194 REASONING. 



bleness." He thinks that it is the ultimate test of all beliefs. He arrives 

 at this conclusion by two steps. First, we never can have any stronger 

 ground for believing any thing, than that the belief of it " invariably exists." 

 Whenever any fact or proposition is invariably believed ; that is, if I un- 

 derstand Mr. Spencer rightly, believed by all persons, and by one's self at all 

 times ; it is entitled to be received as one of the primitive truths, or orig- 

 inal premises of our knowledge. Secondly, the criterion by which we de- 

 cide whether any thing is invariably believed to be true, is our inability to 

 conceive it as false. " The inconceivability of its negation is the test by 

 which we ascertain whether a given belief invariably exists or not." " For 

 our primary beliefs, the fact of invariable existence, tested by an abortive 

 effort to cause their non-existence, is the only reason assignable." He 

 thinks this the sole ground of our belief in our own sensations. If I believe 

 that I feel cold, I only receive this as true because I can not conceive that 

 I am not feeling cold. " While the proposition remains true, the negation 

 of it remains inconceivable." There aye numerous other beliefs which Mr. 

 Spencer considers to rest on the same basis ; being chiefly those, or a part 

 of those, which the metaphysicians of the Reid and Stewart school con- 

 sider as truths of immediate intuition. That there exists a material world; 

 that this is the very world which we directly and immediately perceive, 

 and not merely the hidden cause of our perceptions ; that Space, Time, 

 Force, Extension, Figure, are not modes of our consciousness, but objective 

 realities ; are regarded by Mr, Spencer as truths known by the inconceiva- 

 bleness of their negatives. We can not, he says, by any effort, conceive 

 these objects of thought as mere states of our mind ; as not having an ex- 

 istence external to us. Their real existence is, therefore, as certain as our 

 sensations themselves. The truths which are the subject of direct knowl- 

 edge, being, according to this doctrine, known to be truths only by the in- 

 conceivability of their negation; and the truths which are not the object 

 of direct knowledge, being known as inferences from those which are ; and 

 those inferences being believed to follow from the premises, only because 

 we can not conceive them not to follow; inconceivability is thus the ultir 

 mate ground of all assured beliefs. 



Thus far, there is no very wide difference between Mr. Spencer's doctrine 

 and the ordinary one of philosophers of the intuitive school, from Descartes 

 to Dr. Whewell ; but at this point Mr. Spencer diverges from them. For 

 he does not, like them, set up the test of inconceivability as infallible. On 

 the contrary, he holds that it may be fallacious, not from any fault in the 

 test itself, but because " men have mistaken for inconceivable things, some 

 things which were not inconceivable." And he himself, in this very book, 

 denies not a few propositions usually regarded as among the most marked 

 examples of truths whose negations are inconceivable. But occasional fail- 

 ure, he says, is incident to all tests. If such failure vitiates " the test of in- 

 conceivableness," it " must similarly vitiate all tests whatever. We con- 

 sider an inference logically drawn from established premises to be true. 

 Yet in millions of cases men have been wrong in the inferences they have 

 thought thus drawn. Do we therefore argue that it is absurd to consider 

 an inference true on no other ground than that it is logically drawn from 

 established premises ? No : we say that though men may have taken for 

 logical inferences, inferences that were not logical, there nevertheless are 

 logical inferences, and that we are justified in assuming the truth of what 

 seem to us such, until better instructed. Similarly, though men may have 

 thought some things inconceivable which were not so, there may still be in- 



