human
especially in his _First Principles_, and yet he believed in their empirical origin; and this leads us to ask what his test of truth was. It may be summed up in the phrase
gpt
After a curiously self-contradictory attempt to show by reasoning that
human
he states the
gpt
:
human
The inconceivableness of its negation is that which shows a cognition to possess the highest rank--is the criterion by which its insurpassable validity is known.
gpt
That some propositions have been wrongly accepted as true, because their negations were supposed inconceivable when they were not, does not disprove the validity of the test, for these reasons: (1) That they were complex propositions, not to be established by a test applicable only to propositions no further decomposable; (2) that this test, in common with any test, is liable to yield untrue results, either from incapacity or from carelessness in those who use it. In regard to which Prof. Sidgwick says:[17]
human
These two qualifications surely reduce very much the practical value of the criterion. For how are we to proceed if philosophers disagree about the application of the criteria? How are we to test 'undecomposability'? For notions which on first reflection appear to us simple are so often found on further reflective analysis to be composite. Which conclusion, then, are we to trust, the earlier or the later? This seems to me a serious dilemma for Mr Spencer; whichever way he answers he is in a difficulty.
gpt
human
These verifications are based on experience of the ways in which the human mind has actually been convinced of error, and been led to discard it; _i.e._, three modes of conflict, conflict between a judgment first formed, and the view of this judgment taken by the same mind on subsequent reconsideration; conflict between two different judgments, or the implications of two partially different judgments formed by the same mind under different conditions; and finally, conflict between the judgments of different minds.