ABSTRACT
Unfortunately this theory too entails scepticism, and of a more radical kind than Kant's. To be sure, Kant did not believe that the necessities in our thinking reflected any like necessities among things in themselves, but he at least accepted necessity as holding among our experiences of things. Even this, according to the British
empiricists, is an illusion. Necessity, said Huxley, 'does not lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover elsewhere. For my part I utterly repudiate and anathematise the intruder. Fact I know, and Law I know; but what is this Necessity save an empty shadow of my mind's own throwing?'l It is an empty shadow because what looks like necessity is only habit, and there is nothing logical or self-evident about that; what has become fixed by mere association might in theory become unfixed. If the very laws of logic might have been different from what they are, then what they tell us, and what reasoning in accordance with them tells us, about the nature of the world is unreliable. It may be that the habits we have acquired in our little corner of the universe are an index to its nature everywhere and always. But it would be sheer good luck if that were so. For all we know, the world may be littered with round squares, and pairs of lines enclosing spaces, and sevens and fives that make thirteen, and other such surprises. If we cannot enjoy them, Spencer tells us in effect, it is because we and our fathers and their fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth have been set on edge.2
