ion is a
mere figment. In fact, as J. S. Mill perceives, the 'explanations'
become nugatory. They simply repeat the thing to be explained. He
begins with 'resemblance.' To feel two things to be alike is, he says,
the same thing as to have the two feelings. He means to say,
apparently, that when there are two 'ideas' there is not also a third
idea of 'likeness.' That would be what Bentham called a 'fictitious
entity.' But this cannot 'explain' the likeness of the ideas. 'Their
being alike,' as his son interprets, 'is nothing but their being felt
to be alike--which does not help us.'[550] So 'antecedence and
consequence' are 'explained' by saying that one of two feelings calls
up the other; or, as the son again remarks, antecedence is explained
by antecedence, and succession by succession. Antecedence and
consequence, like likeness and unlikeness, must therefore, according
to J. S. Mill, be 'postulated as universal conditions of Nature,
inherent in all our feelings whether of external or internal
consciousness.'[551] In other words, apparently, time is an ultimate
form of thought. Time and space, generally, as James Mill thinks, are
the 'abstract names' respectively of successive and simultaneous
order, which become 'indissolubly associated with the idea of every
object.'[552] Space, of course, is said to be a product of touch and
muscular sensations, and the problem as to how these varying
sensations and these alone give rise to apparently necessary and
invariable beliefs is not taken into consideration. Mill is here
dealing with the questions which Kant attempted to answer by showing
how the mind imposes its forms upon sense-given materials, forms them
into concepts, and combines the concepts into judgments and reasoning.
Mill evades the mysterious and transcendental at the cost of omitting
reason altogether. He represents the result of accepting one horn of a
dilemma, which presses upon philosophies of loftier pretensions. Those
who accept the other horn speak of a 'fact' as though it were a truth,
and argue as though the world could be spun out of pure logic, or a
tissue be made of relations without any things to be related. Mill,
with scarcely a glance at such doctrines, tries systematically to
speak of a truth as if it were a fact. The world for him is made up of
ideas sticking together; and nothing else exists. The relation is the
fact; belief is the association; consciousness and reflection,
considered apart, are