232 Insufficiency of the Experience theory. CHAP. 



sation, is a primary endowment, not resolvable into 

 anything but itself. 1 In proof of this, I will here 

 remark that our idea of Time is one which it appears 

 impossible for experience alone to have produced. 

 "We naturally believe that Time is without end 

 and without beginning : we can no more conceive 

 an absolute beginning of Time than an absolute 

 end. Now the pure and simple experience theory 

 accounts, no doubt, for the belief that Time is with- 

 out end, by the fact that we have never had 

 experience of any portion of Time without another 

 portion of Time coming after it. But this will 

 not apply to our belief that Time is without be- 

 ginning: for at the time that any one's conscious- 

 ness was first awakened, he had at that moment 

 experience of a portion of Time without having 

 experience of any other portion of time coming 

 before it ; so that for anything that mere experi- 

 ence can witness to, there is nothing inconceivable in 

 a beginning of Time. This shows that although we 

 have obtained our knowledge of Time by direct cog- 

 nition, and it has become a form of our thought by 

 the accumulation of inherited experience, yet there is 

 something in the conception which cannot be thus 

 accounted for, and which can be referred only to that 

 intelligence which is not a result of experience." 2 



1 For a fuller discussion of this subject, see Habit and 

 Intelligence, by the present writer, second edition (Macmillan, 

 1879). 



2 This passage, and the former ones in quotation marks, are 



