Thus far, there is no very wide difference between Mr. Spencer’s doctrine and the ordinary one of philosophers of the intuitive school, from Descartes to Dr. Whewell; but at this point Mr. Spencer diverges from them. For he does not, like them, set up the test of inconceivability as infallible. On the contrary, he holds that it may be fallacious, not from any fault in the test itself, but because “men have mistaken for inconceivable things, some things which were not inconceivable.” And he himself, in this very book, denies not a few propositions usually regarded as among the most marked examples of truths whose negations are inconceivable. But occasional failure, he says, is incident to all tests. If such failure vitiates “the test of inconceivableness,” it “must similarly vitiate all tests whatever. We consider an inference logically drawn from established premises 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 established premises? No: we say that though men may have taken for logical inferences, inferences that were not logical, there nevertheless are logical inferences, and that we are justified in assuming the truth of what seem to us such, until better instructed. Similarly, though men may have thought some things inconceivable which were not so, there may still be inconceivable things; and the inability to conceive the negation of a thing, may still be our best warrant for believing it.... Though occasionally it may prove an imperfect test, yet, as our most certain beliefs are capable of no better, to doubt any one belief because we have no higher guarantee for it, is really to doubt all beliefs.” Mr. Spencer’s doctrine, therefore, does not erect the curable, but only the incurable limitations of the human conceptive faculty, into laws of the outward universe.
§ 2. The doctrine, that “a belief which is proved by the inconceivableness of its negation to invariably exist, is true,” Mr. Spencer enforces by two arguments, one of which may be distinguished as positive, and the other as negative.
The positive argument is, that every such belief represents the aggregate of all past experience. “Conceding the entire truth of” the “position, that during any phase of human progress, the ability or inability to form a specific conception wholly depends on the experiences men have had; and that, by a widening of their experiences, they may, by and by, be enabled to conceive things before inconceivable to them, it may still be argued that as, at any time, the best warrant men can have for a belief is the perfect agreement of all pre-existing experience in support of it, it follows that, at any time, the inconceivableness of its negation is the deepest test any belief admits of.... Objective facts are ever impressing themselves upon us; our experience is a register of these objective facts; and the inconceivableness of a thing implies that it is wholly at variance with the register. Even were this all, it is not clear how, if every truth is primarily inductive, any better test of truth could exist. But it must be remembered that while many of these facts, impressing themselves upon us, are occasional; while others again are very general; some are universal and unchanging. These universal and unchanging facts are, by the hypothesis, certain to establish beliefs of which the negations are inconceivable; while the others are not certain to do this; and if they do, subsequent facts will reverse their action. Hence if, after an immense accumulation of experiences, there remain beliefs of which the negations are still inconceivable, most, if not all of them, must correspond to universal objective facts. If there be ... certain absolute uniformities in nature; if these uniformities produce, as they must, absolute uniformities in our experience; and if ... these absolute uniformities in our experience disable us from conceiving the negations of them; then answering to each absolute uniformity in nature which we can cognize, there must exist in us a belief of which the negation is inconceivable, and which is absolutely true. In this wide range of cases subjective inconceivableness must correspond to objective impossibility. Further experience will produce correspondence where it may not yet exist; and we may expect the correspondence to become ultimately complete. In nearly all cases this test of inconceivableness must be valid now” (I wish I could think we were so nearly arrived at omniscience); “and where it is not, it still expresses the net result of our experience up to the present time; which is the most that any test can do.”
To this I answer, first, that it is by no means true that the inconceivability, by us, of the negative of a proposition proves all, or even any, “pre-existing experience” to be in favor of the affirmative. There may have been no such pre-existing experiences, but only a mistaken supposition of experience. How did the inconceivability of antipodes prove that experience had given any testimony against their possibility? How did the incapacity men felt of conceiving sunset otherwise than as a motion of the sun, represent any “net result” of experience in support of its being the sun and not the earth that moves? It is not experience that is represented, it is only a superficial semblance of experience. The only thing proved with regard to real experience, is the negative fact, that men have not had it of the kind which would have made the inconceivable proposition conceivable.
Next: Even if it were true that inconceivableness represents the net result of all past experience, why should we stop at the representative when we can get at the thing represented? If our incapacity to conceive the negation of a given supposition is proof of its truth, because proving that our experience has hitherto been uniform in its favor, the real evidence for the supposition is not the inconceivableness, but the uniformity of experience. Now this, which is the substantial and only proof, is directly accessible. We are not obliged to presume it from an incidental consequence. If all past experience is in favor of a belief, let this be stated, and the belief openly rested on that ground: after which the question arises, what that fact may be worth as evidence of its truth? For uniformity of experience is evidence in very different degrees: in some cases it is strong evidence, in others weak, in others it scarcely amounts to evidence at all. That all metals sink in water, was a uniform experience, from the origin of the human race to the discovery of potassium in the present century by Sir Humphry Davy. That all swans are white, was a uniform experience down to the discovery of Australia. In the few cases in which uniformity of experience does amount to the strongest possible proof, as with such propositions as these, Two straight lines can not inclose a space, Every event has a cause, it is not because their negations are inconceivable, which is not always the fact; but because the experience, which has been thus uniform, pervades all nature. It will be shown in the following Book that none of the conclusions either of induction or of deduction can be considered certain, except as far as their truth is shown to be inseparably bound up with truths of this class.