44 LESSONS FROM NATURE. [CHAP. IT. 



be driven, as Mr. Spencer says, to accept them as limits lor 

 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, 

 gives us full warrant to assert universally necessary truth or 

 logically forces us, if we decline to accept such truth, into 

 the quagmire 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 alone by a practical 

 acceptance of their objective validity. In the same way the 

 necessities given to us by our supreme intuitions as to im 

 possibility 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 by a corresponding spontaneous judg 

 ment. If in reflecting on such spontaneous judgments we 

 begin to doubt as to their objective validity, we begin ipso 

 facto to undergo a process of mental disintegration and in 

 tellectual 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 enclose a space, 

 if a whole may be less than its part, then we have no cer 

 tainty but that the same thing cannot both &quot; be &quot; and &quot; not 

 be &quot; at the same time and in the same sense, and we are 

 landed in complete scepticism. But Mr. Spencer himself 

 has implicitly admitted this very distinction which he ex 

 plicitly ignores, and not only recognises an active power of 

 positively perceiving necessary truths, but also the distinction 



