293 
comprehensible with one, except as to his modus ojoerandi, 
which we have nothing to do with here — only with his 
existence. 
It. may be thought of little consequence whether he is right 
or wrong in saying that the conservation of force is not an 
experimental law of nature, but a necessary truth or axiom 
“ transcending demonstration and underlying experience by 
being the basis of it 33 — and the only one ; for he expressly 
denies that all the commonly received axioms are self-evident 
or necessary truths (179 n.). But it is of more consequence 
than it looks ; for, if the conservation of force is really a self- 
evident truth, it is not a law of nature which required making 
by the only power that can make them. As a matter of fact, 
it has been established by a long series of experiments by real 
philosophers, who knew very well that it could only be an 
inductive truth, and not a deductive one, if true at all. Mr. 
Spencer has never discovered one single fact or law of nature, 
or a new cause or effect of any kind. He merely takes the 
correlation, or conservation, or indestructibility of force as he 
found it, gives it a new name, and dogmatically asserts that 
it is a necessary and self-evident truth prior to all experience, 
and that from it all the laws of nature come. 
For some reason of his own too, or perhaps only from a 
determination to have a phraseology as well as a religion of 
his own, he is pleased to call necessary or self-evident truths 
postulates, instead of axioms, which have always hitherto 
meant quite different things. The reason he gives for himself 
and Professor Huxley inventing the term “persistence of force ” 
instead of “ conservation/' as everybody else calls it (if not 
correlation), is that “ conservation implies a conserver,” which 
he therefore denies, although he over and over again assigns 
that as the only function of the power which it is the only 
business of religion to acknowledge. “ Correlation,” at any 
rate, does not imply a correlator ; but that was old, and “ Per- 
sistence ” is new. And this is the way he sets to work to 
show that it is the one necessary truth : — “ All reasoned-out 
conclusions must rest on some postulate. We cannot go on 
merging derivative truths in those wider and wider truths from 
which they are derived without reaching at last a widest truth 
which can be merged in no other, or derived from no other. 
And whoever contemplates the relation in which it stands to 
the truths of science in general will see that this truth tran- 
scending demonstration is the f persistence of force 3 33 (192 c.). 
Is it possible that Mr. Spencer does not himself see, but only 
expects unbelievers in a Creator but believers in him not to 
Mr. Spen- 
cer’s “ Pos- 
tulates.’* 
