Wellington Philosophical Society. 689 



Second Meeting : 8tli Juhj, 1891. 



E. Tregear, President, in the Chair. 



Neiu Member. — WilHam Percival Evans, M.A., Ph.D. 



Papers. — 1. "Mill on Demonstration and Necessary- 

 Truth," by W. W. Carlile, M.A. {Transactions, p. 6iL) 



Sir James Hector thanked the author for his most interesting paper. 

 It was a subject difficult to criticize until the paper had been carefully 



read. 



Mr. Maskell agreed with Sir James Hector that the best thanks of 

 the Society were due to Mr. Carlile for his excellent paper, which invested 

 a dry and difficult subject with much more interest than probably any 

 one expected. For himself he found several very suggestive points m the 

 paper — not so much as to the particular question treated as on general 

 grounds. In the first place it reminded him of what seemed to be the 

 general fault of all English writers on philosophy and logic — that they 

 never seemed to refer to any but English, Scotch, or a few German 

 authors. Now, if they would study French, Spanish, or Italian works 

 also they might enlarge their views, and possibly gain insight into quite 

 new and correctly suggestive trains of thought. Then, again, Mr. Carlile, 

 he thought, had attached far too much importance to the notions of 

 Professor Huxley, a man who, to the speaker's mind, was as bad a speci- 

 men of blatant assumption and of illogical absurdity (except, of course, 

 when dealing with actual facts of natural history) as the modern era has 

 shown. There was one point, only incidentally referred to in the paper, 

 which would perhaps require correction. Mr. Carlile parenthetically 

 remarked that the axiom that two things which are equal to a third are 

 equal to one another would be incomprehensible to a Bushman or a 

 Damaraman. Taken as referring to any particular or existing savage, 

 this would be probably true ; taken as a general statement, with the 

 inference that any necessary difference exists between the brain and 

 intellect of a savage and the brain and intellect of a cultivated English- 

 man, it would certainly not be correct, in spite of the prevailing theory 

 of the present day, which usually affirms it, if not in terms, at lease by 

 implication. 



The President said that, greatly as he admired the work of Professor 

 Huxley in the domain of natural science, he shared with others the 

 regret that tiie learned Professor should ever step outside the limits of 

 his own domain and enter the fields of politics and theology, where his 

 logic was by no means unassailable. He (the President) had been struck 

 with astonishment when reading Huxley many years ago to find that he 

 had stated that all dream-images were vague and undefined. This is 

 contrary to the facts of experience of most observers. Undefined images 

 might occupy the mind of one who was discussing a subject like " man " 

 from a racial point of view ; but in the case of " triangle " there was no 

 mental conception possible of a triangle generally — it was absolutely 

 necessary to conceive the idea of a triangle as either equilateral, scalene, 

 isosceles, &c. As to necessary truths, it was almost certainly held that 

 the axioms of Euclid were necessary truths ; but he had read a clever 

 psychological article in a recent magazine, in which it was asked how 

 it was possible to possess one of these self-evident truths except by in- 

 heritance, without breaking the chain of cause and effect. Such a state- 

 ment as that " things which are equal to the same thing are equal to 

 each other " was not a " self-evident " truth ; it required reasoning from 

 experience before the mind could place faith in it. The purely mental 

 conception of a line as having " length without breadth " could not be 

 called useless (although it could not be practically represented), because 

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