The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• Preface to the Third Edition[*]
• Chapter I: Introductory Remarks
• Chapter II: The Relativity of Human Knowledge
• Chapter III: The Doctrine of the Relativity of Human Knowledge, As Held By Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter IV: In What Respect Sir William Hamilton Really Differs From the Philosophers of the Absolute
• Chapter V: What Is Rejected As Knowledge By Sir William Hamilton, Brought Back Under the Name of Belief
• Chapter VI: The Philosophy of the Conditioned
• Chapter VII: The Philosophy of the Conditioned, As Applied By Mr. Mansel to the Limits of Religious Thought
• Chapter VIII: Of Consciousness, As Understood By Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter IX: Of the Interpretation of Consciousness
• Chapter X: Sir William Hamilton’s View of the Different Theories Respecting the Belief In an External World
• Chapter XI: The Psychological Theory of the Belief In an External World
• Chapter XII: The Psychological Theory of the Belief In Matter, How Far Applicable to Mind
• Chapter XIII: The Psychological Theory of the Primary Qualities of Matter
• Chapter XIV: How Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel Dispose of the Law of Inseparable Association
• Chapter XV: Sir William Hamilton’s Doctrine of Unconscious Mental Modifications
• Chapter XVI: Sir William Hamilton’s Theory of Causation
• Chapter XVII: The Doctrine of Concepts, Or General Notions
• Chapter XVIII: Of Judgment
• Chapter XIX: Of Reasoning
• Chapter XX: On Sir William Hamilton’s Conception of Logic As a Science. Is Logic the Science of the Laws, Or Forms, of Thought?
• Chapter XXI: The Fundamental Laws of Thought According to Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter XXII: Of Sir William Hamilton’s Supposed Improvements In Formal Logic
• Chapter XXIII: Of Some Minor Peculiarities of Doctrine In Sir William Hamilton’s View of Formal Logic
• Chapter XXIV: Of Some Natural Prejudices Countenanced By Sir William Hamilton, and Some Fallacies Which He Considers Insoluble
• Chapter XXV: Sir William Hamilton’s Theory of Pleasure and Pain
• Chapter XXVI: On the Freedom of the Will
• Chapter XXVII: Sir William Hamilton’s Opinions On the Study of Mathematics
• Chapter XXVIII: Concluding Remarks
• Appendices
• Appendix A: Manuscript Fragments
• Appendix B: Textual Emendations
• Appendix C: Corrected References
• Appendix D: Bibliographic Index of Persons and Works Cited In the Examination, With Variants and Notes

CHAPTER III

The Doctrine of the Relativity of Human Knowledge, as Held by Sir William Hamilton

it is hardly possible to affirm more strongly or more explicitly than Sir W. Hamilton has done, that Things in themselves are to us altogether unknowable, and that all we can know of anything is its relation to us, composed of, and limited to, the Phænomena which it exhibits to our organs. Let me cite a passage from one of the Appendices to the Discussions.

This passage might be matched by many others, equally emphatic, and in appearance equally decisive; several of which I shall have occasion to quote. Yet in the sense which the author’s phrases seem to convey—in the only ^aimportant^a meaning capable of being attached to them—the doctrine they assert was certainly not held by Sir W. Hamilton. He by no means admits that we know nothing of objects except their existence, and the impressions produced by them upon the human mind. He affirms this in regard to what have been called by metaphysicians the Secondary Qualities of Matter, but denies it of the Primary.

On this point his declarations are very explicit. One of the most elaborate of his “Dissertations on Reid” is devoted to expounding the distinction. The “Dissertation” begins thus:

Further on, he states, in additional development of so-called Natural Realism,

Not only, in Sir W. Hamilton’s opinion, do we know, by direct consciousness or perception, certain properties of Things as they exist in the Things themselves, but we may also know those properties as in the Things, by demonstration à priori. “The notion of body being given, every primary quality is to be evolved out of that notion, as necessarily involved in it, independently altogether of any experience of sense.”^§ “The Primary Qualities may be deduced à priori, the bare notion of matter being given; they being, in fact, only evolutions of the conditions which that notion necessarily implies.”^¶ He goes so far as to say, that our belief of the Primary Qualities is, not merely necessary as involved in a fact of which we have a direct perception, but necessary in itself, by our mental constitution. He speaks of “that absolute or insuperable resistance which we are compelled, independently of experience, to think that every part of matter would oppose to any attempt to deprive it of its space, by compressing it into an inextended.”^∥

The following is still more specific. “The Primary” Qualities “are apprehended as they are in bodies; the Secondary, as they are in us: the Secundo-primary” (a third class created by himself, comprising the mechanical as distinguished from the geometrical properties of Body)

There is nothing wonderful in Sir W. Hamilton’s entertaining these opinions; they are held by perhaps a majority of metaphysicians. But it is surprising that, entertaining them, he should have believed himself, and been believed by others, to maintain the Relativity of all our knowledge. What he deems to be relative, in any sense of the term that is not insignificant, is only our knowledge of the Secondary Qualities of objects. Extension and the other Primary Qualities he positively asserts that we have an immediate intuition of, “as they are in bodies”—“as modes of a not-self;” in express contradistinction to being known merely as causes of certain impressions on our senses or on our minds. As there cannot have been, in his own thoughts, a flat contradiction between what he would have admitted to be the two cardinal doctrines of his philosophy, the only question that can arise is, which of the two is to be taken in a non-natural sense. Is it the doctrine that we know certain properties as they are in the Things? Were we to judge from a foot-note to the same Dissertation, we might suppose so. He there observes—“In saying that a thing is known in itself, I do not mean that this object is known in its absolute existence, that is, out of relation to us. This is impossible: for our knowledge is only of the relative. To know a thing in itself or immediately, is an expression I use merely in contrast to the knowledge of a thing in a representation, or mediately:”^† in other words, he merely means that we perceive objects directly, and not through the species sensibiles of Lucretius,^[*] the Ideas of ^bLocke^b , or the Mental Modifications of Brown.^[†] Let us suppose this granted, and that the knowledge we have of objects is gained by direct perception. Still, the question has to be answered whether the knowledge so acquired is of the objects as they are in themselves, or only as they are relatively to us. Now what, according to Sir W. Hamilton, is this knowledge? Is it a knowledge of the Thing, merely in its effects on us, or is it a knowledge of somewhat in the Thing, ulterior to any effect on us? He asserts in the plainest terms that it is the latter. Then it is not a knowledge wholly relative to us. If what we perceive in the Thing is something of which we are only aware as existing, and as causing impressions on us, our knowledge of the Thing is only relative. But if what we perceive and cognise is not merely a cause of our subjective impressions, but a Thing possessing, in its own nature and essence, a long list of properties, Extension, Impenetrability, Number, Magnitude, Figure, Mobility, Position, all perceived as “essential attributes” of the Thing as “objectively existing”—all as “Modes of a Not-Self” and by no means as an occult cause or causes of any Modes of Self—(and that such is the case Sir W. Hamilton asserts in every form of language, leaving no stone unturned to make us apprehend the breadth of the distinction) then I am willing to believe that in affirming this knowledge to be entirely relative to Self, such a thinker as Sir W. Hamilton had a meaning, but I have no small difficulty in discovering what it is.

