Herbert Spencer

“ Clearly, unless we possess fundamental ideas, or can gain a knowledge of things in themselves, no logical process can give to the notion, impossible, any larger meaning than this. But if, at any time, the inability of men to conceive the negation of a given proposition simply proves that their experience, up to that time, has, without exception, confirmed such proposition; then when they assert that its untruth is impossible, they really assert no more than when they assert that its negation is inconceivable. ”

“ In the philosophy of Kant, however, this is done. Scepticism merely questions all things, and professes to decisively affirm nothing. Kantism, in anxiety to escape it, decisively affirms things contrary to universal belief. That Space and Time are "forms of sensibility" or "subjective conditions of thought" that have no objective basis, is as repugnant to common sense as any proposition that can be framed. And to adopt this proposition instead of the one that we have no sufficient evidence of any objective existence, seems to be a preference of the greater evil to the less. ”

“ Personal existence, the existence of ideas, of consciousness, of beliefs—these look equally primordial. Each seems to pre-suppose one or more of the others; and yet each in turn may be assigned with some plausibility as the basis of the others. Personal existence may be held the most certain fact of all. Yet it may be argued, that personal existence is merely a belief; and that the existence of beliefs is, therefore, more certain than personal existence. ”

“ In proof that inconceivability is not a criterion of impossibility, he cites the fact, that "we can neither conceive, on the one hand, an ultimate minimum of space or time; nor can we, on the other, conceive their infinite divisibility. In like manner, we cannot conceive the absolute commencement of time, nor the utmost limit of space, and are yet equally unable to conceive them without any commencement or limit." ”

“ To say that as a corollary from this, the invariable existence of a belief is our final test of certainty—to say that where there are conflicting propositions, one of which corresponds to an invariably existent belief whilst the other does not, we must adopt the one that so corresponds, is needless—is in fact a truism. For an invariably existent belief is, by virtue of its being one, incapable of being replaced by any other. It is not that we ought to adopt that belief, but that we can do nothing else. In saying that it is invariably existent we say that there is no alternative belief. ”

“ But the ability to contain bodies we cannot conceive annihilated because we have never known it absent. In all our experience that ability has remained constant; and hence the conception of it is similarly constant in our minds. Evidently, then, our powerlessness to conceive the non-existence of Space requires no such hypothesis as that of Kant for its explanation. And we are, therefore, not obliged to take to the anomaly which that hypothesis presents; namely, that though Space is a property of the ego, yet we cannot conceive it to disappear when the ego disappears. ”

“ An assumption may be legitimate if the reasoning based on it, by bringing out a result congruous with known truths, prove the assumption true. But what if the reasoning prove the assumption false, whilst the very terms of the reasoning presuppose its truth? We do, indeed, in mathematics assume a certain number to be the answer to a given question, and on this assumption legitimately base an argument which, by ending in an absurdity, disproves the assumption. ”

“ His personal existence is a truth which every man can cite this warrant for. To his consciousness it is a truth of which the negation is inconceivable. That he might not exist he can conceive well enough; but that he does not exist he finds it impossible to conceive. The pain felt on plunging the hand into scalding water, is a pain which the sufferer cannot, "by an effort of imagination," conceive non-existent. Were the existence of the pain a truth of which the negation was conceivable, he would quickly conceive the negation, and thus rid himself of the pain. ”

“ At first sight, the scepticism of Hume, by not asserting the existence of mind, escapes this difficulty. But the escape is apparent only. In reality, Hume makes even more assumptions than Berkeley does. He sets out by saying, that our perceptions resolve themselves into impressions and ideas; and on this division all his reasoning hinges. Obviously, did he merely postulate these two things, the foundation of his argument would be less certain than the undecomposable belief he calls in question. ”

“ Not only, however, is the invariable existence of a belief our sole warrant for every truth of immediate consciousness, and for every primary generalization of the truths of immediate consciousness—every axiom, but it is our sole warrant for every demonstration. ”

