Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions; And on Other Subjects (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1837 Excerpt: ...shall discover an utter confusion in this respect. Their opinions are a confused and indiscriminate mass, in which facts and inferences, realities and suppositions, are blended together, and conceived, not only as of equal authority, but as possessing the same character. In other words, inferences, or assumptions from facts, are regarded as forming part of the facts. This is particularly observable with regard to the relation of cause and effect. That one thing is the cause of another may be either actually witnessed, or merely inferred; the connection of two events may be, to us, either a fact, or a conclusion deduced from appearances; a difference which may be easily illustrated. For this purpose, let us suppose the case of a stone falling from a rock, and crushing a flower at its base. To an eye-witness, it would be a fact, and not an inference, that the falling of the stone was the cause of the injury sustained by the flower. But suppose a man passed by, after the rock had fallen, and, perceiving a flower crushed and a stone near it which appeared to be a fragmerit recently disjoined from the cliffs above, pronounced, that the flower had been crushed by the stone, he would not be stating a fact but making an inference. The man, who saw the piece of rock fall upon the flower, and crush it, could not be mistaken; but he who inferred the same thing from the appearance of the cliffs and the proximity of the stone, might be wrong, because the flower might possibly have been crushed in some other manner. There would evidently be an opening for error. It would be possible, for instance, although it might be highly improbable, that some person had purposely taken off a piece from the rock, and, after crushing the flower with his foot, had laid the stone by its ...