The place where we should expect to find this difficulty cleared up, is the formal exposition of the Relativity of Human Knowledge, in the first volume of the Lectures. He declares his intention of

Here is an exposition of the nature and limits of our knowledge, which would have satisfied Hartley, Brown, and even Comte. It cannot be more explicitly laid down, that Matter, as known to us, is but the incomprehensible and incognisable basis or substratum of a bundle of sensible qualities, appearances, phænomena; that we know it “only in its effects;” that its very existence is “only an inference we are compelled to make” from those sensible appearances^d . On the subject of Mind, again, could it have been more explicitly affirmed, that all we know of Mind is its successive states “of knowing, willing, feeling, desiring, &c.,” and that Mind, considered as “something behind or under these phænomena,” is to us unknowable?

Subsequently he says, that not only all the knowledge we have of anything, but all which we could have if we were a thousandfold better endowed than we are, would still be only knowledge of the mode in which the thing would affect us. Had we as many senses (the illustration is his own) as the inhabitants of Sirius, in the Micromegas of Voltaire;^[*] were there, as there may well be, a thousand modes of real existence as definitely distinguished from one another as are those which manifest themselves to our present senses, and “had we, for each of these thousand modes, a separate organ competent to make it known to us,—still would our whole knowledge be, as it is at present, only of the relative. Of existence, absolutely and in itself, we should then be as ignorant as we are now. We should still apprehend existence only in certain special modes—only in certain relations to our faculties of knowledge.”^*

Nothing can be truer or more clearly stated than all this: but the clearer it is, the more irreconcileable does it appear with our author’s doctrine of the direct cognoscibility of the Primary Qualities. If it be true that Extension, Figure, and the other qualities enumerated, are known “immediately in themselves,” and not, like Secondary qualities, “in their effects on us;” if the former are “apprehended as they are in bodies,” and not, like the Secondary, “as they are in us;” if it is these last exclusively that are “unknown in themselves, and only inferred as causes to account for certain subjective affections in ourselves:” while, of the former, we are immediately conscious as “attributes of matter objectively existing;” and if it is not to be endured that matter should “sink into something unknown and problematical,” whose existence “can be only precariously affirmed as the occult cause or incomprehensible occasion of certain subjective affections we experience in the form either of a sensation of the secondary quality or of a perception of the primary” (being precisely what Sir W. Hamilton, in the preceding quotations, appeared to say that it is); if these things be so, our faculties, as far as the Primary Qualities are concerned, do cognise and know Matter as it is in itself, and not merely as an unknowable and incomprehensible substratum; they do cognise and know it as it exists absolutely, and not merely in relation to us; it is known to us directly, and not as a mere “inference” from Phænomena.

Will it be said that the attributes of extension, figure, number, magnitude, and the rest, though known as in the Things themselves, are yet known only relatively to us, because it is by our faculties that we know them, and because appropriate faculties are the necessary condition of knowledge? If so, the “great axiom” of Relativity is reduced to this, that we can know Things as they are in themselves, but can know no more of them than our faculties are competent to inform us of. If such be the meaning of Relativity, our author might well maintain that it is a truth “harmoniously reechoed by every philosopher of every school;” nor need he have added “with the exception of a few late Absolute theorizers in Germany;”^* for certainly neither Schelling nor Hegel claims for us any other knowledge than such as our faculties are, in their opinion, competent to give.

Is it possible, that by knowledge of qualities “as they are in Bodies,” no more was meant than knowing that the Body must have qualities whereby it produces the affection of which we are conscious in ourselves? But this is the very knowledge which our author predicates of Secondary Qualities, as contradistinguished from the Primary. Secondary he frankly acknowledges to be occult qualities: we really, in his opinion, have no knowledge, and no conception, what that is in an object, by virtue of which it has its specific smell or taste. But Primary qualities, according to him, we know all about: there is nothing occult or mysterious to us in these; we perceive and conceive them as they are in themselves, and as they are in the body they belong to. They are manifested to us, not, like the Secondary qualities, only in their effects, in the sensations they excite in us, but in their own nature and essence.

Perhaps it may be surmised, that in calling knowledge of this sort by the epithet Relative, Sir W. Hamilton meant that though we know those qualities as they are in themselves, we only discover them through their relation to certain effects in us; that in order that there may be Perception there must also be Sensation; and we thus know the Primary Qualities, in their effects on us and also in themselves. But neither will this explanation serve. This theory of Primary Qualities does not clash with the Secondary, but it runs against the Secundo-primary. It is this third class, which, as he told us, are known “both immediately in themselves and mediately in their effects on us.” The Primary are only known “immediately in themselves.” He has thus with his own hands deliberately extruded from our knowledge of the Primary qualities the element of relativity to us:—except, to be sure, in the acceptation in which knowing is itself a relation, inasmuch as it implies a knower; whereby instead of the doctrine that Things in themselves are not possible objects of knowledge, we obtain the “great axiom” that they cannot be known unless there is somebody to know them.^e

Can any light be derived from the statement that we do not know any qualities of things except those which are in connexion with our faculties, or, as our author expresses it (surely by a very strained use of language), which are “analogous to our faculties?”^* If, by “our faculties,” is to be understood our knowing faculty, this proposition is but the trivial one already noticed, that we can know only what we can know. And this is what the author actually seems to mean; for in a sentence immediately following, he paraphrases the expression “analogous to our faculties,” by the phrase that we must “possess faculties accommodated to their apprehension.”^† To be able to see, we must have a faculty accommodated to seeing. Is this what we are intended to understand by the “great axiom?”^f But if “our faculties” does not here mean our knowing faculty, it must mean our sensitive faculties; and the statement is, that, to be known by us, a quality must be “analogous” (meaning, I suppose, related) to our senses. But what is meant by being related to our senses? That it must be fitted to give us sensations. We thus return as before to an identical proposition.

^gThere is still another possible supposition; that, in calling our knowledge relative in contradistinction to absolute, Sir W. Hamilton was not thinking of our knowledge of qualities, but of substances—of Matter and Mind; and meant that qualities might be cognised absolutely, or as they are in themselves, but that, since substances are only known through their qualities, the knowledge of substances is not knowledge of them as they are in themselves, but is merely relative. According to this interpretation, the relativity which Sir W. Hamilton ascribes to our knowledge of substances is relativity not to us, but to their attributes: we “become aware of their incomprehensible existence only as this is revealed to us through certain qualities.” And when he adds, “which qualities, again, we cannot think as unconditioned, irrelative, existent in and of themselves,”^[*] thus predicating relativity of attributes also (considered as known or conceived by us), he means relativity to a substance. We can only know a substance through its qualities, but also, we can only know qualities as inhering in a substance. Substance and attribute are correlative, and can only be thought together: the knowledge of each, therefore, is relative to the other; but need not be, and indeed is not, relative to us. For we know attributes as they are in themselves, and our knowledge of them is only relative inasmuch as attributes have only a relative existence. It is relative knowledge in a sense not contradictory to absolute. It is an absolute knowledge, though of things which only exist in a necessary relation to another thing called a substance.^*

