In ordinary life most of us make fewer arguments of fact than of policy.  It is only a small minority of our young men who become lawyers, and of them many do not practice before juries.  Nor do any large number of men become scholars or men of science or public men, who have to deal with questions of historical fact or to make arguments of fact on large states of affairs.  On the other hand, all of us have to weigh and estimate arguments of fact pretty constantly.  Sooner or later most men serve on juries; and all students have to read historical and economical arguments.  We shall therefore give some space in Chapter iii to considering the principles of reasoning by which we arrive at and test conclusions as to the existence of facts, and the truth of assertions about them.

9.  Arguments of Policy.  When we turn from arguments of fact to arguments of policy it will be noticed that there is a change in the phraseology that we use:  we no longer say that the assertions we maintain or meet are true or not true, but that the proposals are right or expedient or wrong or inexpedient; for now we are talking about what should or should not be done.  We say, naturally and correctly, that it is or is not true that woman suffrage has improved political conditions in Colorado but it would be a misuse of words to say that it is true or not true that woman suffrage should be adopted in Ohio; and still more so to use the word “false,” which has an inseparable tinge of moral obliquity.  In questions of policy that turn on expediency, and in some, as we shall see directly, that turn on moral issues, we know beforehand that in the end some men who know the subject as well as we do and whose judgment is as good and whose standards are as high, will still disagree.  There are certain large temperamental lines which have always divided mankind:  some men are born conservative minded, some radical minded:  the former must needs find things as they are on the whole good, the latter must needs see vividly how they can be improved.  To the scientific temperament the artistic temperament is unstable and irrational, as the former is dry and ungenerous to the latter.  Such broad and recognized types, with a few others like them, ramify into a multitude of ephemeral parties and classes,—­racial, political, social, literary, scholarly,—­and most of the arguments in the world can be followed back to these essential and irremovable differences of character.  Individual practical questions, however, cross and recross these lines, and in such cases arguments have much practical effect in crystallizing opinion and judgment; for in a complicated case it is often extremely hard to see the real bearing of a proposed policy, and a good argument comes as a guide from the gods to the puzzled and wavering.  But though to be effective in practical affairs one has to be positive, yet that is not saying that one must believe that the other side are fools or knaves.  Some such confusion of thought in the minds of some reformers, both eminent and obscure, accounts for the wake of bitterness which often follows the progress of reform.  Modesty and toleration are as important as positiveness to the man who is to make a mark in the world.