FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 317 



examples. It was long held that Antipodes were impossible 

 because of the difficulty which was found in conceiving per 

 sons with their heads in the same direction as our feet. And 

 it was one of the received arguments against the Copernican 

 system, that we cannot conceive so great a void space as that 

 system supposes to exist in the celestial regions. When men s 

 imaginations had always been used to conceive the stars as 

 firmly set in solid spheres, they naturally found much diffi 

 culty in imagining them in so different, and, as it doubtless 

 appeared to them, so precarious a situation. But they had 

 no right to mistake the limitation (whether natural, or, as it 

 in fact proved, only artificial) of their own faculties, for an 

 inherent limitation of the possible modes of existence in the 

 universe. 



It may be said in objection, that the error in these cases 

 was in the minor premise, not the major; an error of fact, not 

 of principle ; that it did not consist in supposing that what is 

 inconceivable cannot be true, but in supposing antipodes to be 

 inconceivable, when present experience proves that they can 

 be conceived. Even if this objection were allowed, and the 

 proposition that what is inconceivable cannot be true were 

 suffered to remain unquestioned as a speculative truth, it 

 would be a truth on which no practical consequence could ever 

 be founded, since, on this showing, it is impossible to affirm 

 of any proposition, not being a contradiction in terms, that it 

 is inconceivable. Antipodes were really, not fictitiously, in 

 conceivable to our ancestors : they are indeed conceivable to 

 us ; and as the limits of our power of conception have been so 

 largely extended, by the extension of our experience and the 

 more varied exercise of our imagination, so may posterity find 

 many combinations perfectly conceivable to them which are 

 inconceivable to us. But, as beings of limited experience, we 

 must always and necessarily have limited conceptive powers; 

 while it does not by any means follow that the same limitation 

 obtains in the possibilities of nature, nor even in her actual 

 manifestations. 



Rather more than a century and a half ago it was a scien 

 tific maxim, disputed by no one, and which no one deemed to 