I am not disposed to deny that this interpretation of Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine is, to a certain point, correct. He did draw a distinction between our manner of knowing attributes and our manner of knowing substances; and did regard certain attributes (the primary qualities) as objects of direct and immediate knowledge; which, in his opinion, substances are not, but are merely assumed or inferred from phænomena, by a law of our nature which compels us to think phænomena as attributes of something beyond themselves. I do not doubt that when he said that our knowledge of attributes is relative, the necessity of thinking every attribute as an attribute of a substance was present to his mind, and formed a part of his meaning. ^hThere is, however, abundant evidence that the relativity which Sir W. Hamilton ascribed to our knowledge of attributes was not merely relativity to their substances, but also relativity to us. He affirms of attributes as positively as of substances, that all our knowledge of them is relative to us. The passages already quoted apply as much to attributes as to substances. “In saying that we know only the relative, I virtually assert that we know nothing absolute—nothing existing absolutely, that is, in and for itself, and without relation to us and our faculties.”^† “In saying that a thing is known in itself, I do not mean that this object is known in its absolute existence, that is, out of relation to us. This is impossible, for our knowledge is only of the relative.”^‡ In the following passages he is speaking solely of attributes. “By the expression what they are in themselves, in reference to the primary qualities, and of relative notion in reference to the secondary, Reid cannot mean that the former are known to us absolutely and in themselves, that is, out of relation to our cognitive faculties; for he elsewhere admits that all our knowledge is relative.”^§ “We can know, we can conceive, only what is relative. Our knowledge of qualities or phænomena is necessarily relative; for these exist only as they exist in relation to our faculties.”^* The distinction, therefore, which Sir W. Hamilton recognises between our knowledge of substances and that of attributes, though authentically a part of his philosophy, is quite irrelevant here.^h He affirms without reservation, that certain attributes (extension, figure, &c.) are known to us as they really exist out of ourselves; and also that all our knowledge of them is relative to us. And these two assertions are only reconcileable, if relativity to us is understood in the altogether trivial sense, that we know them only so far as our faculties permit.^†g

The conclusion I cannot help drawing from this collation of passages is, that Sir W. Hamilton either never held, or when he wrote the “Dissertations” had ceased to hold ⁱ(for his theory respecting knowledge of the Primary Qualities does not occur in the Lectures)ⁱ the doctrine for which he has been so often praised and nearly as often attacked—the Relativity of Human Knowledge. He certainly did sincerely believe that he held it. But he repudiated it in every sense which makes it other than a barren truism. In the only meaning in which he really maintained it, there is nothing to maintain. It is an identical proposition, and nothing more.

And to this, or something next to this, he^j reduces it in ^kthe first portion of^k the summary with which he concludes its exposition. “From what has been said,” he observes, “you will be able, I hope, to understand what is meant by the proposition, that all our knowledge is only relative. It is relative, 1st. Because existence is not cognisable absolutely in itself, but only in special modes; 2nd. Because these modes can be known only if they stand in a certain relation to our faculties.” Whoever can find anything more in these two statements, than that we do not know all about a Thing, but only as much about it as we are capable of knowing, is more ingenious or more fortunate than myself.

He adds, however, to these reasons why our knowledge is only relative, a third reason. “3rd. Because the modes, thus relative to our faculties, are assented to, and known by, the mind only under modifications determined by those faculties themselves.”^‡ Of this addition to the theory we took notice near the conclusion of the preceding chapter.^[*] It shall have the advantage of a fuller explanation in Sir W. Hamilton’s words.

The proposition, that our cognitions of objects are only in part dependent on the objects themselves, and in part on elements superadded by our organs or by our minds, is not identical, nor primâ facie absurd. It cannot, however, warrant the assertion that all our knowledge, but only that the part so added, is relative. If our author had gone as far as Kant, and had said that all ^lthe primary qualities which we think we perceive in bodies, are^l put in by the mind itself, he would have really held, in one of its forms, the doctrine of the Relativity of our knowledge. But what he does say, far from implying that the whole of our knowledge is relative, distinctly imports that all of it which is real and authentic is the reverse. If any part of what we fancy that we perceive in the objects themselves, originates in the perceiving organs or in the cognising mind, thus much is purely relative; but since, by supposition, it does not all so originate, the part that does not, is as much absolute as if it were not liable to be mixed up with these delusive subjective impressions. The admixture of the relative element not only does not take away the absolute character of the remainder, but does not even (if our author is right) prevent us from recognising it. The confusion, according to him, is not inextricable. It is for us to “analyze and distinguish what elements” in an “act of knowledge” are contributed by the object, and what by our organs, or by the mind. We may neglect to do this, and as far as the mind’s share is concerned, can only do it by the help of philosophy; but it is a task to which in his opinion philosophy is equal. By thus stripping off such of the elements in our apparent cognitions of Things as are but cognitions of something in us, and consequently relative, we may succeed in uncovering the pure nucleus, the direct intuitions of Things in themselves; as we correct the observed positions of the heavenly bodies by allowing for the error due to the refracting influence of the atmospheric medium, an influence which does not alter the facts, but only our perception of them.

^mThis last doctrine, however,—that the mind’s own constitution contributes along with the outward object, to make up what is called our knowledge of the object,—is what Mr. Mansel maintains Sir W. Hamilton to have meant by the assertion that our whole knowledge of the object is relative. And this is the foundation of all that Mr. Mansel presents as a refutation of the present chapter.

If it be true (to use Mr. Mansel’s words) that, in the constitution of our knowledge, the mind “reacts on the objects affecting it, so as to produce a result different from that which would be produced, were it merely a passive recipient,”^* this modifying action of the mind must consist, as is affirmed by Kant and by all others who profess the doctrine, in making us ascribe to the object, and apprehend as in the object, properties which are not really in the object, but are merely lent to it by the constitution of our mental nature. Now, if the attributes which we perceive, or think we perceive, in objects, are partly given by the mind, but not wholly, being also partly given by the nature of the object itself (which is admitted to be Sir W. Hamilton’s opinion); this joint agency of the object and of the mind’s own laws in generating what we call our knowledge of the object, may be conceived in two ways.

First: The two factors may be jointly operative in every part of the effect. Every attribute with which we perceive the thing as invested, may be a joint product of the thing itself and of the modifying action of the mind. If this be the case, we do not really know any property as it is in the object: we have no reason to think that the object as we apprehend it, and as we figure to ourselves that we perceive and know it, agrees in any respect with the object that exists without us; but only that it depends upon that outward object, as one of its joint causes. Such was the opinion of Kant; and whoever is of this opinion, holds, in one of its forms, as I have expressly admitted, the genuine doctrine of the Relativity of our knowledge. For all must agree with Mr. Mansel when he says, that an object of thought, into which the mind puts a positive element of its own, thereby making it different from what it otherwise would be, is that which it is, only relatively to the mind. This seems to be Mr. Mansel’s own mode of representing to himself the combined action of the mind and the object in perception. For he compares it to the action of an acid and an alkali in forming a neutral salt;^* and to a chemical fusion together of two elements, in contradistinction to a mere mechanical juxtaposition.^† If we had never seen, and could not get at, the acid or the alkali except as united in the salt, Mr. Mansel could not think that our knowledge of the salt gave us any knowledge of the acid or the alkali themselves.

