For self-analysis shows this to be a datum of consciousness. Conceivespace to be cleared of all bodies save one. Now imagine the remaining onenot to be removed from its place, but to lapse into nothing while standingin that place. You fail. The space which was solid you cannot conceive becomingempty, save by transfer of that which made it solid. What is termed the ultimateincompressibility of Matter, is an admitted law of thought. However smallthe bulk to which we conceive a piece of matter reduced, it is impossibleto conceive it reduced into nothing. While we can represent to ourselvesits parts as approximated, we cannot represent to ourselves the quantityof matter as made less. To do this would be to imagine some of the partscompressed into nothing, which is no more possible than to imagine compressionof the whole into nothing. Our inability to conceive Matter becoming non-existent,is consequent on the nature of thought. Thought consists in the establishmentof relations. There can be no relation established, and therefore no thoughtframed, when one of the related terms is absent from consciousness. Henceit is impossible to think of something becoming nothing, for the same reasonthat it is impossible to think of nothing becoming something -- the reason,namely, that nothing cannot become an object of consciousness. The annihilationof Matter is unthinkable for the same reason that the creation of Matteris unthinkable.
It must be added that no experimental verification of the truth. thatMatter is indestructible, is possible without a tacit assumption of it. Forall such verification implies weighing, and weighing assumes that the matterforming the weight remains the same. §54. And here we are introduced to that which it most concerns usto observe -- the nature of the perceptions by which the permanence of Matteris perpetually illustrated. These perceptions under all their forms simplyreveal this -- that the force which a given quantity of matter embodies remainsalways the same under the same conditions. A toy which long unseen producesin us a set of visual and tactual feelings like those produced in childhoodis recognized as the same because it has the power of affecting us in thesame ways. The downward strain of some sovereigns which the bank-clerk weighsto save himself the trouble of counting, proves the special amount of a specialkind of Matter; and the goldsmith uses the same test when the shape of theMatter has been changed by a workman. So, too, with special properties. Whethera certain crystal is or is not diamond, is decided by its resistance to abrasionand the degree to which it bends light out of its course. And so the chemistwhen a piece of substance lately visible and tangible has been reduced toan invisible, intangible gas, but has the same weight, or when the quantityof a certain element is inferred from its ability to neutralize a given quantityof some other element, he refers to the amount of action which the Matterexercises as his measure of the amount of Matter.
Thus, then, by the Indestructibility of Matter, we reilly mean the indestructibilityof the force with which Matter affects us. And this truth is made manifestnot only by analysis of the a posteriori cognition, but equally so by analysisof the a priori one.(*)
<* Lest he should not have observed it, the reader must be warned thatthe terms "a priori truth" and "necessary truth," asused in this work, are to be interpreted not in the old sense, as implyingcognitions wholly independent of experiences, but as implying cognitionsthat have been rendered organic by immense accumulations of experiences,received partly by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individualswhose nervous systems he inherits. On referring to the Principles of Psychology (§§426-433), it will be seen that the warrant alleged for one ofthese irreversible ultimate convictions is that, on the hypothesis of Evolution,it represents an immeasurably-greater accumulation of experiences than canbe acquired by any single individual.>
