Page:System of Logic.djvu/530

 esse;" whatever can be very clearly conceived must certainly exist; that is, as he afterward explains it, if the idea includes existence. And on this ground he infers that geometrical figures really exist, because they can be distinctly conceived. Whenever existence is "involved in an idea," a thing conformable to the idea must really exist; which is as much as to say, whatever the idea contains must have its equivalent in the thing; and what we are not able to leave out of the idea can not be absent from the reality.(232) This assumption pervades the philosophy not only of Descartes, but of all the thinkers who received their impulse mainly from him, in particular the two most remarkable among them, Spinoza and Leibnitz, from whom the modern German metaphysical philosophy is essentially an emanation. I am indeed disposed to think that the fallacy now under consideration has been the cause of two-thirds of the bad philosophy, and especially of the bad metaphysics, which the human mind has never ceased to produce. Our general ideas contain nothing but what has been put into them, either by our passive experience, or by our active habits of thought; and the metaphysicians in all ages, who have attempted to construct the laws of the universe by reasoning from our supposed necessities of thought, have always proceeded, and only could proceed, by laboriously finding in their own minds what they themselves had formerly put there, and evolving from their ideas of things what they had first involved in those ideas. In this way all deeply-rooted opinions and feelings are enabled to create apparent demonstrations of their truth and reasonableness, as it were, out of their own substance.

The other form of the fallacy: Things which we can not think of together can not exist together--including as one of its branches, that what we can not think of as existing can not exist at all--may thus be briefly expressed: Whatever is inconceivable must be false.

Against this prevalent doctrine I have sufficiently argued in a former Book,(233) and nothing is required in this place but examples. It was long held that Antipodes were impossible because of the difficulty which was found in conceiving persons with their heads in the same direction as our feet. And it was one of the received arguments against the Copernican system, that we can not conceive so great a void space as that system supposes to exist in the celestial regions. When men's imaginations had always been used to conceive the stars as firmly set in solid spheres, they naturally found much difficulty in imagining them in so different, and, as it doubtless appeared to them, so precarious a situation. But they had no right to mistake the limitation (whether natural, or, as it in fact proved, only artificial) of their own faculties, for an inherent limitation of the possible modes of existence in the universe.

It may be said in objection, that the error in these cases was in the minor premise, not the major; an error of fact, not of principle; that it did not consist in supposing that what is inconceivable can not be true,