PRIMARY CONCEPTS OF MODERN SCIENCE. 97 



a test of reality ? This question has been the subject of a famous 

 controversy between Dr. Whewell and John Stuart Mill, and of a 

 more recent discussion between Mill and Herbert Spencer. Mill 

 broadly denies that "our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing 

 has any thing to do with the possibility of the thing in itself," while 

 Spencer deems it to be a universal postulate of all thought that an in- 

 conceivable proposition, i. e., a proposition "of which the terms can- 

 not, by any effort, be brought before consciousness in that relation 

 which the proposition asserts between them — a proposition of which 

 the subject and predicate offer an insurmountable resistance to union 

 in thought " — must necessarily be held to be untrue. My present pur- 

 pose does not, in strictness, call for a thorough examination of this 

 question ; nevertheless, it is desirable that the confusion into which (as 

 is usual in such cases) it has been thrown by the emergencies of the 

 debate should be partially cleared up. 



Here, at the outset, it appears to me to be unfortunate that Mill 

 repudiates, and Spencer does not insist upon, a distinction suggested 

 by Coleridge between the Inconceivable and the Unimaginable, though 

 we may find reason for dissenting from Coleridge's proposition, that 

 " the Unimaginable may possibly be true, but the Inconceivable can- 

 not." It is true, as has been observed by Reid (and after him by 

 Stewart), that " conceiving, imagining, and apprehending, are com- 

 monly used as synonyms in our language;" but the distinction above 

 referred to is, nevertheless, both real and important. Mill, indeed, de- 

 clines to recognize this distinction, not from any deference to the 

 usages of ordinary speech, but by reason of his antagonism to a 

 philosophical system. He is a strict scholastic nominalist, and denies 

 that there are any objects corresponding to concepts in the mind any 

 more than in Nature, for the reason that concepts, being the results 

 of abstraction, are general, while objects can be represented or imaged 

 in thought only as particular. And, having pointed out (" Examina- 

 tion of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy," chap, xvii.) that in reasoning 

 we rarely attend to all the attributes of which a concept is said to be 

 the complement, but deal exclusively with more or less of these attri- 

 butes which we are able to bring separately before the mind by means 

 of names that suggest them, on the principle of the association of 

 ideas, he claims that our reasoning is carried on by means, not of con- 

 cepts, but of names. 



At the first blush, the remark of Sir W. Hamilton, that the war be- 

 tween the conceptualists and nominalists is a mere war of words, 

 would appear to be just. Surely the most inveterate nominalist must 

 admit that the material of our reasoning processes consists, not of the 

 sounds or written symbols composing words, but of the meanings 

 which underlie them. And, roughly stated, concepts are nothing but 

 these meanings. If a concept be, in the language of Sir W. Hamilton, 

 a " bundle of attributes " — as for purposes of discursive reasoning it 

 tol. iv. — 7 



