COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



to Mr. MilFs objection. Mr. Mill would be 

 the last to admit that the realists were able to 

 conceive of Horse except as some particular 

 horse ; yet they stoutly maintained that they 

 could and did frame such a conception. The 

 Platonic theory of Ideas was based upon this 

 realistic tendency to lend an objective value to 

 the mere verbal signs of subjective conceptions, 

 which was dominant in the philosophy of the 

 Greeks and of the scholastics, and which, in 

 modern times, is well exemplified in the phi- 

 losophy of Hegel. 



We thus see that men may believe — or 

 believe that they believe — propositions which 

 they cannot, in the strict sense of the word, con- 

 ceive. Until men have become quite freed from 

 the inveterate habit of using words without stop- 

 ping to render them into ideas, they may doubt- 

 less go on asserting propositions which conflict 

 with experience ; but it is none the less true that 

 valid conceptions wholly at variance with the 

 subjective register of experience can at no time 

 be framed. And it is for this reason that we 

 cannot frame a conception of nitrogen which 

 will support combustion, or of a solid lump of 

 iron which will float in water, or of a triangle 

 which is round, or of a space enclosed by two 

 straight lines. So that when Mr. Mill hints that 

 it was once possible for men to frame concep- 

 tions which cannot now be framed, he tacitly 



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