we find it to be UNTHINKABLE,--the ideas will not combine.
The proposition remains one which we may utter and defend, and perhaps
vituperate our neighbours for not accepting, but it remains none the
less an unthinkable proposition. It takes terms which severally have
meanings and puts them together into a phrase which has no meaning.
[11] Now when we try to combine the idea of the continuance of conscious
activity with the idea of the entire cessation of material conditions,
and thereby to assert the existence of a purely spiritual world, we
find that we have made an unthinkable proposition. We may defend our
hypothesis as passionately as we like, but when we strive coolly to
realize it in thought we find ourselves baulked at every step.

[11] See my Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. I. pp. 64-67.

But now we have to ask, How much does this inconceivability signify?
In most cases, when we say that a statement is inconceivable, we
practically declare it to be untrue; when we say that a statement is
without warrant in experience, we plainly indicate that we consider it
unworthy of our acceptance. This is legitimate in the majority of cases
with which we have to deal in the course of life, because experience,
and the capacities of thought called out and limited by experience, are
our only guides in the conduct of life. But every one will admit that
our experience is not infinite, and that our capacity of conception
is not coextensive with the possibilities of existence. It is not only
possible, but in the very highest degree probable, that there are
many things in heaven, if not on earth, which are undreamed of in our
philosophy. Since our ability to conceive anything is limited by the
extent of our experience, and since human experience is very far from
being infinite, it follows that there may be, and in all probability is,
an immense region of existence in every way as real as the region which
we know, yet concerning which we cannot form the faintest rudiment of a
conception. Any hypothesis relating to such a region of existence is not
only not disproved by the total failure of evidence in its favour, but
the total failure of evidence does not raise even the slightest prima
facie presumption against its validity.

These considerations apply with great force to the hypothesis of an
unseen world in which psychical phenomena persist in the absence of
material conditions. It is true, on the one hand, that we can brin