NECESSARY TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 629 



as we proceed ; so I will pass right on to a scrutiny of the 

 actual mental structure which we find, 



THE GENESIS OF THE ELEMENTARY MENTAL CATEGORIES. 



We find : 1. Elementary sorts of sensation, and feelings 

 of personal activity ; 



2. Emotions ; desires ; instincts ; ideas of worth ; aes- 

 thetic ideas ; 



3. Ideas of time and space and number ; 



4. Ideas of difterence and resemblance, and of their de- 

 grees. 



5. Ideas of causal dependence among events ; of end 

 and means ; of subject and attribute. 



6. Judgments afiirmiug, denying, doubting, supposing 

 any of the above ideas. 



7. Judgments that the former judgments logically in- 

 V'olve, exclude, or are indifferent to, each other. 



Now we may j)ostulate at the outset that all these 

 forms of thought have a natural origin, if we could only get 

 at it. That assumption must be made at the outset of every 

 scientific investigation, or there is no temptation to pro- 

 ceed. But the first account of their origin which we are 

 likely to hit upon is a snars. All these mental affections 

 are ways of knowing objects. Most psychologists nowa- 

 daj's believe that the objects first, in some natural way, en- 

 gendered a brain from out of their midst, and then imprinted 

 these various cognitive affections upon it. But how? The 

 ordinary evolutionist answer to this question is exceedingly 

 simple-minded. The idea of most speculators seems to be 

 that, since it suffices noio for us to become acquainted with 

 a complex object, that it should be simply present to us 

 often enough, so it must be fair to assume universally 

 that, with time enough given, the mere presence of the 

 various objects and relations to be known must end by 

 bringing about the latter's cognition, and that in this way 

 all mental structure was from first to last evolved. Any 

 ordinary Spencerite will tell you that just as the experience 

 of blue objects wrought into our mind the color blue, and 

 hard objects got it to feel hardness, so the presence of 

 large and small objects in the world gave it the notion of 



