134 Herbert Spencer 



of a tree on which he actually sits, at a point between himself 

 and the trunk. If he would save himself, he must refrain 

 from destroying that which alone sustains him in his elevated 

 position. The vahdity of human reason then, by a just retri- 

 bution, asserts itself by the very reasoning of those who would 

 exphcitly deny its competency to apprehend what is ' abso- 

 lutely true,' and who would confine it to the ' relative ' and 

 the * phenomenal.' 



Our readers will very reasonably suspect that we must 

 have misread Mr. Spencer ; they will hardly deem it possible 

 that he can have involved himself in what, when thus nakedly 

 put before them, seems so obvious a self-contradiction. But 

 it will perhaps appear less incredible that he has fallen into 

 this error when we have compared together different parts of 

 one and the same of Mr. Spencer's works, so as to be able to 

 realise how completely he seems to contradict himself. We 

 shall see, indeed, that our author, in spite of the general 

 clearness of his style, has in his Psychology the appearance, 

 as it were, of playing ' fast and loose ' with the fundamental 

 question of the objective validity of our cognitions, and this 

 necessarily results in such obscurity as may well be the 

 occasion of involuntary misrepresentations on the part of the 

 most benevolent of critics. 



In the seventh part of that work Mr. Spencer justifies in 

 several ways what he calls ' realism,' that is, the behef that 

 the external, material world really exists objectively, and * in 

 such a way that each change in the objective reality causes 

 in the subjective state a change exactly answering to it — so 

 answering as to constitute a cognition of it.' ^ This view he 

 justifies by an argument from * priority,' i.e. from the fact 

 that the reahstic conception is prior to the ideahstic concep- 

 tion, so that 2 ' in no mind whatever can the Idealistic concep- 

 tion be reached except through the Realistic one.' He also 



^ Psychology y vol. ii. p. 497. The italics are ours. - Op. cit., p. 374. 