But, secondly: There is another mode in which the co-operation of the object and the mind’s own properties in producing our cognition of the object, may be conceived as taking place. Instead of their being joint agents in producing our cognitions of all the attributes with which we mentally clothe the object, some of the attributes as cognised by us may come from the object only, and some from the mind only, or from both. Now it is not open to a holder of this second opinion, as it is to one of the first, to affirm that all the attributes are only known relatively to us. Such of them, indeed, as are made to be that which they are by what the mind puts into them, are, on this theory, only known relatively to the mind: they have even no existence except relatively to the mind. But those into which no positive element is introduced by the mind’s laws (I say no positive element, because a mere negative limitation by the mind’s capacities is nothing to the purpose), these, as their cognition contains nothing but what is presented in the external object, must be held to be known not relatively, but absolutely. The doubt how much of what we apprehend in them is due to our own constitution, and how much to the external world, has no place here: they are, by supposition, wholly perceptions of something in the external world.

Now, this second view of the joint action of the mind and the outward thing, as the two factors in our cognition of the thing, is Sir W. Hamilton’s. The passages in which he characterizes our knowledge of the Primary Qualities place this beyond question. He affirms clearly and consistently that extension, figure, and the other Primary Qualities are known by us “as they are in bodies,” and not “as they are in us;” that they are known as “essential attributes of matter objectively existing;” as “modes of a notself,” not even combined, as in the Secundo-primary, with any “modes of self;”^[*] so that no element originating in our subjective constitution interferes with the purity of the apperception. In this respect the physical phenomena which Mr. Mansel calls in as illustrations afford no parallel. No one would say that the acid in a neutral salt is perceived and known by us in the salt as what it is as an acid. Indeed, the ⁿdiscrimination whichⁿ Sir W. Hamilton thinks it possible for philosophy to ^omake,^o between that in our knowledge which the object contributes and that which the mind contributes, ^palmost requires as its condition that some attributes should be^p wholly contributed by the one and some by the other: for if every attribute was the joint product of both, ^qit is difficult to see what means the case could afford^q of making the discrimination, any more than of discriminating between the acid and the alkali in Mr. Mansel’s salt. The question, how much of the salt is due to the acid and how much to the alkali, is not merely unresolvable, but intrinsically absurd.^*

Mr. Mansel’s mode of reconciling Sir W. Hamilton’s emphatic declaration, that we know the Primary Qualities as they are in objects, with his assertion of the entire incognoscibility of Things in themselves, is by saying that “objects” are not identical with “things in themselves.”^* “Objective existence,” he says,

Now, this is a possible opinion; it was really the opinion of Kant. That philosopher did recognise a direct object of our perceptions, different from the thing itself, and intermediate between it and the perceiving mind. And it was open to Kant to do so; because he held what Sir W. Hamilton calls a representative theory of perception. He maintained that the object of our perception, and of our knowledge, is a representation in our own minds. In his philosophy, both object and subject are accommodated within the mind itself—the object within the subject. The mind has no perception of the external thing, nor comes into any contact with it in the act of perception.^‡ Was this Sir W. Hamilton’s opinion? On the contrary, if there be a doctrine of his philosophy which he has laboured at beyond any other, against, as he affirms, nearly all philosophers, it is, that the thing we perceive is the real thing which exists outside us, and that the perceiving mind is in direct contact with it, without any intermediate link whatever. We never hear from Sir W. Hamilton of three elements in our cognition of the outward world, but of two only, the mind, and the real object; which he sometimes calls the external object, sometimes Body, sometimes Matter, sometimes a Non-ego. Yet, according to Mr. Mansel, he must have believed that this object, which he so strenuously contended to be the very thing itself, is not the very thing in itself, but that behind it there is another Thing in itself, the unknown cause of it. I can discover no trace in Sir W. Hamilton’s writings of any such entity. The outward things which he believed to exist, he believed that we perceive and know: not, indeed, “absolutely or in themselves,” because only in such of their attributes as we have senses to reveal to us; but yet as they really are. He did not believe in, or recognise, a Thing per se, itself unknowable, but engendering another material object called a phænomenon, which is knowable. The only distinction he recognised between a phænomenon and a Thing per se, was that between attributes and a substance. But he believed the primary attributes to be known by us as they exist in the substance, and not in some intermediate object.^*

The mark by which Mr. Mansel distinguishes between the object and the Thing in itself, is that the object is in space and time, but the Thing out of space and time; space and time having merely a subjective existence, in us, not in external nature. This is Kantism, but it is not Hamiltonism. I do not believe that the expression “out of space and time” is to be found once in all Sir W. Hamilton’s writings. It belongs to the Kantian, not to the Hamiltonian philosophy. Sir W. Hamilton does indeed hold with Kant, and on Kant’s shewing, that space and time are à priori forms of the mind, but he believes that they are also external realities, known empirically.^* And it is worth notice, that he grounds the outward reality of Space, not on his favourite evidence, that of our Natural Beliefs, but on the specific reason, that (Extension being only another name for Space), if Space was not an outward thing cognizable à posteriori, we could not, as he affirms that we do, cognize Extension as an external reality. He must therefore have thought, not that Space is a mere form in which our perceptions of objects are clothed by the laws of our perceiving faculty, but that we perceive real things in real space.^†

Mr. Mansel is not the only one of my critics who has interpreted Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine of our direct knowledge of outward objects, as if those outward objects were a tertium quid, between the mind and the real outward, or if the expression may be permitted, the outer outward object. For, irreconcilable as this supposition is with the evidence of his writings, it is the only one which can be thought of to give a substantial meaning to his doctrine of Relativity, consistent with the external reality of the Primary Qualities. Professor Masson consequently had already taken refuge in the same interpretation as Mr. Mansel; but propounded it in the modest form of an hypothesis, not a dogmatical assertion. The North American Reviewer in like manner says:

This explanation might pass, if Sir W. Hamilton’s assertion of the relativity of our knowledge to our mind were all contained in the word phænomenal, and could be explained away by supposing that word to mean relativity not to us, but to an unknown cause. But I need not requote his declaration that our knowledge of Qualities is all relative to us, nor his assertion that nevertheless certain qualities are in the object, and are perceived and known in the object, and that the object perceived and known is no other than the real Thing itself. Nowhere in his works do I find any recognition of another real Thing, which is not the Thing perceived by us through its attributes. He does not tell us of a Body perceived, and an unperceived Substance in the background: the Body is the Substance. He does indeed say that the Substance is only an inference from the Attributes; but he also says that certain attributes are perceived as in the real external Thing; and he never drops the smallest hint of any real external thing in which the attributes can be, except the Substance itself, which he expressly defines as “that which manifests its qualities,” that in which the “phænomena or qualities are supposed to inhere.”^[*]

