NECESSARY TRUTHS—EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 639 



we saw to be entirely obscure. (Vol. I. p. 580 ; Vol. II. p. 

 364.) The oulj clear thing about the peculiarity seems to 

 be its interstitial character, and the certainty that no mere 

 appeal to man's ' experience ' suffices to explain it. 



When we pass from scientific to aesthetic and ethical 

 systems, every one readily admits that, although the ele- 

 ments are matters of experience, the peculiar forms of 

 relation into which they are woven are incongruent with 

 ■tile order of passively- received experience. The world of 

 aesthetics and ethics is an ideal world, a Utopia, a world 

 which the outer relations persist in contradicting, but which 

 we as stubbornly persist in striving to make actual. Why 

 do we thus invincibly crave to alter the given order of 

 nature ? Simply because other relations among things are far 

 more interesting to us and more charming than the mere 

 rates of frequency of their time- and sjjace-conjunctions. 

 These other relations are all secondary and brain-born, 

 * spontaneous variations ' most of them, of our sensibility, 

 whereby certain elements of exjjerieuce, and certain arrange- 

 ments in time and space, have acquired an agreeableness 

 which otherwise would not have been felt. It is true that 

 habitual arrangements uiay also become agreeable. But this 

 agreeableness of the merely habitual is felt to be a njere 

 ape and counterfeit of real iuward fitness ; and one sign of 

 intelligence is never to mistake the one for the other. 



There are then ideal and inward relations amongst the ob- 

 jects of our thought ichich can in no inteUigihle sense 7vhatever 

 be interpreted as reproductions of the order of outer experi- 

 ence. In the aesthetic and ethical realms they conflict with 

 its order — the early Christian with his kingdom of heaven, 

 and the contemporary anarchist with his abstract dream of 

 justice, will tell you that the existing order must perish, 

 root and branch, ere the true order can come. Now the 

 peculiarity of those relations among the objects of our 

 thought which are dubbed * scientific * is this, that although 

 they no more are inward reproductions of the outer order 

 than the ethical and {esthetic relations are, yet they do not 

 conflict with that order, but, once having sprung up by the 

 play of the inward forces, are found — some of them at least, 

 namely the only ones which have survived long enough to 



