NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 619 



The originality of these elements is not, then, a question 

 for dispute. The warfare of philosophers is exclusively rela- 

 tive to their forms of combination. The empiricist main- 

 tains that these forms can only follow the order of com- 

 bination in which the elements were originally awakened 

 by the impressions of the external world; the apriorists 

 insist, on the contrary, that some modes of combination, at 

 any rate, follow from the natures of the elements them- 

 selves, and that no amount of experience can modify this 

 result. 



■WHAT IS MEANT BY EXPERIENCE P 



The phrase 'organic mental structure' names the mat- 

 ter in disj)ute. Has the mind such a structure or not ? 

 Are its contents arranged from the start, or is the arrange- 

 ment they may possess simply due to the shuffling of them 

 by experience in an absolutely plastic bed ? Now the first 

 thing to make sure of is that when we talk of 'experience,' 

 we attach a definite meaning to the word. Experience means 

 experience of something foreign supposed to impress lis, whether 

 spontaneously or in consequence of our own exertions and 

 acts. Impressions, as we well know, aflect certain orders of 

 sequence and coexistence, and the mind's habits copy the 

 habits of the impressions, so that our images of things 

 assume a time- and space-arrangement which resembles 

 the time- and space-arrangements outside. To uniform 

 outer coexistences and sequences correspond constant con- 

 junctions of ideas, to fortuitous coexistences and sequences 

 casual conjunctions of ideas. We are sure that fire will 

 burn and water wet us, less sure that thunder will come 

 after lightning, not at all sure whether a strange dog will 

 bark at us or let us go by. In these ways experience 

 moulds us every hour, and makes of our minds a mirror of 

 the time- and space-connections between the things in the 

 world. The principle of habit within us so fxes the cojDy 

 at last that we find it difticult even to imagine how the out- 

 ward order could possibly be difi'erent from what it is, and 

 we continually divine from the present what the future is 

 to be. These habits of transition, from one thought to 

 another, are features of mental structure which were lack- 



