The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

infant's brain not only make possible certain combinations of impressions, bnt also imply that such combinations will hereafter be made — imply that there are answering combinations in the outer world — imply a preparedness to cognize these combinations — imply faculties of comprehending them. It is true that the resulting compound psychical changes do not take place with the same readiness and automatic precision as the simple reflex action instanced— it is true that some individual experiences seem required to establish them. But while this is partly due to the fact that these combinations are highly involved, extremely varied in their modes of occurrence, made up therefore of psychical relations less completely coherent, and hence need further repetitions to perfect them ; it is in a much greater degree due to the fact that at birth the organization of the brain is incomplete, and does not cease its spontaneous progress for twenty or thirty years afterwards. Those who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form. Were the infant born with a full-sized and completely-constructed brain, their position would be less untenable. But, as the case stands, the gradually-increasing intelligence displayed throughout childhood and youth is more attributable to the completion of the cerebral organization than to the individual experiences— a truth proved by the fact that in adult life there is sometimes displayed a high endowment of some faculty which, during education, was never brought into play.

Doubtless, experiences received by the individual furnish the concrete materials for all thought. Doubtless, the organized and semi-organized arrangements existing among the cerebral nerves can give no knowledge until there has been a presentation of the external relations to which they correspond. And doubtless the child's daily observations and reasonings aid the formation of those involved nervous connections that are in process of spontaneous evolution ; just as its daily gambols aid the development of its limbs. But saying this is quite a different thing from saying that its intelligence is wholly produced by its experiences. That is an utterly inadmissible doctrine— a doctrine which makes the presence of a brain meaningless — a doctrine which makes idiotcy unaccountable.

" In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment, there is truth in the doctrine of ' forms of intuition ' — not the truth which its defenders suppose, but a parallel truth. Corresponding to absolute external relations, there are established in the structure of the nervous system absolute internal relations — relations that are potentially present before birth in the shape of definite nervous connections ; that are antecedent to, and independent of, individual experiences ; and that are automatically disclosed along with the first cognitions. And,

as here understood, it is not only these fundamental relations which are thus predetermined, but also hosts of other relations of a more or less constant kind, which are congenitally represented by more or less complete nervous connections. But these predetermined internal relations, though independent of the experiences of the individual, are not independent of experiences in general : they have been determined by the experiences of preceding organisms. The corollary here drawn from the general argument is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely-numerous experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest ; and have slowly amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant— which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or fur ther complicates — and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations. And thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thub it happens that , faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in somb inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakspeares. "

This is a brilliant and seductive statement, and it doubtless includes a good deal of truth. Unfortunately it fails to go into details ; and when the details are scrutinized, as they soon must be by us, many of them will be seen to be inexplicable in this simple way, and the choice will then remain to us either of denying the experiential origin of certain of our judgments, or of enlarging the meaning of the word experience so as to include these cases among its effects.

If we adopt the former course we meet with a controversial diflficulty. The * experience-philosophy ' has from time immemorial been the opponent of theological modes of thought. The word experience has a halo of anti-supernaturalism about it ; so that if anyone express dissatisfaction with any function claimed for it, he is liable to be treated as if he could only be animated by loyalty to the catechism, or in some way have the interests of obscurantism at heart. I am entirely certain that, on this ground alone, what I have erelong to say will make this a sealed chapter to many of my readers. " He denies experience ! " they will exclaim, " denies science; believes the mind created by miracle; is a regular old partisan of innate ideas ! That is enough ! we'll listen to such antediluvian twaddle no more." Eegrettable as is the loss of readers capable of such wholesale discipleship, I feel that a definite meaning for the Word experience is even more important than their company. * Experience ' does not mean every natural, as opposed to every supernatural, cause. It means a particular sort of natural agency, alongside of which other more recondite natural agencies may perfectly well exist. With the scientific animus of anti-supernaturalism we ought to agree, but we ought to free ourselves from its verbal idols and bugbears.

