Proportionality of Cause and Effect

Abstract

IT does not surprise me that Mr. Hayward gives up in despair the attempt to make Mr. Spencer conscious of the fallacies in his logic. But asfrom the first I have addressed myself to Mr. Spencer's readers, I must in justice to myself point out to them the true nature of the controversy in order to counteract the effect of Mr. Spencer's endeavours to represent it as a controversy between those who think that forms of thought become hereditary and those who do not. The original attack centred upon the fallacious character of certain would-be a priori proofs of physical laws. Mr. Spencer has tried to parry the attack by maintaining that the writer misunderstood the sense in which the phrase a priori was used. That the new interpretation was not the one which it was at the time intended to bear is rendered as clear as the English language permits by his speaking of one of these truths as not resulting “from a long registry of experiences gradually organised into an irreversible mode of thought,” and his using similar, or even stronger expressions of the others. But this is, after all, not the real issue. No definition of a priori would cure the fallacies in the proofs in question or in the subsequent attempts that he has made to support them. They are as illogical with the one definition as with the other; and the sole result of Mr. Spencer's change of front will be, I think, to supply the critics of his writings on Physics with another instance of his habit of changing the meanings of the terms he employs without perceiving that by so doing he forfeits the right to use previous conclusions, even though legitimately obtained, and destroys all connection between the bases and the later parts of his system.