In the very denomination commonly employed to signify the portion of time to which the fallacy refers, is virtually involved a false and deceptious proposition, which, from its being employed by every mouth, is at length, without examination, received as true.
What in common language is called old time, ought (with reference to any period at which the fallacy in question is employed) to be called young or early time.
Sect. 2.] FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. 71 As between individual and individual living at the same time and in the same situation, he who is old, possesses, as such, more experience than he who is young; — as between generation and generation, the reverse of this is true, if, as in ordinary language, a preceding generation be, with reference to a succeed- ing generation, called old; — the old or preceding ge- neration could not have had so much experience as the succeeding. With respect to such of the materials or sources of wisdom which have come under the cog- nisance of their own senses, the two are on a par; — with respect to such of those materials and sources of wisdom as are derived from the reports of others, the later of the two possesses an indisputable advantage.
In giving the name of old or elder to the earlier generation of the two, the misrepresentation is not less gross, nor the folly of it less incontestable, than if the name of old man or old woman were aiven to the infant in its cradle.
What then is the wisdom of the times called old? Is it the wisdom of gray hairs? No. — It is the ivis- dom of the cradle *.
The learned and honourable gentlemen of Thibet * No one will deny that preceding ages have produced men emi- nently distinguished by benevolence and genius; it is to them that we owe in succession all the advances which have hitherto been made in the career of human improvement: but as their talents could only be developed in proportion to the state of knowledge at the period in which they lived, and could only have been called into action with a view to then-existing circumstances, it is absurd to rely on their authority, at a period and under a state of things altogether different.
7'i FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. [Ch. 2.
do homage to superior wisdom — superiority raised to the degree of divinity— in the person of an infant lying and squalling in his cradle.
The learned and honourable gendemen of West- minster set down as impostors the lamas of Tur- BET, and laugh at the folly of the deluded people on whom such imposture passes for sincerity and wisdom.
But the worship paid at Thibet to the infant body of the present day, is, if not the exact counterpart, the type at least of the homage paid at Westminster to the infant minds of those who have lived in earlier ages.
Sndly, Another cause of delusion which promotes the employment of this fallacy, is the reigning pre- judice in favour of the dead; — a prejudice which, in former times, contributed, more than any thing else, to the practice of idolatry: the dead were speedily elevated to the rank of divinities; the superstitious invoked them, and ascribed a miraculous efficacy to their relics.
This prejudice, when examined, will be seen to be no less indefensible than pernicious — no less perni- cious than indefensible.
By propagating this mischievous notion, and acting accordingly, the man of selfishness and malice obtains the praise of humanity and social virtue. With this jargon in his mouth, he is permitted to sacrifice the real interests of the living to the imaginary interests of the dead. Thus imposture, in this shape, finds ' Sect. 2.] FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. 7^ the folly or improbity of mankind a never-failing fund of encouragement and reward.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum; — with all its absurdity, the adage is but too frequently received as a leading principle of morals. Of two attacks, which is the more barbarous, on a man that does feel it, or on a man that does not? On the man that does feel it, says the principle of utility: On the man that does not, says the principle of caprice and prejudice — the prin- ciple of sentimentalism — the principle in which ima- gination is the sole mover — the principle in and by which feelings are disregarded as not worth notice.
The same man who bepraises you when dead, would have plagued you without mercy when living.
Thus as betvveen Pitt and Fox. While both were living, the friends of each reckoned so many adversa- ries in the friends of the other. On the death of him who died first, his adversaries were converted into friends. At what price this friendship was paid for by the people is no secret ^: see the Statute Book, see the debates of the time, and see Defence of Economy against Burke and Rose.
The cause of this so extensively-prevalent and ex- tensively-pernicious propensity lies not very deep.
A dead man has no rivals, — to nobody is he an ob- ject of envy, — in whosesoever way he may have stood when living, when dead he no longer stands in any * For the payment of Mr. Pitt's creditors was votfid 40,000/. of the public money; — to Mr, Fox's widow, 1500/. a year.
74 FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. [Ch. 2.
body's way. If he was a man of genius, those who denied him any merit during his life, even his very enemies, changing their tone all at once, assume an air of justice and kindness, which costs them nothing, and enables them, under pretence of respect for the dead, to gratify their malignity towards the living.
Another class of persons habitually exalts the past for the express purpose of depressing and discouraging the present generation.
