A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I
John Stuart Mill · en
The positive argument is, that every such belief represents the
aggregate of all past experience. "Conceding the entire truth of" the
"position, that during any phase of human progress, the ability or
inability to form a specific conception wholly depends on the
experiences men have had; and that, by a widening of their experiences,
they may, by and by, be enabled to conceive things before inconceivable
to them; it may still be argued that as, at any time, the best warrant
men can have for a belief is the perfect agreement of all pre-existing
experience in support of it, it follows that, at any time, the
inconceivableness of its negation is the deepest test any belief admits
of.... Objective facts are ever impressing themselves upon us; our
experience is a register of these objective facts; and the
inconceivableness of a thing implies that it is wholly at variance with
the register. Even were this all, it is not clear how, if every truth is
primarily inductive, any better test of truth could exist. But it must
be remembered that whilst many of these facts, impressing themselves
upon us, are occasional; whilst others again are very general; some are
universal and unchanging. These universal and unchanging facts are, by
the hypothesis, certain to establish beliefs of which the negations are
inconceivable; whilst the others are not certain to do this; and if they
do, subsequent facts will reverse their action. Hence if, after an
immense accumulation of experiences, there remain beliefs of which the
negations are still inconceivable, most, if not all of them, must
correspond to universal objective facts. If there be ... certain
absolute uniformities in nature; if these uniformities produce, as they
must, absolute uniformities in our experience; and if ... these absolute
uniformities in our experience disable us from conceiving the negations
of them; then answering to each absolute uniformity in nature which we
can cognize, there must exist in us a belief of which the negation is
inconceivable, and which is absolutely true. In this wide range of cases
subjective inconceivableness must correspond to objective impossibility.
Further experience will produce correspondence where it may not yet
exist; and we may expect the correspondence to become ultimately
complete. In nearly all cases this test of inconceivableness must be
valid now;" (I wish I could think we were so nearly arrived at
omniscience) "and where it is not, it still expresses the net result of
our experience up to the present time; which is the most that any test
can do."