That a philosopher of Dr. Whewell's eminence should gravely assert that we cannot conceive a world in which the simple elements should combine in other than definite proportions; that by dint of meditating on a scientific truth, the original discoverer of which was still living, he should have rendered the association in his own mind between the idea of combination and that of constant proportions so familiar and intimate as to be unable to conceive the one fact without the other; is so signal an instance of the mental law for which I am contending, that one word more in illustration must be superfluous. In the latest and most complete elaboration of his metaphysical system (the _Philosophy of Discovery_), as well as in the earlier discourse on the _Fundamental Antithesis of Philosophy_, reprinted as an appendix to that work, Dr. Whewell, while very candidly admitting that his language was open to misconception, disclaims having intended to say that mankind in general can _now_ perceive the law of definite proportions in chemical combination to be a necessary truth. All he meant was that philosophical chemists in a future generation may possibly see this. "Some truths may be seen by intuition, but yet the intuition of them may be a rare and a difficult attainment."[34] And he explains that the inconceivableness which, according to his theory, is the test of axioms, "depends entirely upon the clearness of the Ideas which the axioms involve. So long as those Ideas are vague and indistinct, the contrary of an Axiom may be assented to, though it cannot be distinctly conceived. It may be assented to, not because it is possible, but because we do not see clearly what is possible. To a person who is only beginning to think geometrically, there may appear nothing absurd in the assertion, that two straight lines may inclose a space. And in the same manner, to a person who is only beginning to think of mechanical truths, it may not appear to be absurd, that in mechanical processes, Reaction should be greater or less than Action; and so, again, to a person who has not thought steadily about Substance, it may not appear inconceivable, that by chemical operations, we should generate new matter, or destroy matter which already exists."[35] Necessary truths, therefore, are not those of which we cannot conceive, but "those of which we cannot _distinctly_ conceive, the contrary."[36] So long as our ideas are indistinct altogether, we do not know what is or is not capable of being distinctly conceived; but, by the ever increasing distinctness with which scientific men apprehend the general conceptions of science, they in time come to perceive that there are certain laws of nature, which, though historically and as a matter of fact they were learnt from experience, we cannot, now that we know them, distinctly conceive to be other than they are.