A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive

by John Stuart Mill

In his present statement of the Universal Postulate, Mr. Spencer has exchanged his former expression, “beliefs which invariably exist,” for the following: “cognitions of which the predicates invariably exist along with their subjects.” And he says that “an abortive effort to conceive the negation of a proposition, shows that the cognition expressed is one of which the predicate invariably exists along with its subject; and the discovery that the predicate invariably exists along with its subject, is the discovery that this cognition is one we are compelled to accept.” Both these premises of Mr. Spencer’s syllogism I am able to assent to, but in different senses of the middle term. If the invariable existence of the predicate along with its subject, is to be understood in the most obvious meaning, as an existence in actual Nature, or in other words, in our objective, or sensational, experience, I of course admit that this, once ascertained, compels us to accept the proposition: but then I do not admit that the failure of an attempt to conceive the negative, proves the predicate to be always co-existent with the subject in actual Nature. If, on the other hand (which I believe to be Mr. Spencer’s meaning) the invariable existence of the predicate along with the subject is to be understood only of our conceptive faculty, i.e., that the one is inseparable from the other in our thoughts; then, indeed, the inability to separate the two ideas proves their inseparable conjunction, here and now, in the mind which has failed in the attempt; but this inseparability in thought does not prove a corresponding inseparability in fact; nor even in the thoughts of other people, or of the same person in a possible future.

“That some propositions have been wrongly accepted as true, because their negations were supposed inconceivable when they were not,” does not, in Mr. Spencer’s opinion, “disprove the validity of the test;” not only because any test whatever “is liable to yield untrue results, either from incapacity or from carelessness in those who use it,” but because the propositions in question “were complex propositions, not to be established by a test applicable to propositions no further decomposable.” “A test legitimately applicable to a simple proposition, the subject and predicate of which are in direct relation, can not be legitimately applied to a complex proposition, the subject and predicate of which are indirectly related through the many simple propositions implied.” “That things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another, is a fact which can be known by direct comparison of actual or ideal relations.... But that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides, can not be known immediately by comparison of two states of consciousness: here the truth can be reached only mediately, through a series of simple judgments respecting the likenesses or unlikenesses of certain relations.” Moreover, even when the proposition admits of being tested by immediate consciousness, people often neglect to do it. A school-boy, in adding up a column of figures, will say “35 and 9 are 46,” though this is contrary to the verdict which consciousness gives when 35 and 9 are really called up before it; but this is not done. And not only school-boys, but men and thinkers, do not always “distinctly translate into their equivalent states of consciousness the words they use.”

It is but just to give Mr. Spencer’s doctrine the benefit of the limitation he claims—viz., that it is only applicable to propositions which are assented to on simple inspection, without any intervening media of proof. But this limitation does not exclude some of the most marked instances of propositions now known to be false or groundless, but whose negative was once found inconceivable: such as, that in sunrise and sunset it is the sun which moves; that gravitation may exist without an intervening medium; and even the case of antipodes. The distinction drawn by Mr. Spencer is real; but, in the case of the propositions classed by him as complex, consciousness, until the media of proof are supplied, gives no verdict at all: it neither declares the equality of the square of the hypothenuse with the sum of the squares of the sides to be inconceivable, nor their inequality to be inconceivable. But in all the three cases which I have just cited, the inconceivability seems to be apprehended directly; no train of argument was needed, as in the case of the square of the hypothenuse, to obtain the verdict of consciousness on the point. Neither is any of the three a case like that of the school-boy’s mistake, in which the mind was never really brought into contact with the proposition. They are cases in which one of two opposite predicates, mero adspectu, seemed to be incompatible with the subject, and the other, therefore, to be proved always to exist with it.[97]

As now limited by Mr. Spencer, the ultimate cognitions fit to be submitted to his test are only those of so universal and elementary a character as to be represented in the earliest and most unvarying experience, or apparent experience, of all mankind. In such cases the inconceivability of the negative, if real, is accounted for by the experience: and why (I have asked) should the truth be tested by the inconceivability, when we can go further back for proof—namely, to the experience itself? To this Mr. Spencer answers, that the experiences can not be all recalled to mind, and if recalled, would be of unmanageable multitude. To test a proposition by experience seems to him to mean that “before accepting as certain the proposition that any rectilineal figure must have as many angles as it has sides,” I have “to think of every triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, etc., which I have ever seen, and to verify the asserted relation in each case.” I can only say, with surprise, that I do not understand this to be the meaning of an appeal to experience. It is enough to know that one has been seeing the fact all one’s life, and has never remarked any instance to the contrary, and that other people, with every opportunity of observation, unanimously declare the same thing. It is true, even this experience may be insufficient, and so it might be even if I could recall to mind every instance of it; but [pg 204] its insufficiency, instead of being brought to light, is disguised, if instead of sifting the experience itself, I appeal to a test which bears no relation to the sufficiency of the experience, but, at the most, only to its familiarity. These remarks do not lose their force even if we believe, with Mr. Spencer, that mental tendencies originally derived from experience impress themselves permanently on the cerebral structure and are transmitted by inheritance, so that modes of thinking which are acquired by the race become innate and a priori in the individual, thus representing, in Mr. Spencer’s opinion, the experience of his progenitors, in addition to his own. All that would follow from this is, that a conviction might be really innate, i.e., prior to individual experience, and yet not be true, since the inherited tendency to accept it may have been originally the result of other causes than its truth.

