COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



But now, what do we mean when we say that, 

 after eliminating all perturbing conditions, a pro- 

 position of which the negation is unthinkable 

 must be necessarily true ? By a confusion of 

 ideas very unusual with him, Mr. Mill seems to 

 think that we mean to accredit such propositions 

 with expressing some necessary relation among 

 objective realities per se^ apart from their re- 

 lation to our intelligence ; for he somewhere 

 charges Mr. Spencer with " erecting the incur- 

 able limitations of the human conceptive faculty 

 into laws of the outward universe.*' When cor- 

 rectly interpreted, however, Mr. Spencer will be 

 found to have done no such thing. He simply 

 erects them, as Mr. Lewes expresses it, into 

 "laws of the conceptions we form of the uni- 

 verse." Holding as we do, that all our know- 

 ledge is derived from experience, that we have 

 no experience of the objective order of the re- 

 lations among things, and hence can never know 

 whether it agrees or disagrees with the subjec- 

 tive order of our conceptions, — it is passing 

 strange that we should ever have been called 

 upon to correct such a misinterpretation. All 



the entire absence of experiences on which a contradiction 

 could be grounded. If there were any truths independent of 

 Experience, contradictions to them would be conceivable, since 

 there would be no positive obstacle to the conception ; but a 

 contradiction is inconceivable only when all Experience op- 

 poses itself to the formation of the contradictory conception.'* 

 lOO 