It is characteristic of the same sort of persons, as well as of the same system of politics, to idolize, under the name of wisdom of our ancestors, the wisdom of untaught inexperienced generations, and to undervalue and cover with every expression of contempt that the language of pride can furnish, the supposed ignorance and folly of the great body of the people *'^ So long as they keep to vague generalities, — so long as the two objects of comparison are each of them taken in the lump, — wise ancestors in one lump, ig- norant and foolish mob of modern times in the other, — the weakness of the fallacy may escape detection. Let them but assign for the period of superior wisdom any determinate period whatsoever, not only will the groundlessness of the notion be apparent (class being compared with class in that period and the present one), but, unless the antecedent period be compara- tively speaking a very modern one, so wide will be the disparity, and to such an amount in favour of modern * A "Burdett mol)," (or example.
Sect. 2.] FALLACIES OF AUTHORiTY. 75 times, that, in comparison of the lowest class of the people in modern times (always supposing them pro- ficients in the art of reading, and their proficiency em- ployed in the reading of newspapers), the very highest and best informed class of these wise ancestors will turn out to be grossly ignorant.
Take for example any year in the reign of Henry the Eighth, from 1509 to 1546. At that time the House of Lords would probably have been in pos- session of by far the larger proportion of what little instruction the age afforded: in the House of Lords, among the laity, it might even then be a question whether without exception their lordships were all of them able so much as to read. But even supposing them all in the fullest possession of that useful art, political science being the science in question, what instruction on the subject could they meet with at that time of day?
On no one branch of legislation was any book ex- tant from which, with regard to the circumstances of the then present times, any useful instruction could be derived: distributive law, penal law, international law, political economy, so far from existing as sciences, had scarcely obtained a name: in all those departments, under the head o^ quid faciendum, a mere blank: the whole literature of the age consisted of a meagre chronicle or two, containing short memorandums of the usual occurrences of war and peace, battles, sieges, executions, revels, deaths, births, processions, ceremonies, and other external events; but with scarce 76 FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. [Ch. 2.
a speech or an incident that could enter into the com- position of any such work as a history of tlie human mind, — with scarce an attempt at investigation into causes, characters, or the state of the people at large. Even when at last, little by little, a scrap or two of political instruction came to be obtainable, the pro- portion of error and mischievous doctrine mixed up with it was so great, that whether a blank unfilled might not have been less prejudicial than a blank thus filled, may reasonably be matter of doubt.
If we come down to the reign of James the First, we shall find that Solomon of his time, eminently eloquent as well as learned, not only among crowned but among uncrowned heads, marking out for prohi- bition and punishment the practices of devils and witches, and without any the slightest objection on the part of the great characters of that day in their high situations, consigning men to death and torment for the misfortune of not being so well acquainted as he was with the composition of the Godhead.
Passing on to the days of Charles the Second, even after Bacon had laid the foundations of a sound phi- losophy, we shall find Lord Chief Justice Hale (to the present hour chief god of the man of law's idolatry) unable to tell (so he says himself) what theft was; but knowing at the same time too well what witch- craft was, hanging men with the most perfect com- placency for both crimes, amidst the applauses of all who were wise and learned in that blessed age.
Under the name of Exorcism the Catholic liturgy Sect. 2.] FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. 77 contains a form of procedure for driving out devils: — even with the help of this instrument, the operation cannot be performed with the desired success but by an operator quaHfied by holy orders for the working of this as well as so many other wonders.
In our days and in our country the same object is attained, and beyond comparison more effectually, by so cheap an instrument as a common newspaper: be- fore this talisman, not only devils but ghosts, vam- pires, witches, and all their kindred tribes, are driven out of the land, never to return again; the touch of holy water is not so intolerable to them as the bare smell of printers' ink.
If it is absurd to rely on the wisdom of our ances- tors, it is not less so to vaunt their probity: they were as much inferior to us in that point as in all others; and the further we look back, the more abuses we shall discover in every department of Government: — nothing but the enormity of those abuses has produced that degree of comparative amendment on which at present we value ourselves so highly. Till the human race was rescued from that absolute slavery under which nine-tenths of every nation groaned, not a sin- gle step could be made in the career of improvement; and take what period we will in the lapse of preceding ages, there is not one which presents such a state of things as any rational man would wish to see en- tirely re-established.
