NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 631 



coup that we find that they correspond to some reality. 

 What immediately produced them were previous thoughts, 

 with which, and with the brain-processes of which, that 

 reality had naught to do. 



Why may it not have been so of the original ele- 

 ments of consciousness, sensation, time, space, resemblance, 

 difference, and other relations ? Why may they not have 

 come into being by the back-door method, by such 

 physical jDrocesses as lie more in the sphere of morpho- 

 logical accident, of inward summation of effects, than in 

 that of the * sensible jjresence ' of objects ? Why may they 

 not, in short, be j)ure idiosyncrasies, spontaneous variations, 

 fitted by good luck (those of them which have survived) 

 to take cognizance of objects (that is, to steer us in our 

 active dealings with them), without being in any intelligible 

 sense immediate derivatives from them ? I think we shall 

 find this view gain more and more plausibility as we pro- 

 ceed.* 



All these elements are subjective duplicates of outer 

 objects. They are not the outer objects. The secondary 

 qualities among them are not supposed by any educated 

 person even to resemble the objects. Tlheix nature depends 

 more on the reacting brain than on the stimuli which 

 touch it off. This is even more palpably true of the natures 

 of pleasure and pain, effort, desire and aversion, and of such 

 feelings as those of cause and substance, of denial and of 



* Mr. Grant Allen, in a brilliant article entitled Idiosyncrasy (Mind, 

 VIII. 493), seeks to show that accidental morphological changes in the 

 brain cannot possibly be imagined to result in any mental change of a sort 

 which would Jit the animal to its environment. If spontaneous variation 

 ever works on the brain, its product, says Mr. Allen, ought to be an idiot 

 or a raving madman, not a minister and interpreter of Nature, Only the 

 environment can change us in the direction of accommodation to itself. 

 But I think we ought to know a little better just what the molecular 

 changes in the brain are on which thought depends, before we talk so con- 

 fidently about what the efifect can be of their possible variations. Mr. 

 Allen, it should be said, has made a laudable elfort to conceive them dis- 

 tinctly. To me his conception remains too purely anatomical. Meanwhile 

 this essay and another by the same author in the Atlantic Monthly are 

 probably as serious attempts as any that have been made towards applying 

 the Spencerian theorj' in a radical way to the facts of human history. 



