I 



Herbert Spencer 149 



be taken as one of the most certain and indubitable facts of 

 consciousness. 



If there was but the one kind of inconceivable proposi- 

 tions — namely those negatively inconceivable, we should be 

 driven, as Mr. Spencer says, to accept them as limits for us 

 whether objectively and universally valid or not. But the 

 recognition of the quite other kind of active, positive percep- 

 tions of inconceivability (of perceived universal impossibility), 

 together with the recognition that these looked at from the 

 point of view of pure subjectivity assert themselves as 

 supreme, either give us full warrant to assert universally 

 necessary truth, or logically force us, if we decline to accept 

 such truth, into the chaos of universal doubt. 



Mr. Spencer has justly observed that the passive incon- 

 ceivabilities are necessities of thought to us, and that by 

 refusing to accept them we pass into a state of mental con- 

 fusion, and even more or less physical impotence must result 

 from a refusal to act as if they were valid. This confusion 

 and this impotence can be remedied only by a practical 

 acceptance of their objective validity. In the same way the 

 convictions forced upon us by our supreme intuitions as to 

 impossibility and necessity, are practically active necessities 

 of thought. Every man is spontaneously convinced of their 

 necessary truth and acts on such conviction in every case as 

 it arises seriatim to his mind, by a spontaneous judgment 

 accordingly. If in reflecting on such spontaneous active 

 judgments we begin to doubt as to their objective vahdity, 

 we begin ipso facto to undergo a process of mental disintegra- 

 tion and intellectual paralysis, only to be remedied by the 

 acceptance of the objective validity of such truths. The 

 objective validity of these perceptions is given in the very 

 substance of each such perception itself To doubt of the 

 objective truth of each, is to doubt that of which we are 

 directly and supremely certain. If two straight lines can 