Undoubtedly, the history of past ages is not want- ing in some splendid instances of probity and self-de- 78 TALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. [67/. 2.
votion; but in the admiration which these excite, we commonly overrate tlieir amount, and become the dupes of an illusion occasioned by the very nature of an extensive retrospect. Such a retrospect is often made by a single glance of the mind; in this glance the splendid actions of several ages (as if for the very purpose of conveying a false estimate of their number and contiguity) present themselves, as it were, in a lump, leaving the intervals between them altogether unnoticed. Thus groves of trees, which at a distance present the appearance of thick and impenetrable masses, turn out on nearer approach to consist of trunks widely separated from each other.
Would you then have us speak and act as if we had never had any ancestors? Would you, because recorded experience, and, along with it, wisdom, in- creases from year to year, annually change the whole body of our laws? By no means: such a mode of reasoning and acting would be more absurd even than that which has just been exposed; and provisional adherence to existing establishments is grounded on considerations much more rational than a reliance on the wisdom of our ancestors. Though the opinions of our ancestors are as such of little value, their practice is not the less worth attending to; that is, in so far as their practice forms part of our own experience. However, it is not so much from what they did, as from what they underwent (good included as well as evil), that our instruction comes. Independently of consequences, what they did is no more than evidence Sect. 2.] FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. 79 of what they thought; nor yet, in legislation, is it evidence of what they thought best for the whole com- munity, but only of what the rulers thought would be best for themselves in periods when every species of abuse prevailed unmitigated, by the existence of either public press or public opinion. From the facts of their times, much information may be derived: — from the opinions, little or none. As to opinions, it is rather from those which were foolish than from those which were well grounded, that any instruction can be de- rived. From foolish opinions comes foolish conduct; from the most foolish conduct, the severest disaster; and from the severest disaster, the most useful warn- ing. It is from the folly, not from the wisdom, of our ancestors that we have so much to learn; and yet it is to their wisdom, and not to their folly, that the fal- lacy under consideration sends us for instruction.
It seems, then, that our ancestors, considering the disadvantages under which they laboured, could not have been capable of exercising so sound a judgment on their interests as we on ours: but as a knowledge of the facts on which a judgment is to be pronounced is an indispensable preliminary to the arriving at just conclusions, and as the relevant facts of the later pe- riod must all of them individually, and most of them specifically, have been unknown to the man of the earlier period, it is clear that any judgment derived from the authority of our ancestors, and applied to ex- isting affairs, must be a judgment pronounced without evidence; and this is the judgment which the fallacy in question calls on us to abide by, to the exclusion 80 FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. [Ch. 2.
of a judgment formed on thecompletest evidence that the nature of each case may admit.
Causes of the Propejisity to be influenced by this Fallacy.
Wisdom of ancestors being the most impressive of all arguments that can be employed in defence of established abuses and imperfections, persons interest- ed in this or that particular abuse are most forward to employ it.
But their exertions would be of little avail, were it not for the propensity which they find on the part of their antagonists to attribute to this argument nearly the same weight as those by whom it is relied on.
This propensity may be traced to two intimately- connected causes: — 1. Both parties having been train- ed up alike in the school of the English lawyers, headed by Blackstone; and, 2. Their consequent inability, for want of practice, to draw from the principle of gene- ral utility the justificative reason of every thing that is susceptible of justification.
In the hands of a defender of abuse, authority an- swers a double purpose, by affording an argument in favour of any particular abuse which may happen to call for protection, and by causing men to regard with a mingled emotion of hatred and terror the principle of general utility, in which alone the true standard and measure of right and wrong is to be found.
In no other department of the field of knowledge and wisdom (unless that which regards religion be an exception) do leading men of the present times recom- Sect. 2.] FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. 81 mend to us this receipt for thinking and acting wisely. By no gentleman, honourable or right honourable, are we sent at this tinje of day to the wisdom of our an- cestors for the best mode of marshalling armies, navi- gating ships, attacking or defending towns; for the best modes of cultivating and improving land, and preparing and preserving its products for the purposes of food, clothing, artificial light and heat; for the promptest and most commodious means of conveyance of ourselves and goods from one portion of the earth's surface to another; for the best modes of curing, al- leviating or preventing disorders in our own bodies and those of the animals which we contrive to apply to our use.
