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And this diversity exists in a Church which is held together by articles and formularies of the sixteenth century. It might, perhaps, a priori have been imagined that a Church with so much diversity of opinion and of spirit was an enfeebled and disintegrated Church, but no candid man will attribute such a character to the Church of England.
In other words, he reasons a priori, because, by so reasoning, he is certain to arrive at a false conclusion! In the course of the examination to which we propose to subject the speculations of Mr Mill we shall have to notice many other curious instances of that turn of mind which the passage above quoted indicates. The first chapter of his Essay relates to the ends of government.
Thus the savage has a priori no alternative but to regard fire-soul as something akin to human-soul; and in point of fact we find that savage philosophy makes no distinction between the human ghost and the elemental demon or deity. This is sufficiently proved by the universal prevalence of the worship of ancestors.
And it is precisely this attitude which Mr Bergson, by a volte-face which will remain familiar to him in the course of his researches, reverses from the outset. A priori, it seems fairly probable that this is what goes on.
But if the very same condition is considered at the same time as the condition of other cognitions, which together constitute a series of inferences or consequences in a descending line, reason may preserve a perfect indifference, as to how far this progression may extend a parte posteriori, and whether the totality of this series is possible, because it stands in no need of such a series for the purpose of arriving at the conclusion before it, inasmuch as this conclusion is sufficiently guaranteed and determined on grounds a parte priori.
In view of the infinite number and variety of the forms of religion and religious belief, nothing would seem, a priori, more reasonable than to expect an equally infinite number of various and contradictory ideas. Especially should this seem a reasonable expectation to those who consider the idea of God to be fundamentally, and of its very nature, impossible and untenable.
This, however, we can now see to have been an error. No fact concerning anything capable of being experienced can be known independently of experience. We know a priori that two things and two other things together make four things, but we do not know a priori that if Brown and Jones are two, and Robinson and Smith are two, then Brown and Jones and Robinson and Smith are four.
Hence he infers that the only way to get at truth is to place implicit confidence in that chain of proof a priori from which it appears that they must produce the same effects!
The guiding principle of the ideologists was to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori deductions. Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the founders in 1794.
As, therefore, neither empirical nor a priori conceptions are capable of definition, we have to see whether the only other kind of conceptions arbitrary conceptions can be subjected to this mental operation.
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