Finally, the scientific mind gathers up all such credible conceptions, branching out in all directions of space and time, and formulates them in general laws. Every one of these universal propositions stands for an indefinite number of anticipations. Of these some are simple and positive: that is, point to events we really count upon witnessing for ourselves. The greater number, however, are complex and conditional: that is, rest on a supposition of certain experiences which we either regard as probable at some future day, or can imagine ourselves as undergoing or having undergone at any conceivable point of time.* The number of our own actual experiences of the given fact may be small enough; and yet we do not hesitate to cast ourselves, in thought, at least, if not in action, on this indefinitely wide range of conceivable experiences. We have now ceased to draw our crude childish inferences of a world revolving about us like some painted cylinder, with all its different pictures occurring in exactly the same order, and have expanded our field of vision to a world with no clearly marked limits in space or time, a vast painted canvas for ever moving onwards before the eye, in which at first sight nothing but most intricate and unlike groupings of coloured forms are discoverable, subtly woven lines that intersect in ever fresh arabesque forms, but in which the measuring eye of the geometer discovers unfailing uniformities of relation, resolving every picturesque complexity into a modified combination of a few elementary lines and surfaces.†

In this way, then, it seems possible to connect the definite beliefs of maturity with those wild impulses to realize an idea as actual sensation which I have regarded as the germinal form of all belief. In a normal mind under proper discipline there is a growing disposition to abandon the uncontrolled dream-beliefs of the child and savage, and to refer all ideas as they recur to the mind to some object distinctly recognised as removed from present consciousness whether in the present, past, or future. With logical training, too, there grows up a habit of deriving anticipation from past experience, whether it be the individual's own or that of others made known to

* In an admirable analysis of all belief into memory and expectation, Mr. Mill traces out the various modes of these expectations. Mill's Analysis, Editor's Note, p. 413, et seq.

+ Belief has been spoken of in the text as though it has to do with sensations or objective experiences only. At the same time, it is clear that a similar line of remark would throw light on our belief in distant emotions or other subjective experiences, whether past or future.

him. This shows itself in a desire to refer every idea or connection of ideas in proposition to some definite points of the past, and to make this past the basis of all forecastings of the future. Now so far as our ideas and their connections and sequences may be accepted as exact representatives of past facts, this part of our mental mechanism may be looked on, perhaps, as the most valuable condition of all true knowledge and safe action. But this is by no means universally the case. For our ideas often deviate in their arrangement from the order of our experiences, while they are continually liable to processes of decay, amalgamation, and transformation which render them very poor equivalents of the impressions from which they sprang. To this it must be added that the process of assigning its origin to every idea is at best a very carelessly performed duty, so that even in the case of the most logical minds there are many images hovering about the confines of clear-lit consciousness which have never been thus deliberately seized and attached to their right mental origin. The primitive impulse to find an immediate reality for an idea, with no reference to past experience, continues to exert a certain sway even in cultivated minds. And so it happens that in no type of human intellect are all convictions of the clear and definite character just described; nor are all the seemingly definite ones, calm and considerate groundings of anticipation on well-assured knowledge of past events. It may be worth while, perhaps, to inquire more fully into one or two varieties of this incompletely intellectualised belief.

It is easy, for example, to understand that even in the most thoughtful minds there are numerous vague and half-thoughtout recollections, which are nevertheless firmly held to, as products of past experience. Who is not aware of a large number of ideas, wandering detached and free in his mind, each of which he vaguely refers to some past impression, without being able at all to determine the date and connection of the impression? For example: a person may feel pretty certain that he read Robinson Crusoe some time during his boyhood, and yet he cannot in the least recall the attendant circumstances. Here, the idea has, to speak physiologically, lost its processes: it no longer adjusts itself to other elements of the mind, and yet the mind unhesitatingly accepts it as the relic of an actual experience. The risks of this kind of belief must at once be obvious to a thoughtful reader. Where the experience is a frequently recurring one, there is of course little danger of the fading away of particular recollections. Thus, a universal

proposition, as "The air cools after sunset," or an affirmation of the continuous existence of a certain object, though, strictly speaking, a slight deviation from the precise facts of past experience, through the omission of certain limiting terms, serves on the whole as a useful, practical device, namely, the abbreviation of our communications. In other cases, however, where this practical requirement is wanting, there is far greater liability to self-delusion. A universal tendency to refer an idea to some past impression, instead of regarding it as a sign of a present reality, may, just like this earlier impulse, be an unwarrantable intellectual procedure. For many of our ideas come to us by other channels than our own actual experiences. Traditional story, reading, dream, and waking reverie, each of these pours into the individual mind its contingent of ideas, and nothing is easier than to mistake these, later on, for the products of individual experience. The savage, who is certain he saw, in night vision, the body of his slain chief, and so believes in his present existence, and the educated man, who cannot rid himself of the conviction that he actually saw and heard the wonders of fairy tale in which his childish imagination so long ran riot, both illustrate the illogical side of the tendency to refer ideas to actual experience. The reference may be a very vague one. We may have no clear conception of the period of life in which the impression or series of impressions visited us. Yet we find a degree of satisfaction in thus tracing back our detached and unexplained convictions to a dimly descried and remote past. At the same time, the older instinct to look for the present reality of an idea, asserts itself, and so we make these shadowy recollections, by a kind of unconscious intellectual habit, the ground of new expectations. The poet who fancifully, yet in good faith, attributes his early dreams of beauty to impressions of a prenatal world, is naturally disposed to rely on the permanence of those unearthly and ethereal regions. The man who is pretty sure he himself has walked in the Eden that his mother loved to paint to his young imagination, will not find it difficult to trust in a continuance somewhere, even now, of the unblighted garden.