“ Were apparent simultaneity in the acts of consciousness a proof of real simultaneity, nothing would be clearer than that we perceive an object and its distance from us "in the same indivisible moment of intuition;" for it is impossible to distinguish any interval between these perceptions. Yet no fact in psychology is better established than this,—that the perception of a thing's distance is subsequent to the perception of the thing itself—is a deduction from the mode in which the thing affects us; and that the apparent simultaneity is in truth a succession too rapid for detection. ”

“ We find that every fresh assumption of the postulate involves some risk of error; and, indeed, where the calculation is extremely intricate, and the assumptions therefore extremely numerous, our experience teaches us that the probability that there has been a wrong assumption is greater than the probability that there has not. So too in argument. We lose faith in a long series of steps, however logical they may seem, unless we can test the inference by appeal to fact—that is, unless we can get at the inference by a single use of the postulate. ”

“ Whilst looking at the sun a man can no more conceive that he is then looking into darkness, than he can conceive the part greater than the whole. How then does the belief—this is sun-light, differ in nature from the belief—the whole is greater than its part? ”

“ For if we say that all knowledge is organized experience, and that, in assigning one belief in proof of another, we are simply assigning a wider experience in proof of a narrower, it is clear that we cannot continue to assign wider and wider experiences in proof of each other, without arriving finally at the widest. As our experience had a beginning, it follows that, in tracing it backwards, we must ultimately come to our first or deepest experience—an experience which has no other to rest upon. Similarly with the hypothesis of fundamental ideas. ”

“ At present we have to consider the contents of the intellect solely as a system of beliefs, with a view to determine their relative validity. We have seen that beliefs must be their own sureties—that an indestructible belief can have no other warrant than its indestructibility; and what we have just found is, that the inconceivableness of its negation is simply an experimental proof of its indestructibility.
It results then that for our primary beliefs, the fact of invariable existence tested by an abortive effort to cause non-existence, is the only reason assignable. ”

“ So long as he refuses to translate the facts into any hypothesis, he feels that he is conscious of the book, and not of an impression of the book—of an objective thing, and not of a subjective thing. He feels that the sole content of his consciousness is the book considered as an external reality. ”

“ For, granting the sceptic his premisses, and making no objection to his reasoning, what is the sum total of his achievement? Simply this; that by a long and involved series of steps he brings Realism's belief in the existence of objects to a reductio ad absurdum. But his conclusion that objects do not exist, Realism brings to a reductio ad absurdum by a single step. At best, then, he does but offer a many-stepped reductio ad absurdum in place of a single-stepped one. What, now, is the worth of such an offer? If the reductio ad absurdum afford valid proof, the belief of Realism is true. ”

“ Logic is simply a systematization of the process by which we indirectly obtain this warrant for beliefs that do not directly possess it. To gain the strongest conviction possible respecting any complex fact, we either analytically descend from it by successive steps, each of which we unconsciously test by the inconceivableness of its negation, until we reach some axiom or truth which we have similarly tested, or we synthetically ascend from such axiom or truth by such steps. ”

“ To give any psychological answer—to discuss Hume's theory of belief or any other, would be beside the argument. No concrete analysis of belief is possible without taking for granted ideas, or consciousness, or personal identity; and to do this would be to involve in our desired test of credibility the very theories it is proposed to test by it. At present our assumptions are limited to three—existence, its correlative non-existence, and a cognition of the difference, that is—belief. The problem is to find a canon of belief without assuming anything further. ”

“ The first reply is, that we cannot possibly know that our notion of their externality is a synthesis, with anything like the certainty with which we can know that their externality is real. As the reasoning employed to prove the synthetic nature of the realistic belief, is itself a synthesis of a highly complicated kind, whilst the synthesis of Realism is one of the simplest possible—so simple as to have become organic—it follows that any such objection to Realism is, like its many kindred ones, self-destructive; it repeatedly assumes the validity of that whose validity it questions. ”

