y
called upon to conceive a slight change in the direction
of motion, a circumstance familiar to our experience.
But when experience affords no model on which to shape
the new conception, how is it possible for us to form
it? How, for example, can we imagine an end to space and
time? We never saw any object without something beyond
it, nor experienced any feeling without something
following it. When, therefore, we attempt to conceive
the last point of space, we have the idea irresistibly
raised of other points beyond it. When we try to imagine
the last instant of time, we cannot help conceiving
another instant after it. Nor is there any necessity to
assume, as is done by the school to which Mr Whewell
belongs, a peculiar fundamental law of the mind to
account for the feeling of infinity inherent in our
conception of space and time; that apparent infinity is
sufficiently accounted for by simple and universally
acknowledged laws."--Vol. I. p. 313.

Mr Mill does not deny that there exists a distinction, as regards
ourselves, between certain truths (namely, that of some, we cannot
conceive them to be other than truths,) but he sets no value on this
distinction, inasmuch as there is no proof that it has its counterpart
in things themselves; the impossibility of a thing being by no means
measured by our inability to conceive it. And we may observe, that Mr
Whewell, in consistency with the metaphysical doctrine upon space and
time which he has borrowed from Kant, ought, under another shape, to
entertain a similar doubt as to whether this distinction represent any
real distinction in the nature of things. He considers, with Kant,
that space is only that _form_ with which the human mind invests
things--that it has no other than this merely mental existence--is
purely subjective. Presuming, therefore, that the mind is, from its
constitution, utterly and for ever unable to conceive the opposite of
certain truths, (those, for instance, of geometry;) yet as the
existence of space itself is but a subjective truth, it must follow
that all other truths relating to it are subjective also. The mind is
not conversant with things in themselves, in the truths even of
geometry; nor is there any positive objective truth in one department
of science more than another. Mr Whewell, therefore, though he
advocates this distinction between necessary and contingent truth with