166 



HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE. 



[chap. 



IS no es- 

 plauation. 



Belief in 

 substance. 



Mill on 

 Bain. 



Bain on 



the belief 

 in the 

 veracity of 

 memory. 



accounted for by any modification of its passive capacity for 

 feelings. Bat this is not what Professor Bain means. Stripped 

 of its verbiage, his theory of the subject seems to me to come to 

 nothing more than this : the germ of belief in anything consists in 

 readiness to act on that belief ; and this is no explanation at all. 

 I do not even admit that readiness to act on a belief has neces- 

 sarily anything to do with the first rudimentary formation of 

 belief, or with the origin of the power of believing. The belief 

 that wherever there are properties there must be substance, for 

 instance, appears to me to contain no active element whatever 

 in Professor Bain's sense. This argument, however, is of no 

 weight in the estimation of Professor Bain and the school to 

 which he belongs, as they reduce the idea of substance to that of 

 mere permanence. 



Mr. MlU, in liis review of Professor Bain's work on the 

 Emotions and the Will,^ truly remarks that belief is the great 

 difficulty of the (exclusive) association theory ; that is to say, 

 the theory which would account for all the facts of mind, other 

 than mere sensations, by the laws of association alone. He does 

 not express any decided opinion as to Professor Baiu's success in 

 solving the difficulty. I think belief is not the difficulty of the 

 association theory, regarded as a complete and exclusive theory, 

 but its refutation. I think, as I have already stated, that 

 habitual association will account for the origin of our concep- 

 tions, but not of our beliefs ; or, to use what is perhaps more 

 accurate language, that the laws of habitual association will 

 account for the power of conceiving, but not for the power of 

 believing. 



If I understand Professor Bain, he goes so far as to argue that 

 the belief in the veracity of memory is not an ultimate fact, but 

 produced in the same way in which (according to him) any other 

 belief is produced ; that is to say, that belief in the veracity of 

 memory is, in its germ, readiness to act on the belief that things 

 are as we remember them. I think this is open to the objection 

 that it is an exi^lanation which takes for granted the thing to 

 be explained. Of course the truth of a belief in the veracity of 

 memory, or in anything whatever that is past, or future, or 

 external, can be tested only by its agreement with facts. But 

 this does not account for its original formation ; and I think 

 the only possible germ, or root, of the belief in the veracity of 



' Mni's Dissertations and Discussions, vol. iii. 