“ Whether really pre-existent or not they can have no logical pre-existence; since the being perceived to exist is the being believed.
Hence belief is the fact which, to our intellects, is antecedent to, and inclusive of, all other facts. It is the form in which every fact must present itself to us, and therefore underlies every fact. It alone of all things cannot be denied without direct self-contradiction. The propositions—there is no consciousness, there are no ideas, there is no personal identity, may be absurd ”

“ Turn we now to the hypotheses which serve as fulcra for the attempted overthrow of Realism, beginning, as we may properly do, with Hypothetical Realism—the comparatively unassuming one from which the others have sprung, but whose parentage they have in their high pretensions found it convenient to ignore.
No one can form any conception of the representative hypothesis without abandoning his first centre of consciousness, in which he is simply percipient, and taking up another position, from which to inspect the act of percipience. A spectator gazing at a fire is simply conscious of the fire ”

“ Consequently, it becomes impossible to conceive that there can be any non-ego at all. If it be replied that the hypothesis itself involves that we cannot conceive anything without impressing our own forms of thought upon it, and that therefore an unconditioned non-ego is by the hypothesis inconceivable, even though existent, the rejoinder is, that an existence of which we have no evidence, which we cannot conceive, and which it is impossible that we should conceive, is an existence we have as strong a warrant for denying as we have for denying anything. ”

“ Refrain from rendering your terms into ideas, and you may reach any conclusion whatever. The whole is equal to its part, is a proposition that may be quite comfortably entertained so long as neither wholes nor parts are imagined. If, then, Hume's argument claim to be anything more than a string of logical forms containing no substance, its first term—an impression, must be used only as the representative of a definite concept; and no such definite concept can be formed without two other things—the impressing and the impressed—being involved. ”

“ Mind is a synthesis of states of consciousness—is a thing we can form no notion of without re-membering, re-collecting some of our mental acts. Every conception of relation is a synthesis—that of inclusion being one. The child is enabled to recognise one thing as in another, by a series of observations similar to, and simultaneous with, those that teach it the externality of things; and until these observations have been generalized, the proposition that ideas are in minds must be unthinkable. ”

“ Mill assumes that there is something more certain in a demonstration than in anything else—some necessary truth in the steps of our reasoning, which is not possessed by the axioms they start from. How can this assumption be justified? In each successive syllogism the dependence of the conclusion upon its premisses is a truth of which we have no other proof than the inconceivability of the negation. Unless our perception of logical truth is à priori, which Mr. Mill will not contend, it too, like our perceptions of mathematical truth, has been gained from experience. ”

“ Not recognising the fact, that for the validity of every step in an argument, we have no better guarantee than we have for an intuition of sense, but assuming, on the contrary, that whilst our simple perceptions of external existences are fallible, our complex perceptions of internal co-existences are infallible—assuming this, men have sought to reach by reasoning a knowledge that transcends ordinary knowledge. ”

“ Exception might be taken to this argument on several grounds; on the ground that space and time are not strictly conceivable things at all in the sense that other things are; on the ground that the alleged inconceivableness of a minimum or a limit is not really of the same nature as those with which it is classed—is not due to an arrest of the conceptive power, but a baffling of it—is not an inability to get rid of a certain conception, but an inability to form any conception. ”

“ We consider an inference logically drawn from an established premiss to be true. Yet, in millions of cases, men have been wrong in the inferences they have thought thus drawn. Do we, therefore, argue that it is absurd to consider an inference true "on no other ground" than that it is logically drawn from an established premiss? ”

“ Though in common language we speak of a belief as something separate from the conception to which it relates, yet on analysis we find that we simply express by it a certain property of such conception—its persistence. When after given antecedents there arises a state of consciousness which we can change with very little effort, we have a weak belief; when the state of consciousness is one which we can change with difficulty, we call the belief a strong one; when it is one which we find ourselves utterly unable to change, we consider it a belief of the highest order. ”

“ If now we demur to the many obvious assumptions of Realism which this reasoning involves, and insist on Berkeley re-stating it, without taking for granted anything save the existence of mind and ideas, he cannot do so. Let the words that stand for objective realities be supposed to stand for our ideas of them, and the argument becomes meaningless. ”