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REASONING. 



to believe. So that the statement resolves itself into this : That 

 I exist, and that I have sensations, I believe, because I cannot 

 believe otherwise. And in this case every one will admit that 

 the necessity is real. Any one's present sensations, or other 

 states of subjective consciousness, that one person inevitably 

 believes. They are facts known per se : it is impossible to 

 ascend beyond them. Their negative is really unbelievable, 

 and therefore there is never any question about believing it. 

 Mr. Spencer's theory is not needed for these truths. 



But according to Mr. Spencer there are other beliefs, 

 relating to other things than our own subjective feelings, for 

 which we have the same guarantee which are, in a similar 

 manner, invariable and necessary. With regard to these other 

 beliefs, they cannot be necessary, since they do not always 

 exist. There have been, and are, many persons who do not 

 believe the reality of an external world, still less the reality of 

 extension and figure as the forms of that external world ; who 

 do not believe that space and time have an existence indepen- 

 dent of the mind nor any other of Mr. Spencer's objective 

 intuitions. The negations of these alleged invariable beliefs 

 are not unbelievable, for they are believed. It may be main- 

 tained, without obvious error, that we cannot imagine tangible 

 objects as mere states of our own and other people's con- 

 sciousness ; that the perception of them irresistibly suggests to 

 us the idea of something external to ourselves : and I am not 

 in a condition to say that this is not the fact (though I do not 

 think any one is entitled to affirm it of any person besides 

 himself) . But many thinkers have believed, whether they could 

 conceive it or not, that what we represent to ourselves as ma- 

 terial objects, are mere modifications of consciousness; com- 

 plex feelings of touch and of muscular action. Mr. Spencer 

 may think the inference correct from the unimaginable to the 

 unbelievable, because he holds that belief itself is but the per- 

 sistence of an idea, and that what we can succeed in imagining, 

 we cannot at the moment help apprehending as believable. 

 But of what consequence is it what we apprehend at the 

 moment, if the moment is in contradiction to the permanent 

 state of our mind ? A person who has been frightened when 



