COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



The convictions throughout a wide range of 

 cases are rendered less fixed. Other causes than 

 those which are usual become conceivable ; 

 other effects can be imagined ; and hence there 

 comes an increasing modifiability of opinion. 

 This modifiability of opinion reaches its extreme 

 in those most highly cultured persons whose 

 multitudinous experiences include many expe- 

 riences of errors discovered, and whose repre- 

 sentativeness of thought is so far-reaching that 

 they habitually call to mind the various possi- 

 bilities of error, as constituting a general reason 

 for seeking new evidence and subjecting their 

 conclusions to revision. 



" If we glance over the series of contrasted 

 modes of thinking which civilization presents, 

 beginning with the savage who, seized by the 

 fancy that something is a charm or an omen, 

 thereafter continues firmly fixed in that belief, 

 and ending with the man of science whose con- 

 victions, firm where he is conscious of long- 

 accumulated evidence having no exception, are 

 plastic where the evidence though abundant is 

 not yet overwhelming, we see how an increase in 

 freedom of thought goes along with that higher 

 representativeness accompanying further mental 

 evolution." ^ 



If now we inquire for a moment into the 

 causes of this higher representativeness of civi- 



* Spencer, op. cit. ii. 524. [§ 486, Part VIII. chap, iii.] 

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