xi Escape from Metaphysics. 231 



the external world. But Herbert Spencer believes 

 that the Mind is a part, and an evolved product, of 

 the world which surrounds it ; and that these forms 

 of thought are the result of the action of the sur- 

 rounding world upon the Mind in experience. Now 

 surely "neither the individual nor the race could 

 have the experience wherein these ideas have origin- 

 ated, if the realities represented by these ideas had 

 not existed before our experience of them began. 

 Time, Space, and Causation are not the result, but 

 the cause, of our experience of them. Our minds 

 have not created, but have discovered them. 



" If this is true, we have escaped from the cloud- 

 land of metaphysics by coming out at the farther 

 side into inductive science and common sense ; and we 

 stand again, as we stood in our unmetaphysical child- 

 hood, on the firm familiar earth and in the ' light of 

 common day,' trusting with not only an instinctive 

 but a rational trust, that our knowledge, having 

 grown out of experience, truly interprets experience ; 

 that our forms of thought, being produced by the 

 constant action of the external world on our bodily 

 and mental organisation through countless genera- 

 tions, really represent the realities of the external 

 world." 



I doubt, however, whether Herbert Spencer's 

 theory on the subject is quite satisfactory ; it seems 

 to me that the power of receiving and assimilating 

 experience, cannot itself be the result of experience. 

 In other words, I believe that Intelligence, like sen- 