Why this difference? Only because in any other part of the field of knowledge, legislation excepted, (and religion, in so far as it has been taken for the subject of legislation,) leading men are not affected with that sinister interest which is so unhappily com- bined with power in the persons of those leading men who conduct Governments as they are generally at present established.
Sir H. Davy has never had any thing to gain, either from the unnecessary length, the miscarriage, or the unnecessary part of the expenses attendant on chemical experiments; he therefore sends us either to his own experiments or to those of the most enlighten- ed and fortunate of his cotemporaries, and not to the notions of Stahl^ Van Helmont, or Paracelsus.
82 FALLACIES OF AUTIIORrFY. [Ch. 3.
CHAPTER III.
1. Fallacy of Irrevocable Laws.
2. Fallacy of Vows.
Ad superstitionem.
The two fallacies brought to view in this chapter are intimately connected, and require to be considered together: the object in view is the same in both, the difference lies only in the instrument employed; and both of them are in effect the fallacy of the wisdom of our ancestors, pushed to the highest degree of extra- vagance and absurdity.
The object is to tic up the hands of future legislators by obligations supposed to be indissoluble.
In the case of the fallacy derived from the alleged irrevocable nature of certain laws, or, to speak briefly, the fallacy of Irrevocable laws, the instrument em- ployed is a contract — a contract entered into by the ruling powers of the state in question with the ruling powers of some other party. This other party may be either the sovereign of some other state, or the whole or some part of the people of the state in question.
In the case of the fallacy derived from vows, a su- pernatural power is called in and employed in the character of guarantee.
Fallacy of Irrevocable Laws.
E.vposition. A law, no matter to what effect, is proposed to a legislative assembly, and, no matter in what way, it is Sect. 1.] FALLACIES OF AUTHOIUTV. 83 by the whole or a majority of the assembly regarded as being of a beneficial tendency. The fallacy in question consists in calling upon the assembly to re- ject it notwithstanding, upon the single ground, that by those who, in some former period, exercised the power which the present assembly is thus called on to exercise, a regulation was made, having for its object the precluding for ever, or to the end of a period not yet expired, all succeeding legislators from enacting a law to any such effect as that now proposed.
What will be tolerably clear to every man who will allow himself to think it so, is — that, notwithstanding the profound respect we are most of us so ready to testify towards our fellow creatures as soon as the moment has arrived after which it can be of no use to them, the comforts of those who are out of the way of all the comforts we can bestow, as well as of all the sufferings we can inflict, are not the real objects to which there has been this readiness to sacrifice the comforts of present and future generations, and that therefore there must be some other interest at the bottom.
Ed'posure.
1. To consider the matter in the first place on the ground of general utility.
At each point of time the sovereign for the time possesses such means as the nature of the case affords for making himself acquainted with the exigencies of his own time.
84 FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. \Ch. 3.
With relation to the future, the sovereign has no such means of information; it is only by a sort of vac^ue anticipation, a sort of rough and almost random guess drawn by analogy, that the sovereign of this year can pretend to say what will be the exigencies of the country this time ten years.
Here then, to the extent of the pretended immuta- ble law, is the government transferred from those who possess the best possible means of information, to those who, by their very position, are necessarily in- capacitated from knowing any thing at all about the matter.
Instead of being guided by their own judgment, the men of the 19th century shut their own eyes, and give themselves up to be led blindfold by the men of the 1 8th century.
The men who have the means of knowing the whole body of the facts on which the correctness and expe- diency of the judgment to be formed, must turn, give up their own judgment to that of a set of men entirely destitute of any of the requisite knowledge of such facts.
Men who have a century more of experience to ground their judgments on, surrender their intellect to men who had a century less experience, and who, un- less that deficiency constitutes a claim, have no claim to preference.
If the prior generation were, in respect of intellec- tual qualification, ever so much superior to the sub- sequent generation, — if it understood so much better Sect. 1.] TALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. 85 than the subsequent generation itself the interest of that subsequent generation, — could it have been in an equal degree anxious to promote that interest, and con- sequently equally attentive to those facts with which, though in order to form a judgment it ought to have been, it is impossible that it should have been ac- quainted? In a word, will its love for that subsequent generation be quite so great as that same generation's love for itself?
Not even here, after a moment's deliberate reflec- tion, will the assertion be in the affirmative.
And yet it is their prodigious anxiety for the welfare of their posterity that produces the propensity of these sages to tie up the hands of this same posterity for evermore, to act as guardians to its perpetual and in- curable weakness, and take its conduct for ever out of its own hands.
