130 Herbert Spencer 



issues have been joined, and the point of view having been 

 shifted, controversies deemed closed have to be reconsidered. 

 This reconsideration has become requisite, not through want 

 of conclusiveness in the earlier replies to the argument as 

 then conducted, but through the fresh lights now let in at 

 apertures in dividing walls which then seemed of unbreachable 

 solidity, and which give to old facts a quite new aspect. 



The dispute as to our possession of ideas and conceptions 

 which no experience of any single life, however prolonged, 

 can explain — the existence, that is, of an a priori element in 

 our knowledge — may be considered to have ended in the 

 nineteenth century with the triumphant refutation of those 

 sensationalists who denied the existence of such an element. 

 This refutation Mr. Spencer not only fully accepts as vahd, 

 but he actively co-operates in demonstrating the absurdity 

 of the belief that the mental phenomena of any one life, how- 

 ever prolonged, are sufficient to account for such conceptions 

 as extension, causation, objectivity, and existence. 



The opponents of sensism, however, must be prepared to 

 take small comfort from such acceptance and seeming aid, 

 for Mr. Spencer is really one of their most formidable 

 enemies ; and he claims to have demonstrated by a com- 

 bined system of d priori and a posteriori proof that sensa- 

 tion and all intellectual action are fundamentally one and 

 the same, and that (sense being primary) every idea is made 

 up of transformed sensations. This demonstration is accom- 

 plished by means of the doctrine of Evolution, which has of 

 late attained so wide a currency and such general acceptance. 

 According to this doctrine all the varied organisms inhabit- 

 ing this planet have been gradually produced one from 

 another by merely natural processes, and, as Mr. Darwin 

 would fain have us believe, mainly by the action of ' Natural 

 Selection.' In this way Mr. Spencer conceives that what is 

 d priori to the individual is but d posteriori to the race, and 



