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 IV

In What Respect Sir William Hamilton Really Differs from the Philosophers of the Absolute

the question really at issue in Sir W. Hamilton’s celebrated and striking review of Cousin’s philosophy,^[*] is this: Have we, or have we not, an immediate intuition of God. The name of God is veiled under two extremely abstract phrases, “The Infinite” and “The Absolute,” perhaps from a reverential feeling: such, at least, is the reason given by Sir W. Hamilton’s disciple, Mr. Mansel,^* for preferring the more vague expressions. But it is one of the most unquestionable of all logical maxims, that the meaning of the abstract must be sought for in the concrete, and not conversely; and we shall see, both in the case of Sir W. Hamilton and of Mr. Mansel, that the process cannot be reversed with impunity.^†

I proceed to state, chiefly in the words of Sir W. Hamilton, the opinions of the two parties to the controversy. Both undertake to decide what are the facts which (in their own phraseology) are given in Consciousness; or, as others say, of which we have intuitive knowledge. According to Cousin, there are, in every act of consciousness, three elements; three things of which we are intuitively aware. There is a finite element; an element of plurality, compounded of a Self or Ego, and something different from Self, or Non-ego. There is also an infinite element; a consciousness of something infinite. “At the same instant when we are conscious of these [finite] existences, plural, relative, and contingent, we are conscious likewise of a superior unity in which they are contained, and by which they are explained; a unity absolute as they are conditioned, substantive as they are phænomenal, and an infinite cause as they are finite causes. This unity is God.”^* The first two elements being the Finite and God, the third element is the relation between the Finite and God, which is that of cause and effect. These three things are immediately given in every act of consciousness, and are, therefore, apprehended as real existences by direct intuition.

Of these alleged elements of Consciousness, Sir W. Hamilton only admits the first; the Finite element, compounded of Self and a Not-self, “limiting and conditioning one another.”^[*] He denies that God is given in immediate consciousness—is apprehended by direct intuition. It is in no such way as this that God, according to him, is known to us: and as an Infinite and Absolute Being he is not, and cannot be, known to us at all; for we have no faculties capable of apprehending the Infinite or the Absolute. The second of M. Cousin’s elements being thus excluded, the third (the Relation between the first and second) falls with it; and Consciousness remains limited to the finite element, compounded of an Ego and a Non-ego.

In this contest it is almost superfluous for me to say, that I am entirely with Sir W. Hamilton. The doctrine, that we have an immediate or intuitive knowledge of God, I consider to be bad metaphysics, involving a false conception of the nature and limits of the human faculties, and grounded on a superficial and erroneous psychology. Whatever relates to God I hold^c to be matter of inference; I would add, of inference à posteriori. And in so far as Sir W. Hamilton has contributed, which he has done very materially, towards discrediting the opposite doctrine, he has rendered, in my estimation, a ^dvaluable^d service to philosophy. But though I assent to his conclusion, his arguments seem to me very far from inexpugnable: a sufficient answer, I conceive, might without difficulty be given to ^emost^e of them, though I do not say that it was always competent to M. Cousin to give it. And the arguments, in the present case, are of as much importance as the conclusion: not only because they are quite as essential a part of Sir W. Hamilton’s philosophy, but because they afford the premises from which some of his followers, if not himself, have drawn inferences which I venture to think extremely mischievous. While, therefore, I sincerely applaud the scope and purpose of this celebrated piece of philosophical criticism, I think it important to sift with some minuteness the reasonings it employs, and the general mode of thought which it exemplifies.

The question is, as already remarked, whether we have a direct intuition of “the Infinite” and “the Absolute:” M. Cousin maintaining that we have—Sir W. Hamilton that we have not; that the Infinite and the Absolute are inconceivable to us, and, by consequence, unknowable.

It is proper to explain to any reader not familiar with these controversies, the meaning of the terms. Infinite requires no explanation. It is universally understood to signify that, to the magnitude of which there is no limit. If we speak of infinite duration, or infinite space, we are supposed to mean duration which never ceases, and extension which nowhere comes to an end. Absolute is much more obscure, being a word of several meanings; but, in the sense in which it stands related to Infinite, it means (conformably to its etymology) that which is finished or completed. There are some things of which the utmost ideal amount is a limited quantity, though a quantity never actually reached. In this sense, the relation between the Absolute and the Infinite is (as Bentham would have said) a tolerably close one, namely a relation of contrariety. For example, to assert an absolute minimum of matter, is to deny its infinite divisibility. Again, we may speak of absolutely, but not of infinitely, pure water. The purity of water is not a fact of which, whatever degree we suppose attained, there remains a greater beyond. It has an absolute limit: it is capable of being finished or complete, in thought, if not in reality. The extraneous substances existing in any vessel of water cannot be of more than finite amount, and if we suppose them all withdrawn, the purity of the water cannot, even in idea, admit of further increase.

