FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 527 



One of the most instructive facts in scientific history is the pertinacity with 

 which the human mind ching to the belief that the heavenly bodies must 

 move in circles, or be carried round by the revolution of spheres ; merely 

 because those were in themselves the simplest suppositions : though, to 

 make them accord with the facts which were ever contradicting them more 

 and more, it became necessary to add sphere to sphere and circle to circle, 

 until the original simplicity was converted into almost inextricable compli- 

 cation. 



§ 4. We pass to another a priori fallacy or natural prejudice, allied to 

 the former, and originating, as that does, in the tendency to presume an ex- 

 act correspondence between the laws of the mind and those of things ex- 

 ternal to it. The fallacy may be enunciated in this general form — What- 

 ever can be thought of apart exists apart: and its most remarkable mani- 

 festation consists in the personification of abstractions. Mankind in all 

 ages have had a strong propensity to conclude that wherever there is a 

 name, there must be a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the 

 name; and every complex idea which the mind has formed for itself by 

 operating upon its conceptions of individual things, was considered to have 

 an outward objective reality answering to it. Fate, Chance, Nature, Time, 

 Space, were real beings, nay, even gods. If the analysis of qualities in the 

 earlier part of this work be correct, names of qualities and names of sub- 

 stances stand for the very same sets of facts or phenomena ; ichiteness and 

 a lohite thing are only different phrases, required by convenience for speak- 

 ing of the same external fact under different relations. Not such, how- 

 ever, was the notion which this verbal distinction suggested of old, either 

 to the vulgar or to the scientific. Whiteness was an entity, inhering or 

 sticking in the white substance : and so of all other qualities. So far was 

 this carried, that even concrete general terms were supposed to be, not 

 names of indefinite numbers of individual substances, but names of a pe- 

 culiar kind of entities termed Universal Substances. Because we can think 

 and speak of man in general, that is, of all persons in so far as possessing 

 the common attributes of the species, without fastening our thoughts per- 

 manently on some one individual person; therefore man in general was 

 supposed to be, not an aggregate of individual persons, but an abstract or 

 universal man, distinct from these. 



It may be imagined what havoc metaphysicians trained in these habits 

 made with philosophy, when they came to the largest generalizations of all. 

 Substantice Seciindcie of any kind were bad enough, but such Substantise Se- 

 cundoe as to or, for example, and to eV, standing for peculiar entities supposed 

 to be inherent in all things which exist, or in all which are said to be one, 

 were enough to put an end to all intelligible discussion; especially since, 

 with a just perception that the truths which philosophy pursues are gener- 

 al truths, it was soon laid down that these general substances were the only 

 subjects of science, being immutable, while individual substances cogniza- 

 ble by the senses, being in a perpetual flux, could not be the subject of real 

 knowledge. This misapprehension of the import of general language con- 

 stitutes Mysticism, a word so much oftener written and spoken than under- 

 stood. Whether in the Vedas, in the Platonists, or in the Hegelians, mysti- 

 cism is neither more nor less than ascribing objective existence to the sub- 

 jective creations of our own faculties, to ideas or feelings of the mind ; 

 and believing that by watching and contemplating these ideas of its own 

 making, it can read in them what takes place in the world without. 



