200 REASONING. 



believability. The inconceivableness of a supposition is the extreme case 

 of its unbelievability. This is the very foundation of Mr. Spencer's doc- 

 trine. The invariability of the belief is with him the real guarantee. 

 The attempt to conceive the negative is made in order to test the inevita- 

 bleness of the belief. It should be called, an attempt to believe the nega- 

 tive. When Mr. Spencer says that while looking at the sun a man can not 

 conceive that he is looking into darkness, he should have said that a man 

 can not believe that he is doing so. For it is surely possible, in broad day- 

 light, to imagine one's self looking into darkness.* As Mr. Spencer him- 

 self says, speaking of the belief of our own existence, " That he might not 

 exist, he can conceive well enough ; but that he does not exist, he finds it 

 impossible to conceive," i. e., to believe. So that the statement resolves it- 

 self into this : That I exist, and that I have sensations, I believe, because I 

 can not believe otherwise. And in this case every one will admit that the 

 impossibility is real. Any one's present sensations, or other states of sub- 

 jective consciousness, that one person inevitably believes. They are facts 

 known ^5er se: it is impossible to ascend beyond them. Their negative is 

 really unbelievable, and therefore there is never any question about believ- 

 ing it. Ml". 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 guar- 

 antee — which are, in a similar manner, invariable and necessary. With re- 

 gard to these other beliefs, they can not be necessary, since they do not al- 

 ways 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 woi-ld ; who do not believe that space and time 

 have an existence independent 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 maintained, without ob- 

 vious error, that we can not imagine tangible objects as mere states of our 

 own and other people's consciousness; that the perception of them irresist- 

 ibly 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 material objects, are mere modifications of con- 

 sciousness ; complex 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 persistence of an idea, and that 

 what we can succeed in imagining we can not at the moment help appre- 

 hending as believable. But of what consequence is it what we appi-ehend 

 at the moment, if the moment is in contradiction to the jjermanent state of 

 our mind ? A person who has been frightened when an infant by stories 

 of ghosts, though he disbelieves them in after years (and perhaps never be- 

 lieved them), may be unable all his life to be in a dark place, in circum- 

 stances stimulating to the imagination, without mental discomposure. The 

 idea of ghosts, with all its attendant terrors, is irresistibly called \ip in his 

 mind by the outward circumstances. Mr. Spencer may say, that while he 



* Mr. Spencer makes a distinction between conceiving myself looking into darkness, and 

 conceiving 7^a< / am then and there looking into darkness. To me it seems that tliis change 

 of tljo expi;gssibu to the form / am, just marks the transition from conception to belief, and 

 iluif the phnts^ '^Jb conceive tliat lam" or "that any thing w," is not consistent with using 

 the word conc3ivt jn its rigorous sense. 



