The other instance which I shall quote is a truly astonishing one, and may be called the reductio ad absurdum of the theory of inconceivableness. Speaking of the laws of chemical composition, Dr. Whewell says:[85] “That they could never have been clearly understood, and therefore never firmly established, without laborious and exact experiments, is certain; but yet we may venture to say, that being once known, they possess an evidence beyond that of mere experiment. For how in fact can we conceive combinations, otherwise than as definite in kind and quality? If we were to suppose each element ready to combine with any other indifferently, and indifferently in any quantity, we should have a world in which all would be confusion and indefiniteness. There would be no fixed kinds of bodies. Salts, and stones, and ores, would approach to and graduate into each other by insensible degrees. Instead of this, we know that the world consists of bodies distinguishable from each other by definite differences, capable of being classified and named, and of having general propositions asserted concerning them. And as we can not conceive a world in which this should not be the case, it would appear that we can not conceive a state of things in which the laws of the combination of elements should not be of that definite and measured kind which we have above asserted.”
That a philosopher of Dr. Whewell’s eminence should gravely assert that we can not conceive a world in which the simple elements should combine in other than definite proportions; that by dint of meditating on a scientific truth, the original discoverer of which was still living, he should have rendered the association in his own mind between the idea of combination and that of constant proportions so familiar and intimate as to be unable to conceive the one fact without the other; is so signal an instance of the mental law for which I am contending, that one word more in illustration must be superfluous.
In the latest and most complete elaboration of his metaphysical system (the Philosophy of Discovery), as well as in the earlier discourse on the Fundamental Antithesis of Philosophy, reprinted as an appendix to that work, Dr. Whewell, while very candidly admitting that his language was open to misconception, disclaims having intended to say that mankind in general can now perceive the law of definite proportions in chemical combination to be a necessary truth. All he meant was that philosophical chemists in a future generation may possibly see this. “Some truths may be seen by intuition, but yet the intuition of them may be a rare and a difficult attainment.”[86] And he explains that the inconceivableness which, according to his theory, is the test of axioms, “depends entirely upon the clearness of the Ideas which the axioms involve. So long as those ideas are vague and indistinct, the contrary of an axiom may be assented to, though it can not be distinctly conceived. It may be assented to, not because it is possible, but because we do not see clearly what is possible. To a person who is only beginning to think geometrically, there may appear nothing absurd in the assertion that two straight lines may inclose a space. And in the same manner, to a person who is only beginning to think of mechanical truths, it may not appear to be absurd, that in mechanical processes, Reaction should be greater or less than Action; and so, again, to a person who has not thought steadily about Substance, it may not appear inconceivable, that by chemical operations, we should generate new matter, or destroy matter which already exists.”[87] Necessary truths, therefore, are not those of which we can not conceive, but “those of which we can not distinctly conceive, the contrary.”[88] So long as our ideas are indistinct altogether, we do not know what is or is not capable of being distinctly conceived; but, by the ever increasing distinctness with which scientific men apprehend the general conceptions of science, they in time come to perceive that there are certain laws of nature, which, though historically and as a matter of fact they were learned from experience, we can not, now that we know them, distinctly conceive to be other than they are.
The account which I should give of this progress of the scientific mind is somewhat different. After a general law of nature has been ascertained, men’s minds do not at first acquire a complete facility of familiarly representing to themselves the phenomena of nature in the character which that law assigns to them. The habit which constitutes the scientific cast of mind, that of conceiving facts of all descriptions conformably to the laws which regulate them—phenomena of all descriptions according to the relations which have been ascertained really to exist between them; this habit, in the case of newly-discovered relations, comes only by degrees. So long as it is not thoroughly formed, no necessary character is ascribed to the new truth. But in time, the philosopher attains a state of mind in which his mental picture of nature spontaneously represents to him all the phenomena with which the new theory is concerned, in the exact light in which the theory regards them: all images or conceptions derived from any other theory, or from the confused view of the facts which is anterior to any theory, having entirely disappeared from his mind. The mode of representing facts which results from the theory, has now become, to his faculties, the only natural mode of conceiving them. It is a known truth, that a prolonged habit of arranging phenomena in certain groups, and explaining them by means of certain principles, makes any other arrangement or explanation of these facts be felt as unnaturaclass="underline" and it may at last become as difficult to him to represent the facts to himself in any other mode, as it often was, originally, to represent them in that mode.
But, further (if the theory is true, as we are supposing it to be), any other mode in which he tries, or in which he was formerly accustomed, to represent the phenomena, will be seen by him to be inconsistent with the facts that suggested the new theory—facts which now form a part of his mental picture of nature. And since a contradiction is always inconceivable, his imagination rejects these false theories, and declares itself incapable of conceiving them. Their inconceivableness to him does not, however, result from any thing in the theories themselves, intrinsically and a priori repugnant to the human faculties; it results from the repugnance between them and a portion of the facts; which facts as long as he did not know, or did not distinctly realize in his mental representations, the false theory did not appear other than conceivable; it becomes inconceivable, merely from the fact that contradictory elements can not be combined in the same conception. Although, then, his real reason for rejecting theories at variance with the true one, is no other than that they clash with his experience, he easily falls into the belief, that he rejects them because they are inconceivable, and that he adopts the true theory because it is self-evident, and does not need the evidence of experience at all.