CH. in.] THE TEST OF TRUTH. C7 



Realism, because at that time it was most conspicuously 

 illustrated in the famous theory that wherever there is a 

 general term there must be a real objective thing correspond- 

 ing to it, — a general Horse, for example, in addition to all 

 individual horses. This single phase of the mental habit in 

 question might be cited as an all-sufficient answer to Mr. 

 Mill's objection. Mr. Mill would be the last to admit that 

 the realists were able to conceive of Horse except as some 

 particular horse; yet they stoutly maintained that they could 

 and did frame such a conception. The Platonic theory of 

 Ideas was based upon this realistic tendency to lend an 

 objective value to the mere verbal signs of subjective con- 

 ceptions, which was dominant in the philosophy of the Greeks 

 and of the scholastics, and which, in modern times, is well 

 exemplified in the philosophy of Hegel. 



"We thus see that men may believe — or believe that they 

 believe — propositions which they cannot, in the strict sense 

 of the word, conceive. Until men have become quite freed 

 from the inveterate habit of using words without stopping to 

 render them into ideas, they may doubtless go on asserting 

 propositions which conflict with experience ; but it is none 

 the less true that valid conceptions wholly at variance with 

 the subjective register of experience can at no time be framed. 

 And it is for this reason that we cannot frame a conception of 

 nitrogen which will support combustion, or of a solid lump of 

 iron which will float in water, or of a triangle which is round, 

 or of a space enclosed by two straight lines. So that when 

 Mr. Mill hints that it was once possible for men to frame 

 conceptions which cannot now be framed, he tacitly assumes 

 that conceptions may have been framed of which the elements 

 have never been joined together in experience. Yet of all 

 possible psychological theorems there is none, I suppose, 

 which, when overtly stated, Mr. Mill would more emphatically 

 deny than this. To see Mr. Mill unwittingly arrayed in the 

 lists against the experience-theory is indeed a singular spec- 



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