Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

REASONING AND DEDUCTIVE EVIDENCE. 449
changed if all the bodies in the universe were annihilated. It
is not our business here to inquire into the origin and grounds
of this conviction. It is with the fact alone that we are concerned at present; and this I conceive to be one of the most
obviously incontrovertible which the circle of our knowledge
embraces. Let those explain it as they best can, who are of
opinion, that all the judgments of the human understanding
rest ultimately on observation and experience.
Nor is this the only case in which the mind forms conclusions
concerning space, to which those of the natural philosopher do
not bear the remotest analogy. Is it from experience we learn
that space is infinite? or, to express myself in more unexceptionable terms, that no limits can be assigned to its immensity?
HIere is a fact, extending not only beyond the reach of our personal observation, but beyond the observation of all created
beings; and a fact on which we pronounce with no less confidence, when in imagination we transport ourselves to the utmost
verge of the material universe, than when we confine our
thoughts to those regions of the globe which have been explored
by travellers. How unlike those general laws which we investigate in physics, and which, how far soever we may find them
to reach, may still, fbr any thing we are able to discover to the
contrary, be only contingent, local, and temiporary.*
* [Mr. J. S. Mill is the latest writer of authority who has maintained
the doctrine of Beddoes and Leslie, that even pure mathematics is an
inductive science, and depends ultimately on external observation. The
following is a summary of his argument upon this point, though it deserves
notice only as the attempt of a very acute reasoner to support a thesis
which is wholly indefensible. Only a love of paradox, or the bias of a
previously conceived theory, could induce any one to controvert the doctrine of Mr. Stewart in the text, which expresses the almost unanimous
opinion of the scientific world.
B-ut Mr. Mill avers that geometrical axioms "are experimental axioms
- generalizations from observation. The proposition,'Two straight lines
cannot inclose a space' -or in other words,' Two straight lines which
have once met, do not meet again, but continue to diverge' — is an induction from the evidence of our senses."
When it is urged that actual observation is not needed to convince us
38 "