Note BA — PREFACE (continued 2)

The sense in which Sir W. Hamilton himself uses the word conception is explained in a note to Reid’s Works, p. 377—namely, the combination of two or more attributes in a unity of representation. The second sense which Mr. Mill imagines is simply a mistake of his own. When Hamilton speaks of being “unable to conceive as possible,” he does not mean, as Mr. Mill supposes, physically possible under the law of gravitation or some other law of matter, but mentally possible as a representation or image; and thus the supposed second sense is identical with the first. The third sense may also be reduced to the first; for to conceive two attributes as combined in one representation is to form a notion subordinate to those of each attribute separately. We do not say that Sir W. Hamilton has been uniformly accurate in his application of the test of conceivability; but we say that his inaccuracies, such as they are, do not affect the theory of the conditioned, and that in all the long extracts which Mr. Mill quotes, with footnotes, indicating “first sense,” “second sense,” “third sense,” the author’s meaning may be more accurately explained in the first sense only.