Professor Fraser, in the (in many respects) profound Essay of which he has done this work the honour of making it the occasion, vindicates at once the consistency of Sir W. Hamilton, and the substantial significance of his doctrine of Relativity, by ascribing to him, in opposition to his incessant declarations, Mr. Fraser’s own far clearer views of the subject. Mr. Fraser, like myself, believes the Primary Qualities to have no more existence out of our own or other minds, than the Secondary Qualities have, or than our pains and pleasures have; and he asks, “Where does he” (Sir W. Hamilton) “say that we have an absolute knowledge of the primary qualities of matter, in any other sense than that in which he says that we have a like knowledge of a feeling of pain or pleasure in our minds while it is being felt, or of an act of consciousness while it is being acted?”^* To this “where,” I answer, in every place where he says that we know the Primary Qualities not as they are in us, but as they are in the Body. That is asserting an absolute knowledge of them, as distinguished from relativity to us: and he would not have made a similar assertion of our pains and pleasures, or of our acts of internal consciousness. Again, asks Mr. Fraser, “How does the assertion that we are percipient directly, and not through a medium, of phenomena of solidity and extension, contradict the principle that all our knowledge is relative, when the assertion that we are percipient, directly and not through a medium, of the phenomena of sensation or emotion or intelligence does not?”^† Because the phænomena of sensation or emotion or intelligence are admitted to be perceived or felt as facts that have no reality out of us, and the facts being only relative to us, the knowledge of the facts partakes of the same relativity: but the phænomena of solidity and extension are alleged by Sir W. Hamilton to be perceived as facts whose reality is out of our minds, and in the material object: which is indeed knowing them relatively to the outward object, but is the diametrical opposite of knowing them relatively to us.^‡m

It has ^vnow^v been shown, by accumulated proof, that Sir W. Hamilton did not hold any opinion in virtue of which it could rationally be asserted that all human knowledge is relative; but did hold, as one of the main elements of his philosophical creed, the opposite doctrine, of the cognoscibility of external Things, in certain of their aspects, as they are in themselves, absolutely.

But if this be true, what becomes of his dispute with Cousin, and with Cousin’s German predecessors and teachers? That celebrated controversy surely meant something. Where there was so much smoke there must have been some fire. Some difference of opinion must really have existed between Sir W. Hamilton and his antagonists.

Assuredly there was a difference, and one of great importance from the point of view of either disputant; not unimportant in the view of those who dissent from them both. In the succeeding chapter I shall endeavour to point out what the difference was.

[* ]Discussions on Philosophy, [App. I(B),] pp. 643-4.

[a-a]651, 652 substantial

[* ]“Dissertations” appended to Sir W. Hamilton’s Edition of Reid’s Works, [Note D,] p. 825.

[† ]Ibid., p. 842.

[‡ ]Ibid.

[§ ]Ibid., p. 844n.

[¶ ]Ibid., p. 846.

[∥ ]Ibid., p. 848.

[* ]Ibid., pp. 857-8.

[† ]P. 866n.

[[*] ]The attribution is mistaken. The notion originates with Aristotle; see On the Soul, in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, on Breath (Greek and English), trans. W. S. Hett (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), pp. 136, 180 (II, xii, 424a19; III, viii, 432a4). See also p. 155 below.

[b-b]651, 652, 67 Berkeley

[[†] ]See e.g., Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, 19th ed., 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Black; London: Longman, 1851), Vol. II, p. 83. Brown does not use the term very often, but Hamilton uses it in his Discussions to distinguish Brown’s theory from Reid’s.

[c-c]651, 652 [in italics]

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 136-8. [Virgil, Aeneid, in Works, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1916), Vol. II, p. 110 (VIII, 730).]

[d]651, 652 : a doctrine, by the way, which, under the name of Cosmothetic Idealism, is elsewhere the object of some of his most cutting attacks

[[*] ]See Micromégas, in Œuvres complètes, 66 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1817-25), Vol. XXXIX, pp. 141-67.

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 153.

[* ]Discussions, Appendix [I(B)], p. 644.

[e]651, 652 [paragraph] Perhaps it may be suspected (and some phrases in the longest of our extracts might countenance the idea) that in calling our knowledge relative, Sir W. Hamilton was not thinking of the knowledge of qualities, but of Substances, of Matter and Mind; and meant that qualities might be cognised absolutely, but that Substances being only known through their qualities, the knowledge of Substances can only be regarded as relative. But this interpretation of his doctrine is again inadmissible. For the relativity of which he is continually speaking is relativity to us, while the relativity which this theory ascribes to Substances is relativity to their attributes; and if the attributes are known otherwise than relatively to us, so must the substances be. Besides, we have seen him asserting the necessary relativity of our knowledge of Attributes, no less positively than of Substances. Speaking of Things in themselves, we found him saying that we “become aware of their incomprehensible existence only as this is revealed to us through certain qualities . . . which qualities, again, we cannot think as unconditioned, irrelative, existent in and of themselves.” [Discussions, App. I(B), pp. 643-4.] There is no reservation here in favour of the Primary Qualities. Whatever, in his theory, was meant by relativity of knowledge, he intended it of qualities as much as of substances, of Primary Qualities as much as of Secondary. [cf. 20g-g22below]

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 141, 153.

[† ]Ibid., p. 153.

[f]651, 652 [paragraph]

[g-g]22+67, 72

[[*] ]Discussions, App. I(B), pp. 643-4; cf. p. 13 above.

[* ][67] This is essentially the interpretation put on Sir W. Hamilton’s meaning by the ingenious reviewer [John Cunningham] of the present work in the Edinburgh Review [CXXIV (July, 1866), 146-9].

[h-h][manuscript fragment exists; see Appendix A below]

[† ][67] Lectures, Vol. I, p. 137.

[‡ ][67] “Dissertations on Reid,” [Note D,] p. 866n.

[§ ][67] Foot-note to Reid, [Works, ed. Hamilton (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1846,] p. 313n.

[* ][67] Ibid., pp. 322n-3n. I am indebted to Mr. Mansel (Philosophy of the Conditioned, p. 79) for reminding me of the last two passages. I should not have failed to quote them in the first edition, if I had kept references to them.

[† ][67] I may add that even the Edinburgh Reviewer’s supposition [see Cunningham, p. 148] does not save either the relativity of human knowledge to us, or its relativity in the sense in which relative is opposed to absolute, as doctrines of Sir W. Hamilton: for by the Reviewer’s interpretation our knowledge of attributes would be relative only to their substances; absolute in their cognition by us.

[i-i]+67, 72

[j]651, 652 openly

[k-k]+67, 72

[‡ ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 148.

[[*] ]See p. 12 above.

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 146-8.

[l-l]651, 652, 67 which constitutes knowledge is

[m-m]32+67, 72

[* ][67] Mansel, [Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 64.

[* ][67] Ibid., p. 71.

[† ][67] Ibid., p. 75.

[[*] ]“Dissertations on Reid,” Note D, pp. 825 and 857-8; quoted more extensively above, p. 15.

[n-n]67 very fact that

[o-o]67 discriminate

[p-p]67 shows that he regarded some attributes as

[q-q]67 there would be no means

[* ][72] Sir W. Hamilton has the appearance of disclaiming the opinion here attributed to him, and professing the alternative opinion that every attribute is a joint product of the object and the mind, in the following foot-note to Reid:

“The distinctions of perception and sensation, and of primary and secondary qualities, may be reduced to one higher principle. Knowledge is partly objective, partly subjective; both these elements are essential to every cognition, but in every cognition they are always in the inverse ratio of each other. Now, in perception and the primary qualities, the objective element preponderates; whereas the subjective element preponderates in sensation and the secondary qualities. See Notes D and D*.” (Pp. 313n-14n.)