This pseudo-recollection and its accompanying expectation are as various as the processes by which ideas are born, recast in shape, and regrouped. Thus, one great connecting influence among our ideas is to be found, as has been remarked, in a feeling of similarity. When the savage mind, discovering a strong resemblance between some crag or stump and a human form, at once feels sure

that the dead matter is possessed by a human soul, shadowy, yet still corporeal, one may see the powerful influence of a haunting similarity. With civilized men, the mental process is a little dif ferent. They feel, too, the power of a strong resemblance, but their belief in identity is checked by larger experience. It is afterwards, when the first source of the ideas has faded from memory, that the similarity of the mental images comes to be the basis of belief. And so it happens that any ideas joined together by a strong link of resemblance easily become a warrant of some objective connection in the things themselves, experienced in the past, and capable of being re-experienced in the future. Thus, a large number of the groundless beliefs embodied in our every-day popular sayings and proverbs are simply the result of this latent tendency to connect facts in the order of their ideas. A curious example of this common fallacy may be found in the disposition to connect processes of growth and decay in nature with the waxing and waning of the moon. The powerful suggestions of change and new-birth conveyed by the young lunar crescent, have proved sufficient to sustain a belief in its connection with marked changes of weather, however little people may have actually observed any instances of such simultaneous variations. The element of feeling, or the wishing for certain events, which also contributes to the formation and duration of these beliefs, will be spoken of presently.

There are one or two other intellectual processes involved in this transformation of idea which ought, perhaps, to be just named here. One of these is that curious fusion which takes place between ideas invariably occurring in a certain connection. The uniting bond may be contiguity or nearness in time between the corresponding impressions, or the mental link supplied by a feeling of their resemblance. A signal instance of the first kind of inseparable association is to be found, according to Mr. Mill and other Idealists, in our supposed intuitions of external objects, the quasiindependent object having never in fact been a factor of our experience, and its idea being nothing but the mental residuum of that aggregate of impressions which we have uniformly experienced together under given circumstances. Examples of similar impressions blending to constitute apparently new types of idea are to be found in all our abstractions. According to the Nominalist

See an interesting account of these ideas in Taylor's Primitive Culture, vol. i., p. 117, et seq.

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theory, these ideas are nothing but closely united aggregates of like particular ideas, with their similar feature or features accented by the general name, which at the same time binds them together in a seeming unity. Yet they readily assume the appearance of perfectly new elements underivable from single impressions. And so one frequently finds a tendency in the human mind to give them in some form or another an independent position in the objective universe. Not only did the grotesque assumptions of the Platonic Realists spring from this tendency, but the modern hypotheses of an unknowable force, supposed to be necessitated by every series of like phenomena in external nature, involve among other mental agencies the impulse to invest a general idea with some kind of objective validity. Even general ideas of mental phenomena themselves may give rise to analogous beliefs. When the series of like volitional or ethical states is ascribed to a certain underlying power or faculty, namely, the will or conscience, the process is still the reflex movement of a general idea towards the semblance of objective reality. For such secret powers of the mind are still conceived as somehow observable, and forming proper objects of consciousness to an adequate intelligence.

It will thus be seen, then, that the ancient yet still partially surviving notions of substance, being, substratum of powers or properties, and so on, imply both the fusion of closely bound ideas of contiguous impressions, and the blending of the products of a long series of like impressions into a general idea. To these two processes should be added a third, namely, the decay, through inattention, of certain portions of the original idea. That this last is discoverable in the frequent acceptance of general ideas as elementary states of mind, follows at once from the Nominalist theory, according to which, every such idea is nothing but a rapid series of particular mental images grouped in a certain way, though we only become aware of this fact after close reflection and exact analysis. In the case of contiguously linked ideas, too, the influence of this decay may sometimes be detected. Thus, the common notion of simple material entities, involving the supposition that the group of impressions actual and possible making up the full perception of an object is one indivisible existence, really springs, if the Idealistic theory is correct, from inattention to the intermediate links which

The fuller illustration of this process in popular conceptions of the will, may be found in the following essay.