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Updated: June 11, 2025
Will it really be contended that the inconceivableness of the thing, in such circumstances, proves any thing against the experimental origin of the conviction? Is it not clear that in whichever mode our belief in the proposition may have originated, the impossibility of our conceiving the negative of it must, on either hypothesis, be the same? As, then, Dr.
I maintain then, first, that uniformity of past experience is very far from being universally a criterion of truth. But secondly, inconceivableness is still further from being a test even of that test. Uniformity of contrary experience is only one of many causes of inconceivability. Tradition handed down from a period of more limited knowledge, is one of the commonest.
Spencer considers to rest on the same basis; being chiefly those, or a part of those, which the metaphysicians of the Reid and Stewart school consider as truths of immediate intuition. Spencer as truths known by the inconceivableness of their negatives. We can not, he says, by any effort, conceive these objects of thought as mere states of our mind; as not having an existence external to us.
He sets forth, by the glass of God's Word, the inconceivableness of its value, while progressing through time; and, aided by the same wondrous glass, he penetrates the eternal world, unveils the joys of heaven and the torments of hell so far as they are revealed by the Holy Ghost, and are conceivable to human powers.
Ocean and sky remain as God made them. He must love space for us, though it be needless for himself; seeing that in all the magnificent notions of creation afforded us by astronomers, shoal upon shoal of suns, each the centre of complicated and infinitely varied systems, the spaces between are yet more overwhelming in their vast inconceivableness.
But in truth the point is of little importance; since inconceivability, in Mr. Spencer’s theory, is only a test of truth, inasmuch as it is a test of believability. The inconceivableness of a supposition is the extreme case of its unbelievability. This is the very foundation of Mr. Spencer’s doctrine. The invariability of the belief is with him the real guarantee.
Our curiosity is naturally excited to discover what a poor, unlettered mechanic, whose book-learning had been limited to the contents of one volume, could by possibility know upon a subject so abstruse, so profound, and so highly metaphysical, as that of the Soul its greatness and the inconceivableness of its loss.
After so complete an admission that inconceivableness is an accidental thing, not inherent in the phenomenon itself, but dependent on the mental history of the person who tries to conceive it, how can he ever call upon us to reject a proposition as impossible on no other ground than its inconceivableness?
The pious man, therefore, does not find the essential characteristic of miracles in their relative inconceivableness, but in the fact that they refer him to a living God who stands above this process, whether perceived or unperceived in its relative causal connection, and unites it with the course of things in order to reach his ends and to manifest himself to man.
This double meaning of inconceivable it is very important to bear in mind, for the argument from inconceivableness almost always turns on the alternate substitution of each of those meanings for the other. In which of these two senses does Mr. Spencer employ the term, when he makes it a test of the truth of a proposition that its negation is inconceivable? Until Mr.
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