If it be right that the conduct of the 19th century should be determined not by its own judgment but by that of the 1 8th, it will be equally right that the con- duct of the 20th century should be determined not by its own judgment but by that of the 19th.
The same principle still pursued, what at length would be the consequence? — that in process of time the practice of legislation would be at an end: the con- duct and fate of all men would be determined by- those who neither knew nor cared any thing about the mat- ter; and the aggregate body of the living would re- main for ever in subjection to an inexorable tyranny, exercised, as it were, by the aggregate body of the dead.
85 FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. [C/l. 3.
This irrevocable law, whether good or bad at the moment of its enactment, is found at some succeeding period to be productive of mischief — uncompensated mischief — to any amount. Now of this mischief, what possibility has the country of being rid?
A despotism, though it were that of a Caligula or a Nero, might be to any degree less mischievous, less intolerable, than any such immutable law. By bene- volence (for even a tyrant may have his moments of benevolence), by benevolence, by prudence, — in a word, by caprice, — the living tyrant might be induced to revoke his law, and release the country from its consequences. But the dead tyrant! who shall make lum feel? who shall make him hear?
Let it not be forgotten, that it is only to a bad pur- pose that this and every other instrument of deception will in general be employed.
It is only when the law in question is mischievous, and generally felt and understood to be such, that an argument of this stamp will be employed in the sup- port of it.
Suppose the law a good one, it will be supported, not by absurdity and deception, but by reasons drawn from its own excellence.
But is it possible that the restraint of an irrevocable law should be imposed on so many millions of living beings by a few score, or a few hundreds, whose ex- istence has ceased? Can a system of tyranny be esta- blished under which the living are all slaves — and a few among the dead, their tyrants?
Sect. 1.] FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. 87 The production of any such effect in the way of constraint being physically impossible, if produced in any degree it must be by force of argument — by the force of fallacy, and not by that of legislative power.
The means employed to give effect to this device may be comprised under two heads; the first of them exhibiting a contrivance not less flaoitious than the position itself is absurd.
1st, In speaking of a law which is considered as repugnant to any law of the pretended immutable class, the way has been to call it void. But to what purpose call it void? Only to excite the people to re- bellion in the event of the legislator's passing any such void law. In speaking of a law as void, either this is meant or nothing. It is a sophism of the same cast as that expressed by the words rights of man, though played off in another shape, by a different set of hands, and for the benefit of a different class.
Are the people to consider the law void? They are then to consider it as an act of injustice and tyranny under the name of law; — as an act of power exercised by men who iiave no right to exercise it: they are to deal by it as they would by the command of a robber; they are to deal by those who, having passed it, take upon them to enforce the execution of it, as they would deal, whenever they found themselves strong enough, by the robber himself*.
* Lord Coke was for holding void every act contrary to Magna Charta. If his doctrine were tenable, every act imposing law-taxes would be void.
88 FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. [Ck. 3.
Sndly, The other contrivance for maintaining the immutability of a given law, is derived from the notion of a contract or engagement. The faithful observance of contracts being one of the most important of the ties that bind society together, an argument drawn from this source cannot fail to have the appearance of plausibility.
But be the parties interested who they may, a con- tract is not itself an end; it is but a means toward some end: and in cases where the public is one of the parties concerned, it is only in so far as that end consists of the happiness of the whole community, taken in the aggregate, that such contract is worthy to be observed.
Let us examine the various kinds of contract to which statesmen have endeavoured to impart this character of perpetuity: — 1, Treaties between state and foreign state, by which each respectively engages its government and people; 2, Grant of privileges from the sovereign to the whole community in the character of subjects; 3, Grant of privileges from the sovereign to a particular class of subjects; 4, New arrangement of power between different portions or branches of the sovereignty, or new declaration of the rights of the community; 5, Incorporative union be- tween two sovereignties having or not having a com- mon head.
Take, then, for the subject and substance of the contract any one of these arrangements: so long as the happiness of the whole community, taken in the Sect, 1.] FALLACIES OF AUTHORITY. 89 aggregate, is in a greater degree promoted by the exact observance of the contract than it would be by any alteration, exact ought to be the observance: — on the contrary, if, by any given change, the aggregate of hap- piness would be in a greater degree promoted than by the exact observance, such change ought to be made.