THE EVOLUTION OF MIND 



tritive tendencies, which are transmissible from 

 parent to child. 



I believe that the last difficulties which may 

 have hovered about the doctrine of the Test of 

 Truth, expounded in the third chapter of our 

 Prolegomena, are now swept away. It must be 

 by this time quite clear that the inconceivability 

 test and the experience test are merely the ob- 

 verse faces of the same thing. An association 

 of subject and predicate, which answers to an 

 objective relation of which the experience has 

 been absolutely uniform, must be absolutely 

 indissoluble ; and vice versa. The ultimate 

 question at issue between Mr. Mill and Mr. 

 Spencer thus becomes reduced to a question of 

 terminology, save in one important particular, 

 in which I have already shown that Mr. Mill 

 is not only demonstrably wrong, but also in- 

 consistent with himself. The foregoing exposi- 

 tion adds new weight to the argument by which 

 it was formerly (Part I., chapter iii.) proved that 

 when Mr. Mill asserts that the negation of such 

 an axiom as the indestructibility of matter, which 

 is now inconceivable, was in past times conceiv- 

 able, he virtually asserts that there was a time 

 when men could frame inner relations of which 

 the corresponding outer relations had never 

 been presented in experience. And thus he not 

 only runs counter to the general theory of Life 

 as Adjustment which is here adopted, but he 

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