Nature has many methods of producing the same effeco. She may make a * born ' draughtsman or singer by tipping in a certain direction at an opportune moment the molecules of some human ovum ; or she may bring forth a child ungifted and make him spend laborious but successful years at school. She may make our ears ring by the sound of a bell, or by a dose of quinine ; make us see yellow by spreading a field of buttercups before our eyes, or by mixing a little santonine powder with our food ; fill us with terror of certain surroundings by making them really dangerous, or by a blow which produces a pathological alteration of our brain. It is obvious that we need two words to designate these two modes of operating. In the one case the natural agents produce perceptions which take cognizance of the agents themselves ; in the other case, they prodm^e perceptions which take cognizance of something else. What is taught to the mind by the * experience,' in the first case, is the order of the experience itself — the * inner relation ' (in Spencer's phrase) * corresponds ' to the * outer relation' wkich produced it, by remembering and knowing the latter. But in the case of the other sort of natural agency, what is taught to the mind has nothing to do with the agency

itself, but with some different outer relation altogether. A diagram will express the alternatives. B stands for our human brain in the midst of the world. All the little o's with arrows proceeding from them are natural objects (like sunsets, etc.), which impress it through the senses, and in the strict sense of the word give it experience, teaching it by habit and association what is the order of their ways. AU the little a?'s inside the brain and all the little cc's outside of it are other natural objects and processes (in the ovum, in the blood, etc.), which equally modify the brain, but mould it to no cognition of themselves. The tinnitus aurium discloses no properties of the quinine ; the musical endowment teaches no embryology ; the morbid dread (of solitude, perhaps) no brain-pathology ; but the way in which a dirty sunset and a rainy morrow hang together in the mind copies and teaches the sequences of sunsets and rainfall in the outer world.

In zoological evolution we have two modes in which an animal race may grow to be a better match for its environment. First, the so-called way of * adaptation,' in which the environment may itself modify its inhabitant by exercising, hardening, and habituating him to certain sequences, and these habits may, it is often maintained, become hereditary. Second, the way of ' accidental variation,' as Mr. Darwin termed it, in which certain young are born with peculiarities that help them and their progeny to survive. That variations of this sort tend to become hereditary, no one doubts

The first mode is called by Mr. Spencer direct, the second indirect, equilibration. Both equilibrations must of course be natural and physical processes, but they belong to entirely different physical spheres. The direct influences are obvious and accessible things. The causes of variation in the young are, on the other hand, molecular and hidden. The direct influences are the animal's * experiences,' in the widest sense of the term. Where what is influenced by them is the mental organism, they are conscious experiences, and become the objects as well as the causes of their effects. That is, the effect consists in a tendency of the experience itself to be remembered, or to have its elements thereafter coupled in imagination just as they were coupled in the experience. In the diagram these experiences are represented by the o's exclusively. The cc's, on the other hand, stand for the indirect causes of mental modification— causes of which we are not immediately conscious as such, and which are not the direct objects of the effects they produce. Some of them are molecular accidents before birth ; some of them are collateral and remote combinations, unintended combinations, one might say, of more direct effects wrought in the unstable and intricate brain-tissue. Such a result is unquestionably the susceptibility to music, which some individuals possess at the present day. It has no zoological utility ; it corresponds to no object in the natural environment ; it is a pure incident ol having a hearing organ, an incident depending on such instable and inessential conditions that one brother may have it and another brother not. Just so with the susceptibility to sea-sickness, which, so far from being engendered by long experience of its * object ' (if a heaving deck can be called its object) is erelong annulled thereby.