But a reference to the Notes in question will shew, that in admitting a subjective element in the Primary Qualities, he only meant that a subjective element accompanies our apprehension of them; that whenever we perceive the primary qualities we are conscious of a sensation also. “Sensation proper,” he says, “is the conditio sine qua non of a Perception proper of the Primary qualities.” And again, “Every Perception proper has a Sensation proper as its condition.” “The fact of Sensation proper and the fact of Perception proper imply each other:” they always co-exist, though “in the degree or intensity of their existence they are always found in an inverse ratio to one another” (“Dissertations,” [Note D*,] p. 880). This co-existence does not prevent the two from being entirely distinct. “The apprehensions of the Primary” qualities “are perceptions, not sensations; of the Secondary, sensations, not perceptions; of the Secundo-primary, perceptions and sensations together” ([ibid., Note D,] p. 858). Perceptions, the apprehensions of the Primary qualities, are themselves wholly objective.

[* ][67] Mansel, [Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 79n.

[† ][67] Ibid., pp. 82-3.

[‡ ][67] Such, at least, is the doctrine of Kant in the first edition of the Kritik, though, in the so-called Refutation of Idealism introduced into the second, he is sometimes supposed to have intended to explain it away [see Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Vol. II of Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Rosenkranz and Friedrich Schubert, 14 vols. in 12 (Leipzig: Voss, 1838-40), pp. 31-238 (1st ed.), and 772-5 (the Refutation in the 2nd ed.).]; but Mr. Mahaffy (Intro., Pt. IV [pp. xxxviii-liii], and notes to Appendix C) seems to have explained away the explanation [cf. George Gordon Byron, “Dedication ii,” Don Juan, in Works, ed. Thomas Moore, 17 vols. (London: Murray, 1832-33), Vol. XV, p. 101]; and Mr. Stirling, who holds “the second edition of the Kritik of Pure Reason to supersede the first,” (p. 30n,) still credits Kant with this doctrine, interpreting in a sense consistent with it, the externality which Kant ascribes to objects in space. Kant’s external and internal were both internal to the mind. Nothing but the noumenon was external to it.

[* ][67] If any doubt could remain that Mr. Mansel defends Sir W. Hamilton by ascribing to him an opinion he never held, the following passage would dispel it. “If, indeed,” says Mr. Mansel “Hamilton had said with Locke, that the primary qualities are in the bodies themselves, whether we perceive them or no, he would have laid himself open to Mr. Mill’s criticism. But he expressly rejects this statement, and contrasts it with the more cautious language of Descartes, ‘ut sunt, vel saltem esse possunt.’ ” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] pp. 83-4. [The Locke reference is to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in Works, New ed., 10 vols. (London: Tegg, et al., 1823), Vol. I, p. 126 (Bk. II, Chap. viii, §23); the Descartes quotation is from René Descartes, Principia Philosophiœ, 4th ed. (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1664), p. 18 (I, lxx).]) Sir W. Hamilton may never have said, totidem verbis, that the Primary Qualities are in the bodies even when we do not perceive them: but can any one who has read his writings doubt that this was his opinion? The passage which Mr. Mansel refers to as “rejecting” it runs as follows: “On the doctrine of both philosophers” (Locke and Descartes) “we know nothing of material existence in itself: we know it only as represented, or in idea. When Locke, therefore, is asked, how he became aware that the known idea truly represents the unknown reality, he can make no answer. On the first principles of his philosophy, he is wholly and necessarily ignorant whether the idea does or does not represent to his mind the attributes of matter, as they exist in nature. His assertion is, therefore, confessedly without a warrant; it transcends, ex hypothesi, the sphere of possible knowledge. Descartes is more cautious. He only says, that our ideas of the qualities in question represent those qualities as they are, or as they may exist; ‘ut sunt, vel saltem esse possunt.’ The Cosmothetic Idealist can only assert to them a problematical reality.” (“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note D,] p. 839.)

Mr. Mansel actually thinks this an adoption of Descartes’ opinion; and does not see that Sir W. Hamilton merely pronounces Descartes to be right and Locke wrong from their own point of view, that of Cosmothetic Idealism. As Cosmothetic Idealists, they have, he says, no evidence that the qualities we perceive are in the object itself, and are as we perceive them. Not admitting that we directly perceive the qualities in the object, they cannot do more than assert problematically that the qualities are in the object; and this Descartes saw, and Locke, more inconsistently, did not see. But what they as Cosmothetic Idealists could not affirm, Sir W. Hamilton, as a Natural Realist, could; because, as a Natural Realist, he held that we directly perceive the qualities in the object. Mr. Mansel mistakes one of the thousand statements by Sir W. Hamilton of his difference with the Cosmothetic Idealists, for an adhesion to them. r(Mr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, admits and withdraws this error [“Supplementary Remarks,” p. 20n].)r Sir W. Hamilton, as Professor Fraser observes, believed that “the solid and extended percepts which our sensations reveal to us, exist, whether we are conscious or not.” ([“Mr. Mill’s Examination,”] p. 22.) He believed that bodies exist whether we perceive them or not, and that they always carry their “essential attributes,” the Primary Qualities, with them: if, therefore, he had thought that the Primary Qualities only exist while we perceive them, he must have thought so of the bodies likewise, and must have believed that we create the bodies in the act of perceiving them; which Kant, who deemed the body we perceive to be really in the mind, did believe; but if Sir W. Hamilton did, his whole philosophy of perception is without a meaning.

In the essay in his Discussions, headed “Philosophy of Perception,” Sir W. Hamilton speaks of the knowledge of external objects claimed by a Natural Realist, ipsissimis verbis, as knowledge of “things in themselves.” (Discussions, p. 57, in the statement of the opinion of Hypothetical Realists.)

For a critical examination of the doctrine ascribed to Sir W. Hamilton by Mr. Mansel, that of an external object cognizable by us, and an uncognizable Noumenon besides, I may refer to Mr. Bolton’s able work, [Inquisitio Philosophica,] pp. 218ff.

sMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, though he does not give up the theory of the tertium quid, does not further insist on it; but attempts to shew that when Sir W. Hamilton speaks of knowing the Primary qualities as they are in themselves, and as they are in the body, he means knowing them in immediate relation to the mind, in contradistinction to knowing them mediately through a mental representation, or merely inferring them as the hypothetical cause of a mental state. [“Supplementary Remarks,” pp. 20-1.] I admit, and have already admitted, that Sir W. Hamilton did mean this, and did say that he meant it. But the “immediate relation to the mind” which Sir W. Hamilton thus distinguished from the different modes of mediate relation, is no other than that between perceiver and perceived: and to say that all our knowledge is relative, meaning only this relation, is but to say, that we know of external things only what we perceive of them, and that in order that we may know an object of sense it must be presented to our senses. The knowledge, when we do get it, according to Sir W. Hamilton, is not (in the case of Primary qualities) knowledge of an impression made on our own sensitive faculty, which would be really relative knowledge; it is knowledge of the Thing as it exists in itself, independently of our perceptions. It is this which, as I have pointed out, reduces the pretended Relativity to a name.

