On Monday evening Professor Huxley delivered a lecture, at the
London Institution, on the " Elements of Psychology," in which he hazarded the suggestion that it was:a " fundamental and principal law of psychology that all beliefs as to the past must rest on experience ;" " and so, too, with our belief of expectation, as when a burnt child dreads the fire." But how as to our belief that what we remember as past, ever was present at all ? Does that, too, rest on experience ? If so, on what experience? We have never experienced it as a memory till it is a memory. We have ceased to experience it as a sensation directly it becomes a memory. On what, then, does the absolute asseveration of con- sciousness rest, that that which is now an image to the mind, was shortly before a state of experience of the body ? Surely here is an ultimate belief, due to the mere authority of a mental faculty which no one can say admits of "verification."
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