thereby blend uncertainty with every possible conclusion, no matter how remote from your conclusion or how proximate to it your premises may lie. It would be a grievous delusion to suppose that the habit of darting the mind's eye along every...
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