en. iti.] THE TEST OF TRUTH. 65 



existence or lapse into non-existence. But before the use of 

 the balance in chemistry had shown experimentally that 

 nothing ever disappears, hypotheses were freely propounded 

 in which the indestructibility of matter was entirely ignored ; 

 and, accordingly, Mr. Mill appears to believe that in former 

 times the annihilation of matter was thinkable. In reply it 

 is enough to observe that, so long as human intelligence has 

 been human intelligence, it can never have been possible to 

 frame in thought an equation between something and nothing: 

 yet this is the impossibility which must be surmounted before 

 the annihilation or the creation of a particle of matter can 

 become representable in consciousness. The truth is that 

 whoever, before the discoveries of chemistry, maintained 

 that matter is destructible, defended a verbal proposition, 

 which answered to no framed or frameable conception. Of a 

 piece with this is the fact that in all ages men have tortured, 

 slain, calumniated, or otherwise persecuted each other in their 

 zeal to get sundry propositions established, the subject and 

 predicate of which could never be united in thought. It is 

 not so very long since Michael Servetus was burned at the 

 stake for a heresy partly based upon doubts as to the possible 

 equality or identity of three and one ; yet not even Mr. Mill 

 would maintain that it has ever been possible for human 

 intelligence to join together the members of the quantitative 

 theorem implied in the doctrine of the Trinity. It appears, 

 therefore, that men may believe, or at least maintain, what 

 they can in nowise conceive. As Mr. Spencer well says, 

 " Eefrain from rendering your terms into ideas, and you may 

 reach any conclusion whatever. That the whole is equal to 

 its part is a proposition that may be quite comfortably 

 entertained so long as neither wholes nor parts are imagined." 

 This is one of the ways in which so many absurd theories 

 obtain currency, and having once become current are so 

 difficult to banish from circulation. The philologist A. W. 

 Schlegel once suggested that the terminations of words may 

 vol. I. F 