Our higher aesthetic, moral, and intellectual life seems made up of affections of this collateral and incidental sort, which have entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather have not entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house. No one can successfully treat of psychogenesis, or the factors of mental evolution, without distinguishing between these two ways in which the mind is assailed. The way of * experience ' proper is tlie front door, the door of the five senses. The agents which affect the brain in this way immediately become the mind's objects. The other agents do not. It would be simply silly to say of two men with perhaps equal effective skill in drawing, one an untaught natural genius, the other a mere obstinate plodder in the studio, that both alike owe their skill to their ' experience.' The reasons of their several skills lie in wholly disparate natural cycles of causation.*

/ iviU then, with the reader's permission, restrict the word * experience ' to processes which influence the mind by the front-door-way of simple habits and association. What the back-door-effects may be will probably grow clearer * Principles of Biology, part iii. chaps, xi, xii. — Goltz and Loeb have found that dogs become mild in character when their occipital, and fierce when their frontal, brain-lobes are cut off. " A dog which originally was <rross in an extreme degree, never suffering himself to be touched, and xiven refusing, after two days' fasting, to take a piece of bread from my hand, became, after a bilateral operation on the occipital lobes, perfectly trustful and harmless. He underwent five operations on these parts. . . . Each one of them made him more good-natured; so that at last (just as Goltz observed of his dogs) he would let other dogs take away the very bones which he was gnawing " (Loeb, Pfliiger's Archiv, xxxix. 300). A course of kind treatment and training might have had a similar effect. But how absurd to call two such different causes by the same name, and to say both times that the beast's ' experience of outer relations ' is what educates him to good-nature. This, however, is virtually what all writers do who ignore the distinction between the ' front-door ' and the * backdoor ' manners of producing mental change.

One of the most striking of these back-door affections is susceptibility to the charm of drunkenness. This (taking drunkenness in the broadest sense, as teetotalers use the word) is one of the deepest functions of human nature. Half of both the poetry and the tragedy of human life would Tanish if alcohol were taken away. As it is, the thirst for it is such tha/, in the United States the cash-value of its sales amounts to that of the salt-j of meat and of bread put together. And yet what ancestral 'outer relation ' is responsible for this peculiar reaction of ours? The only ' outer relation ' could be the alcohol itself, which, comparatively speaking, came into the environment but yesterday, and which, so far from creating, is tending to eradicate, the love of itself from our mental structure, by letting only those families of men survive in whom it is not strong. The love of drunkenness is a purely accidental susceptibility of a brain, evolved for entirely different uses, and its causes are to be sought in the molecular realm, rather than in any possible order of ' outer relations. '

as we proceed ; so I will pass right on to a scrutiny of the actual mental structure which we find. We find : 1. Elementary sorts of sensation, and feelings of personal activity ; 2. Emotions ; desires ; instincts ; ideas of worth ; aesthetic ideas ; 4. Ideas of difference and resemblance, and of their degrees. 5. Ideas of causal dependence among events ; of end and means ; of subject and attribute. 6. Judgments affirming, denying, doubting, supposing any of the above ideas.

7. Judgments that the former judgments logically involve, exclude, or are indifferent to, each other. Now we may postulate at the outset that all these forms of thought have a natural origin, if we could only get at it. That assumption must be made at the outset of every scientific investigation, or there is no temptation to proceed. But the first account of their origin which we are likely to hit upon is a snare. All these mental affections are ways of knowing objects. Most psychologists nowadays believe that the objects first, in some natural way, engendered a brain from out of their midst, and then imprinted these various cognitive affections upon it. But how ? The ordinary evolutionist answer to this question is exceedingly simple-minded. The idea of most speculators seems to be that, since it suffices now for us to become acquainted with a complex object, that it should be simply present to us often enough, so it must be fair to assume universally that, with time enough given, the mere presence of the various objects and relations to be known must end by bringing about the latter's cognition, and that in this way all mental structure was from first to last evolved. Any ordinary Spencerite will tell you that just as the experience of blue objects wrought into our mind the color blue, and hard objects got it to feel hardness, so the presence of large and small objects in the world gave it the notion of

