156 REASOXING. 



may be, they can show nothing with regard to the infinite number of 

 cases in which the experiment has not been made." Moreover, axioms 

 are not only universal, they are also necessary. Now " experience 

 cannot offer the smallest ground for the necessity of a proposition. 

 She can obseiTO and record what has happened ; but she cannot find, 

 in any case, or in any accumulation of cases, any reason for what must 

 happen. She may see objects side by side ; but she cannot see a rea- 

 son why they must ever be side by side. She finds certain events to 

 occur in succession ; but the succession supplies, in its occurrence, no 

 reason for its recurrence. She contemplates external objects ; but she 

 cannot detect any internal bond, which indissolubly connects the future 

 with the past, the possible with the real. To learn a proposition by ex- 

 perience, and to see it to be necessarily true, are two altogether different 

 processes of thought."* And Mr. Whewell adds, " If any one does 

 not clearly comprehend this distinction of necessary and contingent 

 truths, he will not be able to go along with us in our researches into 

 the foundations of human knowledge ; nor indeed, to pursue with 

 success any speculation on the subject."t 



In order to leani what the distinction is, the non-recognition of which 

 incurs this denunciation, let us refer again to Mr. Whewell. " Neces- 

 sary truths are those in which we not only learn that the proposition 

 is true, but see that it 7nust be true ; in which the negation of the 

 truth is not only false, but impossible; in which we cannot, even by 

 an effort of imagination, or in a supposition, conceive the reverse of 

 that which is asserted. That there are such truths cannot be doubted. 

 We may take, for example, all relations of number. Three and Two, 

 added together, make Five. We cannot conceive it to be otherwise. 

 We cannot, by any freak of thought, imagine Three and Two to make 

 Seven."* 



Although Mr. W^hewell has naturally and properly employed a 

 variety of phrases to bring his meaning more forcibly home, he will, I 

 presume, allow that they are all equivalent ; and that what he means by 

 a necessaiy truth, would be sufficiently defined, a proposition the 

 negation of which is not only false but inconceivable. I am unable to 

 find in any of INIr. ^Vhewell's expressions, turn them what way you 

 will, a meaning beyond this, and I do not believe he would contend 

 that they mean anything more. 



This, therefore, is the principle asserted : that propositions, the 

 negation of which is inconceivable, or in other woi-ds, which we can- 

 not figure to ourselves as being false, must rest upon evidence of a 

 higher and more cogent description than any which expeiience can 

 afford. And we have next to consider whether there is any ground 

 for this assertion. 



Now I cannot but wonder that so much stress should be laid upon the 

 circumstance of inconceivableness, when there is such ample experience 

 to show that our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very 

 little to do with the possibility of the thing in itself; but is in truth very 

 much an affair of accident, and depends upon the past history and 

 habits of our own minds. There is no more generally acknowledtred 

 fact in human nature, than the extreme difficulty at first felt in con- 

 ceiving anything as possible, which is in contradiction to long estab- 



* Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, i., 5&— 61. 

 t njid-, 57. t Ibid., i., 54, 55. 



