MATTER, MOTION, AND FORCE 



quired knowledge, but even the inherited consti- 

 tution of our minds, is the product of accu- 

 mulated and integrated experiences, partly per- 

 sonal but chiefly ancestral. Upon this wider 

 ground we shall find ourselves able to dwell in 

 peace with our old foes, the intuitionalists, since 

 it will be seen that the very intuitions upon 

 which they rightly insist as inexplicable from 

 individual experience are nevertheless explicable 

 from the organized experiences of countless gen- 

 erations. And the conclusion will then assert 

 itself, with redoubled emphasis, that the axiom 

 of the persistence of force, being the product 

 of the entire intercourse between subject and 

 object since the dawn of intelligence, must have 

 the highest warrant which any axiom can have. 

 Let us for the present, however, content our- 

 selves with reproducing the psychological argu- 

 ment by which Mr. Spencer clinches his demon- 

 stration of the necessity which we are under to 

 conceive of force as persistent. " The inde- 

 structibility of matter and the continuity of mo- 

 tion we saw to be really corollaries from the 

 impossibility of establishing in thought a rela- 

 tion between something and nothing. What 

 we call the establishment of a relation in thought 

 is the passage of the substance of conscious- 

 ness from one form into another. To think 

 of something becoming nothing would involve 

 that this substance of consciousness, having just 

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