size, moving objects made it aware of motion, and objectiye successions taught it time. Similarly in a world with different impressing things, the mind had to acquire a sense of difference, whilst the like parts of the world as they fell upon it kindled in it the perception of similarity. Outward sequences which sometimes held good, and sometimes failed, naturally engendered in it doubtful and uncertain forms of expectation, and ultimately gave rise to the disjunctive forms of judgment ; whilst the hypothetic form, *if a, then 5,' was sure to ensue from sequences that were invariable in the outer world. On this view, if the outer order suddenly were to change its elements and modes, we should have no faculties to cognize the new order by. At most we should feel a sort of frustration and confusion. But little by little the new presence would work on us as the old one did ; and in course of time another set of psychic categories would arise, fitted to take cognizance of the altered world.

This notion of the outer world inevitably building up a sort of mental duplicate of itself if we only give it time, is so easy and natural in its vagueness that one hardly knows how to start to criticise it. One thing, however, is obvious, namely that tJw manner in which we now become acquainted with complex objects need not in the least resemble the manner in which the original elements of our consciousness grew up. Now, it is true, a new sort of animal need only be present to me, to impress its image permanently on my mind ; but this is because I am already in possession of categories for knowing each and all of its several attributes, and of a memory for retracing the order of their conjunction. I now have preformed categories for all possible objects. The objects need only awaken these from their slumber. But it is a very different matter to account for the categories themselves. I think we must admit that the origin of the various elementary feelings is a recondite history, even after some sort of neural tissue is there for the outer world to begin its work on. The mere existence of things to be known is even now not, as a rule, sufficient to bring about a knowledge of them. Our abstract and general discoveries usually come to us as lucky fancies : and it is only apreg

coup tliat we find that they correspond to some reality. What immediately produced them were previous thoughts, with which, and with the brain-processes of which, that reality had naught to do. Why may it not have been so of the original elements of consciousness, sensation, time, space, resemblance, difference, and other relations ? Why may they not have come into being by the back-door method, by such physical processes as lie more in the sphere of morphological accident, of inward summation of effects, than in that of the * sensible presence ' of objects ? Why may they not, in short, be pure idiosyncrasies, spontaneous variations, fitted by good luck (those of them which have survived) to take cognizance of objects (that is, to steer us in our active dealings with them), without being in any intelligible sense immediate derivatives from them ? I think we shall find this view gain more and more plausibility as we proceed.*

All these elements are subjective duplicates of outer objects. They are not the outer objects. The secondary qualities among them are not supposed by any educated person even to resemble the objects. Their nature depends more on the reacting brain than on the stimuli which touch it off. This is even more palpably true of the natures of pleasure and pain, effort, desire and aversion, and of such feelings as those of cause and substance, of denial and of

* Mr. Grant Allen, in a brilliant article entitled Idiosyncrasy (Mind, vni. 493), seeks to show that accidental morphological changes in the brain cannot possibly be imagined to result in any mental change of a sort which would Jit the animal to its environment. If spontaueous variation ever works on the brain, its product, says Mr. Allen, ought lo be an idiot or a raving madman, not a minister and interpreter of Nature, Only the environment can change us in the direction of accommodation to itself. But 1 think we ought to know a little better just what the molecular changes in the brain are on which thought depends, before we talk so confidently about what the effect can be of their possible variations, Mr. Allen, it should be said, has made a laudable effort to conceive them distinctly. To me bis conception remains too purely anatomical. Meanwhile this essay and another by the same author in the Atlantic Monthly arc probably as serious attempts as any that have been made towards applying (^ Spencerian theory in a radical way to the facts of human history.

