80 



organization of the nervous system and certain resulting ne- 

 cessities of thought; and the a priori beliefs determined by 

 these necessities differ from a posteriori beliefs simply in this, 

 that they are products of the experiences of innumerable 

 successive individuals instead of the experiences of a single 

 individual." 3 



Clearly, Spencer is not concerned so much with "fixed 

 intuitions" or "necessities of thought" as present facts in 

 human experience, as he is with a theory of the origin of such 

 intuition which, in fact, he definitely states. He speaks of 

 such "necessities of thought" as having been established as 

 a product of influences operative "throughout an enormous 

 past". Were he contending for the intuitions as present 

 facts, then he would simply have to show the characteristics 

 of these intuitions, whereby they are designated as 'fixed', 

 that is, unchanging data in human knowledge, and thus 

 differentiated from all other changing, transient facts of con- 

 sciousness. As Spencer, however, is dealing with the origin 

 of "fixed intuitions", it is to be observed that in this, there 

 is an entirely different question from the question of fact. 



The foregoing exposition has briefly traced Spencer's 

 account of the origin of "fixed intuitions". The essentials in 

 this origination are: (1) "The inner relations must correspond 

 with the outer ones; and therefore the order of states of con- 

 sciousness must be in some way expressible in terms of the 

 external order;" or, as he elsewhere states, "Relations which 

 are absolute in the environment are absolute in us." (2) " Per- 

 petually-repeated experiences have generated in us cognitions 

 of logical and mathematical relations" which are characterized 

 by necessity because of the inconceivableness of their nega- 

 tions. 



In order to test the validity of this process, an example 

 from the sphere of mathematics may be taken. The proposi- 

 tion that two plus two equals four, is a familiar one. "We 

 cannot think otherwise, " says Spencer, "because, during the 

 adjustment between the organism and the environment which 

 evolution has established, the inner relations have been so 

 moulded upon the outer relations that they cannot, by any 

 effort, be made not to fit them." 



Since we are dealing with outer relations, according to the 

 Spencerian theory, they must be relations of things. This 

 must mean that two things plus two things equal four things. 

 But the obvious question is, How did Spencer ever come to 

 know this equation as an outer relation? The relation, two 



"Principles of Ethics" 1893, 278. 



