1 66 Ideas are not created. 



fact. The influence of printing, railways, telegraphs, 

 postal communication and other scientific develop- 

 ments, in aiding mental progress, afford other illustra- 

 tions. A multitude of facts of this kind, and many 

 others, leads us to the conclusion that each new idea 

 requires a cause to produce it, and that human know- 

 ledge is subject to the great law of causation ; also 

 that the creation of an idea out of nothing would be a 

 miracle, a phenomenon without a cause. Our present 

 knowledge was not created by us, but was originated 

 by previous knowledge and experience, including of 

 course inherited impressions. Even in what is termed 

 the " noblest effort of the mind," an act of reasoning 

 or inference, we do not create an idea, but only render 

 explicit in a new form of words, ideas already impli- 

 citly contained in the words of the propositions em- 

 ployed, as may easily be rendered manifest by 

 mechanical means in Jevons's "Logical Machine;" a 

 proper inference never contains more than its data. 

 In the so-called "creation " of ideas by the imagina- 

 tion also, the new ideas are evolved from old ones, 

 and rendered explicit by mental processes of analysis, 

 combination, permutation, &c. Our scientific in- 

 ventions also, being mental conceptions, an unr 

 limited number of them cannot be made by means 

 of a limited stock of old knowledge. It was in con- 

 sequence of this limit, viz,, the impossibility of 

 actually creating ideas out of nothing, that human 

 knowledge was not more advanced by metaphysical 

 speculations until science with its experiments and 