doubt. Here then is a native wealth of inner forms whose origin is shrouded in mystery, and which at any rate were not simply * impressed ' from without, in any intelligible sense of the verb * to impress.' Their time- and spcu^-rdations, however, are impressed from without — for two outer things at least the evolutionary psychologist must believe to resemble our thoughts of them, these are the time and space in Avhich the objects lie. The time- and space-relations between things do stamp copies of themselves within. Things juxtaposed in space impress us^ continue to be thought of as thus juxtaposed. Things sequent in time impress their sequence on our memorj . And thus, through experience in the legitimate sense of the word, there can be truly explained an immense number of our mental habitudes, many of our abstract beliefs, and all our ideas of concrete things, and of their ways of behavior. Such truths as that fire burns and water wets, that glass refracts, heat melts snow, fishes live in water and die on land, and the like, form no small part of the most refined education, and are the all-in-all of education amongst the brutes and lowest men. Here the mind is passive and tributary, a servile copy, fatally and unresistingly fashioned from without. It is the merit of the associationist school to have seen the wide scope of these effects of neighborhood in time and space ; and their exaggerated applications of the principle of mere neighborhood ought not to blind us to the excellent service it has done to Psychology in their hands. As far as a large part of our thinking goes, then, it can intelligibly be formulated as a mere lot of habits impressed upon us from without. The degree of cohesion of our inner relations, is, in this part of our thinking, proportionate, in Mr. Spencer's phrase, to the degree of cohesion of the outer relations ; the causes and the objects of our thought are one ; and we are, in so far forth, what the materialistic evolutionists would have us altogether, mere offshoots and creatures of our environment, and naught besides."**"

* In my own previous chapters on habit, memory, association, and perception, justice has been done to all these facts. But now the plot thickens, for the images impressed upon our memory by the outer stimuli are not restricted to the mere time- and space-relations, in which they originally came, but revive in various manners (dependent on the intricacy of the brain-paths and the instability of the tissue thereof), and form secondary combinations such as the forms of judgment^ which, taken per se, are not congruent either with the forms in which reality exists or in those in which experiences befall us, but which may nevertheless be explained by the way in which experiences befall in a mind gifted with memory, expectation, and the possibility of feeling doubt, curiosity, belief, and denial. The conjunctions of experience befall more or less invariably, variably, or never. The idea of one term will then engender a fixed, a wavering, or a negative expectation of another, giving affirmative, the hypothetical, disjunctive, interrogative, and negative judgments, and judgments of actuality and possibility about certain things. The separation of attribute from subject in all judgments (which violates the way in which nature exists) may be similarly explained by the piecemeal order in which our perceptions come to us, a vague nucleus growing gradually more detailed as we attend to it more and more. These paxticular secondary mental forms have had ample justice done them by associationists from Hume downwards.

Associationists have also sought to account for discrimination, abstraction, and generalization by the rates of frequency in which attributes come to us conjoined. With much less success, I think. In the chapter on Discrimination, I have, under the " law of dissociation by varying concomitants," sought to explain as much as possible by the passive order of experience. But the reader saw how much was left for active interest and unknown forces to do. In the chapter on Imagination I have similarly striven to do justice to the * blended image ' theory of generalization and abstraction. So I need say no more of these matters here.

Our * scientific' ways of thinking the outer reality are highly abstract ways. The essence of things for science is not to be what they seem, but to be atoms and molecalos moving to and from each other according tc strange laws. Nowhere does the account of inner relations produced by outer ones in proportion to the frequency with which the litter have been met, more egregiously break down than in f he casQ oi scientific conceptions. The order of scientific f bought ia quite incongruent either with the way in which reality exists or with the way in which it comes before us. 3cientific thought goes by selection and emphasis exclusively. We break the solid plenitude of fact into separate essences, conceive generally what only exists particularly, and by our classifications leave nothing in its natural neighborhood, but separate the contiguous, and join what the poles divorce. The reality exists as a plenum. All its parts are contemporaneous, each is as real as any other, mid each as essential for making the whole just what it is and nothing else. But we can neither experience nor think this plenum. What we expoiience, wliat comes before 'os^ is a chaos of fragmentary impressions interrupting each other ; * what we think is an abstract system of hypothel ical data and laws.f