It is a great confirmation of the unmeaningness of the Relativity Doctrine in Sir W. Hamilton’s hands, that those who have most studied his philosophy, Dean Mansel and Professor Veitch, are reduced to such straits in the attempt to find a meaning for it, and do not always find the same meaning.s

[* ][67] See Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 113-14; Discussions, p. 16; “Dissertations on Reid,” [Note D*,] p. 882; and, in further illustration, foot-note to Reid, p. 126n; passages strangely overlooked by Mr. Mansel ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 138).

[† ][67] When Sir W. Hamilton says (“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note D,] p. 841) that although Space is a native, necessary, à priori form of imagination, we yet have an immediate perception of a really objective extended world, Mr. Mansel imagines that Sir W. Hamilton is maintaining at once the subjectivity of Space, and the objectivity of bodies as occupying space. But Sir W. Hamilton himself declares unequivocally that these two opinions contradict one another, unless reconciled by the supposition that Space is objective and external to us as well as subjective: not, therefore, properly a form of our mind, but an outward reality which has a form of our mind corresponding to it. See the whole of the passages referred to in the last note.

[* ][67] [Anon., “Mill on Hamilton,” North American Review, CIII (July, 1866),] 252-3.

[[*] ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 137, 138.

[* ][67] Fraser, [“Mr. Mill’s Examination,”] p. 16.

[† ][67] Ibid., p. 15.

[‡ ][67] Mr. Fraser affirms (p. 20) with me, and contrary to Mr. Mansel and the North American Reviewer [see pp. 252-6], that in Sir W. Hamilton’s opinion “there is nothing behind the proper objects of sense-consciousness, these being the very things or realities themselves which we call material, external, extended, solid.” Instead of recognizing three elements, a Noumenal real thing, a Phænomenal real thing, and the perceiving mind, the middle one of the three being that which the mind cognizes, Mr. Fraser sees that Sir W. Hamilton recognised but one real Thing, the very Thing which we perceive; unknown to us in its essence, but perceived and known through its attributes; and by means of those attributes, actually brought into what Sir W. Hamilton calls our consciousness. This Mr. Fraser regards [ibid.] as “a distinct and important contribution by Sir W. Hamilton to the theory of matter previously common in this country,” because bringing matter into our consciousness is part of the way towards making it (what Mr. Fraser believes it to be) wholly a phænomenon of mind. But Sir W. Hamilton did not intend his doctrine to lead to this; he admits Matter into our consciousness because, contrary to the general opinion of philosophers, he thinks (see below, Chap. viii) that we can be conscious of what is outside our mind. Sir W. Hamilton, in short, was not a Berkeleian, as Mr. Fraser is, and as that philosopher almost admits (p. 26) that the interpretation which he would like to put on Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine would make Sir W. Hamilton.

Mr. Fraser seems to me, throughout his defence of Sir W. Hamilton, to have yielded to the natural tendency of a consistent thinker when standing up for an inconsistent one, to interpret ambiguous utterances twhicht face two ways, as if they looked only one way; though the part of their author’s philosophy towards which those expressions face on their other side, is thereby set at nought and abolished.

uSince the publication of the third edition of this work, my attention has been drawn to a passage (unfortunately left unfinished) in the posthumous continuation of Sir W. Hamilton’s “Dissertations on Reid,” which strikingly confirms the opinion I have expressed, that the relativity of human knowledge, as understood by him, is a mere identical proposition.

“That all knowledge consists in a certain relation of the object known to the subject knowing, is self-evident. What is the nature of this relation, and what are its conditions, is not, and never can be, known to us; because we know only the qualities of our own faculties of knowledge, as relations to their objects, and we only know the qualities of their objects, as relations to our minds. All qualities both of mind and of matter are therefore only known to us as relations; we know nothing in itself. We know not the cause of this relation, we know nothing of its conditions, the fact is all. The relation is the relation of knowledge. We know nothing consequently of the kind of the relation; we have no consciousness and no possible knowledge whether the relation of knowledge has any analogy to the relations of similarity, contrariety, identity, difference—we have no consciousness that it is like any other, or any modification of any other: these are all relations of a different kind between object and object; this between subject and object: we can institute no point of comparison.” (Reid, [Note N,] p. 965.)

That is to say, we know nothing except in relation to us, but that relation is simply the relation of being known by us, and this is the only relation cognizable by us which exists between the knower and the known. Our knowledge is relative, but only in the sense that knowing is itself a relation. Would Cousin, or Hegel, or Schelling, have had the slightest objection to admit that our knowledge even of the Absolute is relative, in the sense that it is we that know it?u

[v-v]651, 652 thus

[* ][67] If any doubt could remain that Mr. Mansel defends Sir W. Hamilton by ascribing to him an opinion he never held, the following passage would dispel it. “If, indeed,” says Mr. Mansel “Hamilton had said with Locke, that the primary qualities are in the bodies themselves, whether we perceive them or no, he would have laid himself open to Mr. Mill’s criticism. But he expressly rejects this statement, and contrasts it with the more cautious language of Descartes, ‘ut sunt, vel saltem esse possunt.’ ” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] pp. 83-4. [The Locke reference is to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in Works, New ed., 10 vols. (London: Tegg, et al., 1823), Vol. I, p. 126 (Bk. II, Chap. viii, §23); the Descartes quotation is from René Descartes, Principia Philosophiœ, 4th ed. (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1664), p. 18 (I, lxx).]) Sir W. Hamilton may never have said, totidem verbis, that the Primary Qualities are in the bodies even when we do not perceive them: but can any one who has read his writings doubt that this was his opinion? The passage which Mr. Mansel refers to as “rejecting” it runs as follows: “On the doctrine of both philosophers” (Locke and Descartes) “we know nothing of material existence in itself: we know it only as represented, or in idea. When Locke, therefore, is asked, how he became aware that the known idea truly represents the unknown reality, he can make no answer. On the first principles of his philosophy, he is wholly and necessarily ignorant whether the idea does or does not represent to his mind the attributes of matter, as they exist in nature. His assertion is, therefore, confessedly without a warrant; it transcends, ex hypothesi, the sphere of possible knowledge. Descartes is more cautious. He only says, that our ideas of the qualities in question represent those qualities as they are, or as they may exist; ‘ut sunt, vel saltem esse possunt.’ The Cosmothetic Idealist can only assert to them a problematical reality.” (“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note D,] p. 839.)

Mr. Mansel actually thinks this an adoption of Descartes’ opinion; and does not see that Sir W. Hamilton merely pronounces Descartes to be right and Locke wrong from their own point of view, that of Cosmothetic Idealism. As Cosmothetic Idealists, they have, he says, no evidence that the qualities we perceive are in the object itself, and are as we perceive them. Not admitting that we directly perceive the qualities in the object, they cannot do more than assert problematically that the qualities are in the object; and this Descartes saw, and Locke, more inconsistently, did not see. But what they as Cosmothetic Idealists could not affirm, Sir W. Hamilton, as a Natural Realist, could; because, as a Natural Realist, he held that we directly perceive the qualities in the object. Mr. Mansel mistakes one of the thousand statements by Sir W. Hamilton of his difference with the Cosmothetic Idealists, for an adhesion to them. r(Mr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, admits and withdraws this error [“Supplementary Remarks,” p. 20n].)r Sir W. Hamilton, as Professor Fraser observes, believed that “the solid and extended percepts which our sensations reveal to us, exist, whether we are conscious or not.” ([“Mr. Mill’s Examination,”] p. 22.) He believed that bodies exist whether we perceive them or not, and that they always carry their “essential attributes,” the Primary Qualities, with them: if, therefore, he had thought that the Primary Qualities only exist while we perceive them, he must have thought so of the bodies likewise, and must have believed that we create the bodies in the act of perceiving them; which Kant, who deemed the body we perceive to be really in the mind, did believe; but if Sir W. Hamilton did, his whole philosophy of perception is without a meaning.

