an unconditional positive statement--a statement defying all rational
contradiction--than he abstracts it from amongst the acquisitions of
experience, and throwing over it, we suppose, the light of these
fundamental ideas, pronounces it enrolled in the higher class of
universal and necessary truths. The first laws of motion, though
established through great difficulties against the most obstinate
preconceptions, and by the aid of repeated experiments, are, when
surveyed in their present perfect form, proclaimed to be, not
acquisitions of experience, but truths emanating from a higher and
more mysterious origin.[2]

[2] Necessary truths multiply on us very fast. "We
maintain," says Mr Whewell, "that this equality of
_mechanical action and reaction_ is one of the
principles which do not flow from, but regulate, our
experience. A mechanical pressure, not accompanied by an
equal and opposite pressure, can no more be given by
experience than two unequal right angles. With the
supposition of such inequalities, space ceases to be
space, form ceases to be form, matter ceases to be
matter." And again he says, "_That the parallelogram of
forces is a necessary truth_;" a law of motion of which
we surely can _conceive_ its opposite to be true. In
some of these instances Mr Whewell appears, by a
confusion of thought, to have given to the _physical
fact_ the character of necessity which resides in the
mathematical formula employed for its expression.
Whether a moving body would communicate motion to
another body--whether it would lose its own motion by so
doing--or what would be the result if a body were struck
by two other bodies moving in different directions--are
questions which, if they could be asked us prior to
experience, we could give no answer whatever to--which
we can easily conceive to admit of a quite different
answer to that which experience has taught us to give.

This distinction, which assigns a different mental origin to truths,
simply because (from the nature of the subject-matter, as it seems to
us) there is a difference with regard to the sort of certainty we feel
of them, has always appeared to us most unphilosophical. It is
admitted that we arrive at a general proposition through experience;
there is no room, therefore, for quibbling as to the meaning of the
term experience--it is understood that when we speak o