42 LESSONS FEOM NATUEE. [CHAP. IT. 



by special modifications of consciousness, which modifications 

 are now, of course, unimaginable to us. We have never 

 experienced colour apart from extension, nor an extended 

 object not coloured, and yet these properties can be con 

 ceived as distinct though they cannot be so imagined. But 

 an effective argumentum ad liominem may be addressed to 

 Mr. Mill, who tells us he can conceive that 2 and 2 may 

 make 5, for most assuredly such a power transcends the 

 experience of all his ancestors, and will transcend that of his 

 successors to their latest posterity. Indeed, as Mr. Martineau 

 observes,* &quot; Experience proceeds and intellect is trained, not 

 by association but by Dissociation, not by reduction of plu 

 ralities of impression to one, but by the opening out of one 

 into many ; and a true psychological history must expound 

 itself in analytic rather than synthetic terms.&quot; But what is 

 experience? A stone cannot &quot;experience,&quot; nor can expe 

 rience be taken as ultimate. The very acquisition of ex 

 perience implies innate laws or principles. Instead of ex 

 perience being able to account for innate principles, innate 

 principles are needed to explain the acquisition of experience. 

 As Mr. Mott observes,! the defect of the materialistic view 

 generally, &quot; is that it confounds the physical conditions of 

 experience with experience itself, which is nothing but mental 

 change; and that it tacitly assumes, in defiance of the 

 evidence, that consciousness depends on nothing but physical 

 change.&quot; 



Let us now consider those propositions which are deemed 

 Propositions by the mind to be necessary and universal, not from 



positively * 



seen to be a passive impotence to disassociate two mental 



necessarily ^ L f 



true - images (such as those of colour and extension), but 



from an active power of positive perception of which the 

 intellect is self-conscious. It requires but a little candid 

 introspection to see how different is the mental declaration 

 with regard to those unimaginable conceivabilities we have 



* Essays, p. 271. 



t On the Materialism of Modern Science, an opening address read before 

 the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, October 5th, 1874, p. 15. 



