believability. The inconceivableness of a supposition is the extreme case of its unbelievability. This is the very foundation of Mr. Spencer's doctrine. The invariability of the belief is with him the real guarantee. The attempt to conceive the negative is made in order to test the inevitableness of the belief. It should be called, an attempt to believe the negative. When Mr. Spencer says that while looking at the sun a man can not conceive that he is looking into darkness, he should have said that a man can not believe that he is doing so. For it is surely possible, in broad daylight, to imagine one's self looking into darkness.[1] As Mr. Spencer himself says, speaking of the belief of our own existence, "That he might not exist, he can conceive well enough; but that he does not exist, he finds it impossible to conceive," i.e., to believe. So that the statement resolves itself into this: That I exist, and that I have sensations, I believe, because I can not believe otherwise. And in this case every one will admit that the impossibility is real. Any one's present sensations, or other states of subjective consciousness, that one person inevitably believes. They are facts known per se: it is impossible to ascend beyond them. Their negative is really unbelievable, and therefore there is never any question about believing it. Mr. Spencer's theory is not needed for these truths.
But according to Mr. Spencer there are other beliefs, relating to other things than our own subjective feelings, for which we have the same guarantee—which are, in a similar manner, invariable and necessary. With regard to these other beliefs, they can not be necessary, since they do not always exist. There have been, and are, many persons who do not believe the reality of an external world, still less the reality of extension and figure as the forms of that external world; who do not believe that space and time have an existence independent of the mind—nor any other of Mr. Spencer's objective intuitions. The negations of these alleged invariable beliefs are not unbelievable, for they are believed. It may be maintained, without obvious error, that we can not imagine tangible objects as mere states of our own and other people's consciousness; that the perception of them irresistibly suggests to us the idea of something external to ourselves: and I am not in a condition to say that this is not the fact (though I do not think any one is entitled to affirm it of any person besides himself). But many thinkers have believed, whether they could conceive it or not, that what we represent to ourselves as material objects, are mere modifications of consciousness; complex feelings of touch and of muscular action. Mr. Spencer may think the inference correct from the unimaginable to the unbelievable, because he holds that belief itself is but the persistence of an idea, and that what we can succeed in imagining we can not at the moment help apprehending as believable. But of what consequence is it what we apprehend at the moment, if the moment is in contradiction to the permanent state of our mind? A person who has been frightened when an infant by stories of ghosts, though he disbelieves them in after years (and perhaps never believed them), may be unable all his life to be in a dark place, in circumstances stimulating to the imagination, without mental discomposure. The idea of ghosts, with all its attendant terrors, is irresistibly called up in his mind by the outward circumstances. Mr. Spencer may say, that while he
- ↑ Mr. Spencer makes a distinction between conceiving myself looking into darkness, and conceiving that I am then and there looking into darkness. To me it seems that this change of the expression to the form I am, just marks the transition from conception to belief, and that the phrase "to conceive that I am," or "that any thing is," is not consistent with using the word conceive in its rigorous sense.
