can not conceive that he is looking into darkness, he should have said that a man can not _believe_ that he is doing so. For it is surely possible, in broad daylight, to _imagine_ one’s self looking into darkness.(94) As Mr. Spencer himself says, speaking of the belief of our own existence, “That he _might_ not exist, he can conceive well enough; but that he _does_ not exist, he finds it impossible to conceive,” _i.e._, to believe. So that the statement resolves itself into this: That I exist, and that I have sensations, I believe, because I can not believe otherwise. And in this case every one will admit that the impossibility is real. Any one’s present sensations, or other states of subjective consciousness, that one person inevitably believes. They are facts known _per se_: it is impossible to ascend beyond them. Their negative is really unbelievable, and therefore there is never any question about believing it. Mr. Spencer’s theory is not needed for these truths. But according to Mr. Spencer there are other beliefs, relating to other things than our own subjective feelings, for which we have the same guarantee—which are, in a similar manner, invariable and necessary. With regard to these other beliefs, they can not be necessary, since they do not always exist. There have been, and are, many persons who do not believe the reality of an external world, still less the reality of extension and figure as the forms of that external world; who do not believe that space and time have an existence independent of the mind—nor any other of Mr. Spencer’s objective intuitions. The negations of these alleged invariable beliefs are not unbelievable, for they are believed. It may be maintained, without obvious error, that we can not _imagine_ tangible objects as mere states of our own and other people’s consciousness; that the perception of them irresistibly suggests to us the _idea_ of something external to ourselves: and I am not in a condition to say that this is not the fact (though I do not think any one is entitled to affirm it of any person besides himself). But many thinkers have believed, whether they could conceive it or not, that what we represent to ourselves as material objects, are mere modifications of consciousness; complex feelings of touch and of muscular action. Mr. Spencer may think the inference correct from the unimaginable to the unbelievable, because he holds that belief itself is but the persistence of an idea, and that what we can succeed in imagining we can not at the moment help apprehending as believable. But of what consequence is it what we apprehend at the moment, if the moment is in contradiction to the permanent state of our mind? A person who has been frightened when an infant by stories of ghosts, though he disbelieves them in after years (and perhaps never believed them), may be unable all his life to be in a dark place, in circumstances stimulating to the imagination, without mental discomposure.