[Footnote 1: If it is in direct contradiction with a perfectly undoubted, truth, we have reduced our opponent's position ad absurdum.]

For there is a bad pleasurehappy he who has not felt itin a pitiless reductio ad absurdum, which asks tauntingly, 'Why do you not follow out your own conclusions?'instead of thanking God that people do not follow them out, and that their hearts are sounder than their heads.

Not contented with this, he prevailed on Gay to satirise Philips in the "Shepherd's Week"a poem which forms the reductio ad absurdum of that writer's plan, and exhibits rural life in more than the vulgarity and grossness which the author of the "Pastorals" had ascribed to it.

An argument which attributes to unwashed, vermin-covered savages a fanatic zeal for what they consider as beautiful, such as no civilized devotee of beauty would ever dream of, involves its own reductio ad absurdum by proving too much.

It would mean a reductio ad absurdum.

I must say, also, that all attempts to distinguish between 'Jehovistic' and 'Elohistic' documents (with the exception, perhaps, of the first chapter of Genesis) seem to me to fail likewise; and that the theory of an Elohistic and a Jehovistic sect has received its reductionem ad absurdum in a certain recent criticism of the Psalms.

To avoid this reductio ad absurdum, it has been suggested that it is not the coherence of the idea in human, finite, minds which constitutes 'truth,' but the perfect consistency of the experience of an Absolute Mind.

" "I hate reductiones ad absurdum.