* " The order of uature, as perceived at a first glance, presents at every instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose each chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic antecedent a multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic consequent ^a multitude of distinct consequents. This, supposing it done, will not of itself tell us on which of the antecedents each consequent is invariably attendant. To determine that point, we musi endeavor to effect a separation of the facts from one another, not in our minds only, but in nature. The mental analysis, however, must take place first. And every one knows that in the mode of performing it, one intellect differs immensely from another." (J. S. Mill, Logic, bk. in. chap. vii. § 1.)

f I quote from an address entitled 'Reflex Action and Theism,' pub- Jiished in the * Unitarian Review ' for November 1881, and translated In Hie Critique JKiilosophique for January and Februar/ 1883, "The conceiving or theorizing faculty works exclusively for tJ.e sake of ends that do not exist at all in the world of the impressions received by way of our 3(inses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity. It is a *-ransformer of the woild of our impressions into a totally different world» .::ie world of our conception; and the transformation is effected in the liiterests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose whatsoever. Destroy th© volitional nature, the definite aubjective purposes, preferences, fondness for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remaiu for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But. us \v.i iiMve the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the re-

This sort of scientific algebra, little as it immediately resembles the reality given to us, turns out (strangely modelling must be effected, there is no escape. The world's contents are given to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is like. We have to break that order altogether, and by picking out from it the items that concern us, and connecting them with others far away, which we say ' belong ' with them, we are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency, to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for them, to enjoy simplicity and harmony in the place of what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this moment and impartially added together an utter chaos ? The strains of my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the wind, the ticking of Ihe clock, the various organic feelings you may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all ? Is it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them that most of them should become nonexistent for you, and that a few others — the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering — should evoke from places in your memory, that have nothing to do with this scene, associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train of thought ? — rational because it leads to a conclusion we have some organ to appreciate. We have no organ or faculty to appreciate the simply given order. The real world as it is given at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such a sum ? Can we realize for an instant what a crosssection of all existence at a definite point of time would be ? While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.

What does that mean ? Does the contemporaneity of these events with each other and with a million more as disjointed as they form a rational bond between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world ? Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the real order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break it : we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences ; and then we begin to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it. On any one of these, we may react as if the rest did not exist. We discover among its parts relations that were never given to sense at all, — mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions, — and out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but only/<?r our purpose, the other relations being just as real and present as they ; and our purpose is to conceive simply and to foresee Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends, pure and simple ? They are the ends of what we call science ; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends." Cf. also Hodgson : Phllos. of Refl., eh. v ; Lotze : Logik, §§ 342-351 ; Sigwart : Logik, §§ 60-68, 106.

enough) applicable to it. That is, it yields expressions which, at given places and times, can be translated into real values, or interpreted as definite portions of the chaos that falls upon our sense. It becomes thus a practical guide to our expectations as vrell as a theoretic delight. But I do not see how any one with a sense for the facts can possibly call our systems immediate results of * experience ' in the ordinary sense. Every scientific conception is in the first instance a * spontaneous variation ' in some one's brain.* For one that proves useful and applicable there are a thousand that perish through their worthlessness. Their genesis is strictly akin to that of the flashes of poetry and sallies of wit to which the instable brain-paths equally give rise. But whereas the poetry and wit (like the science of the ancients) are their * own excuse for being,' and have to run the gauntlet of no farther test, the * scientific ' conceptions must prove their worth by being 'verified.' This test, however, is the cause of their 'preservation^ not that of their production ; and one might as well account for the origin of Artemus Ward's jokes by the * cohesion ' of subjects with predicates in proportion to the 'persistence of the outer relations ' to which they * correspond ' as to treat the genesis of scientific conceptions in the same ponderously unreal way.

The most persistent outer relations which science believes in are never matters of experience at all, but have to be disengaged from under experience by a process of elimination, that is, by ignoring conditions which are always present. The elementary laws of mechanics, physics, and chemistry are all of this sort. The principle of uniformity in nature is of this sort ; it has to be sought under and in spite of the most rebellious appearances ; and our convic-