1 8 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



have to be acknowledged as a priori. This factor 

 issues from the nature of the mind that has the 

 experience, and introduces into experience all that 

 distinguishableness, that arrangedness, and that de- 

 scribable form, without which it could not be con- 

 ceived as apprehensible or intelligible, that is, as 

 an experience at all. 



The almost surprisingly happy thought of Mr. 

 Spencer and his school at this juncture — to turn the 

 flank of Kant and his " pure reason " by applying 

 the conception of evolution to the origin of ideas, 

 and thus explaining a priori knowing away — does 

 not do the work it was contrived for. It is certainly 

 adroit to say that cognitions which in us human 

 beings are felt as irresistible, as if part of the nature 

 of things and incapable of change or of alternative, 

 are simply the result in us of transmitted inheri- 

 tance ; that our remote ancestral predecessors had 

 these cognitions at most as associations only habit- 

 ual, regarding which no incapability of exception was 

 felt, and that our feeling them as necessities is 

 merely the result of their coming to us through gen- 

 eration after generation of successive ancestors, 

 handing on their accumulated associations in ever 

 increasing mass and cohesion. But this clever 

 stroke cannot get rid of Kant's suggestion, that in 

 order to the solidifying of associations in any con- 

 sciousness there must be some principle — some 



