28/119 The principle of assailment, if any, is the _extension_ of the analogies beyond the Paley point.... With the extension commences my responsibility. He who proves an irrelevancy in it answers my book." This is, no doubt, a vulnerable point, but we venture to think that it is not the only one. His whole reasoning seems to proceed on an unsound view of the nature and conditions of the argument, and is radically defective in at least _three_ respects. Were it so, it might, like many another process of mere analogical reasoning, yield no more than a probable conclusion or a plausible conjecture. |