Mr. Spencer would have a much stronger case, if he could really show that the evidence of Reasoning rests on the Postulate, or, in other words, that we believe that a conclusion follows from premises only because we can not conceive it not to follow. But this statement seems to me to be of the same kind as one I have previously commented on, viz., that I believe I see light, because I can not, while the sensation remains, conceive that I am looking into darkness. Both these statements seem to me incompatible with the meaning (as very rightly limited by Mr. Spencer) of the verb to conceive. To say that when I apprehend that A is B and that B is C, I can not conceive that A is not C, is to my mind merely to say that I am compelled to believe that A is C. If to conceive be taken in its proper meaning, viz., to form a mental representation, I may be able to conceive A as not being C. After assenting, with full understanding, to the Copernican proof that it is the earth and not the sun that moves, I not only can conceive, or represent to myself, sunset as a motion of the sun, but almost every one finds this conception of sunset easier to form, than that which they nevertheless know to be the true one.

§ 5. Sir William Hamilton holds as I do, that inconceivability is no criterion of impossibility. “There is no ground for inferring a certain fact to be impossible, merely from our inability to conceive its possibility.” “Things there are which may, nay must, be true, of which the understanding is wholly unable to construe to itself the possibility.”[98] Sir William Hamilton is, however, a firm believer in the a priori character of many axioms, and of the sciences deduced from them; and is so far from considering those axioms to rest on the evidence of experience, that he declares certain of them to be true even of Noumena—of the Unconditioned—of which it is one of the principal aims of his philosophy to prove that the nature of our faculties debars us from having any knowledge. The axioms to which he attributes this exceptional emancipation from the limits which confine all our other possibilities of knowledge; the chinks through which, as he represents, one ray of light finds its way to us from behind the curtain which veils from us the mysterious world of Things in themselves—are the two principles, which he terms, after the school-men, the Principle of Contradiction, and the Principle of Excluded Middle: the first, that two contradictory propositions can not both be true; the second, that they can not both be false. Armed with these logical weapons, we may boldly face Things in themselves, and tender to them the double alternative, sure that [pg 205] they must absolutely elect one or the other side, though we may be forever precluded from discovering which. To take his favorite example, we can not conceive the infinite divisibility of matter, and we can not conceive a minimum, or end to divisibility: yet one or the other must be true.

As I have hitherto said nothing of the two axioms in question, those of Contradiction and of Excluded Middle, it is not unseasonable to consider them here. The former asserts that an affirmative proposition and the corresponding negative proposition can not both be true; which has generally been held to be intuitively evident. Sir William Hamilton and the Germans consider it to be the statement in words of a form or law of our thinking faculty. Other philosophers, not less deserving of consideration, deem it to be an identical proposition; an assertion involved in the meaning of terms; a mode of defining Negation, and the word Not.

I am able to go one step with these last. An affirmative assertion and its negative are not two independent assertions, connected with each other only as mutually incompatible. That if the negative be true, the affirmative must be false, really is a mere identical proposition; for the negative proposition asserts nothing but the falsity of the affirmative, and has no other sense or meaning whatever. The Principium Contradictionis should therefore put off the ambitious phraseology which gives it the air of a fundamental antithesis pervading nature, and should be enunciated in the simpler form, that the same proposition can not at the same time be false and true. But I can go no further with the Nominalists; for I can not look upon this last as a merely verbal proposition. I consider it to be, like other axioms, one of our first and most familiar generalizations from experience. The original foundation of it I take to be, that Belief and Disbelief are two different mental states, excluding one another. This we know by the simplest observation of our own minds. And if we carry our observation outward, we also find that light and darkness, sound and silence, motion and quiescence, equality and inequality, preceding and following, succession and simultaneousness, any positive phenomenon whatever and its negative, are distinct phenomena, pointedly contrasted, and the one always absent where the other is present. I consider the maxim in question to be a generalization from all these facts.

In like manner as the Principle of Contradiction (that one of two contradictories must be false) means that an assertion can not be both true and false, so the Principle of Excluded Middle, or that one of two contradictories must be true, means that an assertion must be either true or false: either the affirmative is true, or otherwise the negative is true, which means that the affirmative is false. I can not help thinking this principle a surprising specimen of a so-called necessity of Thought, since it is not even true, unless with a large qualification. A proposition must be either true or false, provided that the predicate be one which can in any intelligible sense be attributed to the subject; (and as this is always assumed to be the case in treatises on logic, the axiom is always laid down there as of absolute truth). “Abracadabra is a second intention” is neither true nor false. Between the true and the false there is a third possibility, the Unmeaning: and this alternative is fatal to Sir William Hamilton’s extension of the maxim to Noumena. That Matter must either have a minimum of divisibility or be infinitely divisible, is more than we can ever know. For in the first place, Matter, in any other than the phenomenal sense of the term, may not exist: and it will scarcely be said that a nonentity must be either infinitely or finitely divisible. In the second place, though matter, considered as [pg 206] the occult cause of our sensations, do really exist, yet what we call divisibility may be an attribute only of our sensations of sight and touch, and not of their uncognizable cause. Divisibility may not be predicable at all, in any intelligible sense, of Things in themselves, nor therefore of Matter in itself; and the assumed necessity of being either infinitely or finitely divisible, may be an inapplicable alternative.

On this question I am happy to have the full concurrence of Mr. Herbert Spencer, from whose paper in the Fortnightly Review I extract the following passage. The germ of an idea identical with that of Mr. Spencer may be found in the present chapter, on a preceding page; but in Mr. Spencer it is not an undeveloped thought, but a philosophical theory.