ch. in.] THE TEST OF TRUTH. 59 



zation.' The first affirms that whatever is seen to be true, 

 under present conditions, will be true so long as these con- 

 ditions remain unaltered. The second affirms that whatever 

 is true now, being a truth irrespective of conditions, cannot 

 suffer any change from interfering conditions, and must 

 therefore be universally true." 1 



To this lucid exposition it is hardly necessary to add that 

 the mental compulsion under which we accept mathematical 

 truths is of precisely the same character as that under which 

 we accept physical or chemical truths. Our conception of 

 parallel lines— a conception which the Kantian admits to 

 have been formed by experience — is a conception of lines 

 which do not enclose space. And just as we found that, in 

 order to imagine nitrogen supporting combustion, we were 

 obliged to suppress the conception of nitrogen altogether and 

 substitute for it some other conception, we also find that, 

 in order to imagine two parallel lines enclosing a space, we 

 must suppress the conception of parallel lines altogether, and 

 substitute for it the conception of bent or converging lines. 

 The two cases are exactly similar. In the one case, as in 

 the other, our conceptions are but the registry of our ex- 

 perience, and can therefore be altered only by being tempo- 

 rarily annihilated. Our minds being that which intercourse 

 with the environment — both their own intercourse and that 

 of ancestral minds, as will be shown hereafter — has made 

 them, it follows that our indestructible beliefs must be the 

 registry of that intercourse, must be necessarily true, not 

 because they are independent of experience, but because they 

 are the only complete unqualified expression of it. Here 

 then, on the ruins of the Kantian hypothesis, we may erect 

 a canon of truth, as follows : — 



1 History of Philosophi/i 4th edit. vol. i. p. cv. This view, which I 

 hold to be the most important contribution ever made to the discussion of 

 Necessity uul Conringency, is sr ill more thoroughly and forcibly presented 

 by Mi. Lew;s in ins new work, Problems of Life, and Mind, vol. i. pp. 

 £53-414. 



