“The experiences these propositions record all implicate the same consciousness—the notion of proportionality between force applied and result produced; and it is out of this latent consciousness that the axiom of the perfect quantitative equivalence of the relations between cause and effect is evolved. To show how rigorous, how irreversible, this consciousness becomes, take a boy and suggest to him the following statements:—Can he not break a string he has, by pulling? tell him to double it, and then he will break it. He cannot bend or break a particular stick: let him make less effort and he will succeed. He is unable to raise a heavy weight: tell him he errs by using too much force. He can’t push over a small chest: he will find it easier to upset a larger one. By blowing hard he cannot move a given object: if he blows lightly, he will move it. By great exertion he cannot make himself audible at a distance: but he will make himself heard with less exertion at a greater distance. Tell him to do all or any of these, and of course he fails. The propositions are unthinkable, and their unthinkableness shows that the consciousness which yields them is irreversible. These, then, are preconceptions, properly so called, which have {304} grown unconsciously out of the earliest experiences, beginning with those of the sucking infant, which are perpetually confirmed by fresh experiences, and which have at last become organized in the mental structure. * * * * * “Mr. Spencer’s argument appears to be briefly this:—1. There are numberless experiences unconsciously acquired and unconsciously accumulated during the early life of the individual (in harmony with the acquisitions of all ancestral individuals) which yield the preconception, long anteceding anything like conscious physical experiments, that physical causes and effects vary together quantitatively. This is gained from all orders of physical experiences, and forms a universal preconception respecting them, which the physicist or other man of Science brings with him to his experiments. “2. Mr. Spencer showed in three cases—chemical, physical, and mechanical—that this preconception, so brought, was tacitly involved in the conception which the experimenter drew from the results of his experiments.