162 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [PT. n. 



third chapter of our Prolegomena, are now swept a svay. It 

 must be by this time quite clear that the inconceivability- 

 test and the experience-test are merely the obverse faces of 

 the same thing. An association of subject and predicate, 

 which answers to an objective relation of which the ex 

 perience has been absolutely uniform, must be absolutely 

 indissoluble ; and vice versa. The ultimate question at issue 

 between Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer thus becomes reduced to 

 a question of terminology, save in one important particular, 

 in which I have already shown that Mr. Mill is not only 

 demonstrably wrong, but also inconsistent with himself. 

 The foregoing exposition adds new weight to the argument 

 by which it was formerly (Part I., Chap, iii.) proved that 

 when Mr. Mill asserts that the negation of such an axiom 

 as the indestructibility of matter, which is now inconceivable, 

 was in past times conceivable, he virtually asserts that there 

 was a time when men could frame inner relations of which 

 the corresponding outer relations had never been presented 

 in experience. And thus he not only runs counter to the 

 general theory of Life as Adjustment which is here adopted, 

 but he contravenes his own favourite doctrine of the ex 

 periential origin of all knowledge, which is in reality part 

 and parcel of that general theory of life. 



With these corollaries I must conclude this too brief 

 account of the process of psychical evolution. In the present 

 chapter and its two predecessors, while steadily refraining 

 from the chimerical attempt to identify Mind with some 

 form of Matter or Motion, it has nevertheless been shown 

 that, owing to the mysterious but unquestionable correlation 

 which exists between the phenomena of Mind and the 

 phenomena of Matter and Motion, it is possible to describe 

 the evolution of the former by the same formula which 

 describes the evolution of the latter. By a continuous dif 

 ferential compounding of impressions, we pass, through 

 infinitesimal stages, from the relatively homogeneous and 

 simple set of correspondences known as reflex action, mani- 