In the essay in his Discussions, headed “Philosophy of Perception,” Sir W. Hamilton speaks of the knowledge of external objects claimed by a Natural Realist, ipsissimis verbis, as knowledge of “things in themselves.” (Discussions, p. 57, in the statement of the opinion of Hypothetical Realists.)

For a critical examination of the doctrine ascribed to Sir W. Hamilton by Mr. Mansel, that of an external object cognizable by us, and an uncognizable Noumenon besides, I may refer to Mr. Bolton’s able work, [Inquisitio Philosophica,] pp. 218ff.

sMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, though he does not give up the theory of the tertium quid, does not further insist on it; but attempts to shew that when Sir W. Hamilton speaks of knowing the Primary qualities as they are in themselves, and as they are in the body, he means knowing them in immediate relation to the mind, in contradistinction to knowing them mediately through a mental representation, or merely inferring them as the hypothetical cause of a mental state. [“Supplementary Remarks,” pp. 20-1.] I admit, and have already admitted, that Sir W. Hamilton did mean this, and did say that he meant it. But the “immediate relation to the mind” which Sir W. Hamilton thus distinguished from the different modes of mediate relation, is no other than that between perceiver and perceived: and to say that all our knowledge is relative, meaning only this relation, is but to say, that we know of external things only what we perceive of them, and that in order that we may know an object of sense it must be presented to our senses. The knowledge, when we do get it, according to Sir W. Hamilton, is not (in the case of Primary qualities) knowledge of an impression made on our own sensitive faculty, which would be really relative knowledge; it is knowledge of the Thing as it exists in itself, independently of our perceptions. It is this which, as I have pointed out, reduces the pretended Relativity to a name.

It is a great confirmation of the unmeaningness of the Relativity Doctrine in Sir W. Hamilton’s hands, that those who have most studied his philosophy, Dean Mansel and Professor Veitch, are reduced to such straits in the attempt to find a meaning for it, and do not always find the same meaning.s

[‡ ][67] Mr. Fraser affirms (p. 20) with me, and contrary to Mr. Mansel and the North American Reviewer [see pp. 252-6], that in Sir W. Hamilton’s opinion “there is nothing behind the proper objects of sense-consciousness, these being the very things or realities themselves which we call material, external, extended, solid.” Instead of recognizing three elements, a Noumenal real thing, a Phænomenal real thing, and the perceiving mind, the middle one of the three being that which the mind cognizes, Mr. Fraser sees that Sir W. Hamilton recognised but one real Thing, the very Thing which we perceive; unknown to us in its essence, but perceived and known through its attributes; and by means of those attributes, actually brought into what Sir W. Hamilton calls our consciousness. This Mr. Fraser regards [ibid.] as “a distinct and important contribution by Sir W. Hamilton to the theory of matter previously common in this country,” because bringing matter into our consciousness is part of the way towards making it (what Mr. Fraser believes it to be) wholly a phænomenon of mind. But Sir W. Hamilton did not intend his doctrine to lead to this; he admits Matter into our consciousness because, contrary to the general opinion of philosophers, he thinks (see below, Chap. viii) that we can be conscious of what is outside our mind. Sir W. Hamilton, in short, was not a Berkeleian, as Mr. Fraser is, and as that philosopher almost admits (p. 26) that the interpretation which he would like to put on Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine would make Sir W. Hamilton.

Mr. Fraser seems to me, throughout his defence of Sir W. Hamilton, to have yielded to the natural tendency of a consistent thinker when standing up for an inconsistent one, to interpret ambiguous utterances twhicht face two ways, as if they looked only one way; though the part of their author’s philosophy towards which those expressions face on their other side, is thereby set at nought and abolished.

uSince the publication of the third edition of this work, my attention has been drawn to a passage (unfortunately left unfinished) in the posthumous continuation of Sir W. Hamilton’s “Dissertations on Reid,” which strikingly confirms the opinion I have expressed, that the relativity of human knowledge, as understood by him, is a mere identical proposition.

“That all knowledge consists in a certain relation of the object known to the subject knowing, is self-evident. What is the nature of this relation, and what are its conditions, is not, and never can be, known to us; because we know only the qualities of our own faculties of knowledge, as relations to their objects, and we only know the qualities of their objects, as relations to our minds. All qualities both of mind and of matter are therefore only known to us as relations; we know nothing in itself. We know not the cause of this relation, we know nothing of its conditions, the fact is all. The relation is the relation of knowledge. We know nothing consequently of the kind of the relation; we have no consciousness and no possible knowledge whether the relation of knowledge has any analogy to the relations of similarity, contrariety, identity, difference—we have no consciousness that it is like any other, or any modification of any other: these are all relations of a different kind between object and object; this between subject and object: we can institute no point of comparison.” (Reid, [Note N,] p. 965.)

That is to say, we know nothing except in relation to us, but that relation is simply the relation of being known by us, and this is the only relation cognizable by us which exists between the knower and the known. Our knowledge is relative, but only in the sense that knowing is itself a relation. Would Cousin, or Hegel, or Schelling, have had the slightest objection to admit that our knowledge even of the Absolute is relative, in the sense that it is we that know it?u

[r(Mr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, admits and withdraws this error [“Supplementary Remarks,” p. 20n].)r]67 As a specimen of misunderstanding of a philosopher’s opinions by his commentator and defender, this, it must be acknowledged, stands high.

[sMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, though he does not give up the theory of the tertium quid, does not further insist on it; but attempts to shew that when Sir W. Hamilton speaks of knowing the Primary qualities as they are in themselves, and as they are in the body, he means knowing them in immediate relation to the mind, in contradistinction to knowing them mediately through a mental representation, or merely inferring them as the hypothetical cause of a mental state. [“Supplementary Remarks,” pp. 20-1.] I admit, and have already admitted, that Sir W. Hamilton did mean this, and did say that he meant it. But the “immediate relation to the mind” which Sir W. Hamilton thus distinguished from the different modes of mediate relation, is no other than that between perceiver and perceived: and to say that all our knowledge is relative, meaning only this relation, is but to say, that we know of external things only what we perceive of them, and that in order that we may know an object of sense it must be presented to our senses. The knowledge, when we do get it, according to Sir W. Hamilton, is not (in the case of Primary qualities) knowledge of an impression made on our own sensitive faculty, which would be really relative knowledge; it is knowledge of the Thing as it exists in itself, independently of our perceptions. It is this which, as I have pointed out, reduces the pretended Relativity to a name.]+72

[twhicht]67 intended to

[uSince the publication of the third edition of this work, my attention has been drawn to a passage (unfortunately left unfinished) in the posthumous continuation of Sir W. Hamilton’s “Dissertations on Reid,” which strikingly confirms the opinion I have expressed, that the relativity of human knowledge, as understood by him, is a mere identical proposition.]+72