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Updated: May 6, 2025
We cannot conceive how the same grass produces lamb, pork and beef; but we keep on raising stock just the same, because we are guided by facts learned by experience and observation rather than by conceivability. We do reach our mouth, the minute-hand does overtake the hour-hand, objects do move in space, etc., rationalism and inconceivability to the contrary notwithstanding.
Sankara thus explains it: He has no such attributes as sound, etc; in consequence of this He is not an object of direct perception by the sense; nor can He be an object of inference, in consequence of there being nothing to which belong the same attributes as His, etc. His inconceivability is the foundation of His immeasurableness. Hrishikesa is regarded by European scholars as a doubtful word.
But they say that that is not the primitive, simple teaching of the Man of Nazareth; and that the unanimity is a unanimity of misapprehension of, and addition to, His words and to the drift of His teaching. Now, just think what a huge I was going to say inconceivability that supposition is.
The truths which are the subject of direct knowledge, being, according to this doctrine, known to be truths only by the inconceivability of their negation; and the truths which are not the object of direct knowledge, being known as inferences from those which are; and those inferences being believed to follow from the premises, only because we can not conceive them not to follow; inconceivability is thus the ultimate ground of all assured beliefs.
Secondly, the criterion by which we decide whether any thing is invariably believed to be true, is our inability to conceive it as false. “The inconceivability of its negation is the test by which we ascertain whether a given belief invariably exists or not.” “For our primary beliefs, the fact of invariable existence, tested by an abortive effort to cause their non-existence, is the only reason assignable.” He thinks this the sole ground of our belief in our own sensations.
If so, no amount of ignorance, or even inconceivability, of the conditions and mode of production could affect the validity of the inference, nor could it be affected by any misunderstanding on our part as to what the particular use or function was; a statement which would have been deemed superfluous, except for the following: "There is not an organ in our bodies but what has passed, and is still passing, through a series of different and often contradictory interpretations.
Seeing, on the one hand, how very fallible the test in question is known to have proved itself in many cases of much less speculative difficulty seeing, too, that even now "the philosophy of the condition proves that things there are which may, nay must, be true, of which nevertheless the mind is unable to construe to itself the possibility;" and seeing, on the other hand, that the substance of Mind, whatever it is, must necessarily be unknowable; seeing these things, if any question remains as to whether the test of inconceivability should in this case be regarded as having any degree of validity at all, there can, I think, be no reasonable doubt that such degree should be regarded as of the smallest.
It only remains to show that disputants on either side are apt to endow this test of relative inconceivability with far more than its real logical worth. Being accustomed to apply this test of truth in daily life, and there finding it a trustworthy test, most men are apt to forget that its value as a test must clearly diminish in proportion to the distance from experience at which it is applied.
The only difference, then, between what I have called absolute inconceivability and what I have called relative inconceivability consists in this that while the latter admits of degrees, the former does not. With this distinction clearly understood, I may now proceed to observe that in everyday life we constantly apply the test of relative inconceivability as a test of truth.
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.” 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.
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