^fThe idea of Absolute, in this sense of the term, being thus contrasted with that of Infinite, they cannot, both of them, be truly predicated of God; or, if truly, not in respect of the same attributes. But the word Absolute, without losing the signification of perfect or complete, may drop that of limited. It may continue to mean the whole of that to which it is applied; but without requiring that this whole should be finite. Granted (for instance) a being of infinite power, that Being’s knowledge, if supposed perfect, must be infinite; and may therefore, in an admissible sense of the term, be said to be both absolute and infinite.^* In this acceptation there is no inconsistency or incongruity in predicating both these words of God.

The word Absolute, however, has other meanings, which have nothing to do with perfection or completeness^f, though often mixed and confounded with ^hit^h ; the more readily as they are all ⁱhabitually predicated of the Deityⁱ . By Absolute is often meant the opposite of Relative; and this is rather many meanings than one; for Relative also is a term used very indefinitely, and wherever it is employed, the word Absolute always accompanies it as its negative. In another of its senses, Absolute means that which is independent of anything else: which exists, and is what it is, by its own nature, and not because of any other thing. In this ^jfourth sense as in the third^j , Absolute stands for the negation of a relation; not now of Relation in general, but of the specific relation expressed by the term Effect. In this signification it is synonymous with ^kuncaused, and is therefore most naturally identified with the^k First Cause. The meaning of a First Cause is, that all other things exist, and are what they are, by reason of it and of its properties, but that it is not itself made to exist, nor to be what it is, by anything else. It does not depend, for its existence or attributes, on other things: there is nothing upon the existence of which its own is conditional: it exists absolutely.^l

^mIn which of these meanings is the term used in the polemic with M. Cousin? M. Cousin makes no distinction at all between the Infinite and the Absolute. Sir W. Hamilton distinguishes them as two species of a higher genus, the Unconditioned; and^m defines the Infinite as “the unconditionally unlimited,” the Absolute as “the unconditionally limited.”^* Here is a new word introduced, the word “unconditionally;” of which we look in vain for any direct explanation, ⁿbut which needs it as much as either of the words which it is employed to explain. In the Essay itself, this is the only attempt made to define the Absolute: but in the reprint Sir W. Hamilton appends the following note:

“The term Absolute is of a twofold (if not threefold) ambiguity, corresponding to the double (or treble) signification of the word in Latin.” The third application he, with reason, dismisses, as here irrelevant. The other two are as follows:

“1. Absolutum means what is freed or loosed: in which sense the Absolute will be what is aloof from relation, comparison, limitation, condition, dependence, &c., and thus is tantamount to τὸ ὰπόλυτον of the lower Greeks.^[*] In this meaning the Absolute is not opposed to the Infinite.” This is an amplification of my third meaning.

“2. Absolutum means finished, perfected, completed; in which sense the Absolute will be what is out of relation, &c. as finished, perfect, complete, total, and thus corresponds to τὸ ὅλον and τὸ τέλειον of Aristotle.^[†] In this acceptation—and it is that in which for myself I exclusively use it,—the Absolute is diametrically opposed to, is contradictory of, the Infinite.”^* This second meaning of Sir W. Hamilton, which I, in the first edition, by a blameable inadvertence, confounded with my own first meaning,^† must be reckoned as a fifth, compounded of the first and third—of the idea of finished or completed, and the idea of being out of relation. How to make an intelligible meaning out of the two combined, is the question. One can, with some difficulty, find a meaning in being “aloof from relation, comparison, limitation, condition, dependence;” but what is meant by being all this “as finished, perfect, complete, total?” Does it mean, being both out of relation and also complete? and must the Absolute in Sir W. Hamilton’s second sense be also Absolute in his first, and be out of all relation whatever? or does the particle “as” signify that it is out of relation only in respect of its completeness, which (I suppose) means that it does not depend for its completeness on anything but itself? Mr. Mansel’s comment, which otherwise does not help us much, decides for the latter. “Out of relation as completed” means (he says)^‡ “self-existent in its completeness, and not implying the existence of anything else.”^§ Without further attempt to clear up the obscurity, let it suffice that Sir W. Hamilton’s Absolute, though not synonymous with a “finished, perfected, completed,” but limited, whole, includes that idea, and is therefore incompatible with Infinite.^*n

Having premised these verbal explanations, I proceed to state, as far as possible in Sir W. Hamilton’s own words, the heads of his argumentation to prove that the ^oAbsolute and Infinite are^o unknowable. His first summary statement of the doctrine is as follows:

This argument, that the Infinite and the Absolute are unknowable by us because the only conceptions we are able to form of them are negative, is stated still more emphatically a few pages later.

Let us note, then, as the first and most fundamental of Sir W. Hamilton’s arguments, that our ideas of the Infinite and the Absolute are ^ppurely negative, and the Unconditioned which combines the two, “a^p fasciculus of negations.” I reserve consideration of the validity of this and every other part of the argumentation, until we have the whole before us. He proceeds:

The dictum that “to think is to condition” ^r(the meaning of which will be examined hereafter)^r may be noted as our author’s second argument. And here ends the positive part of his argumentation. There remains his refutation of opponents. After an examination of Schelling’s opinion, into which I need not follow him, he grapples with M. Cousin, against whom he undertakes to show, that “his argument to prove the correality of his three Ideas proves directly the reverse;” “that the conditions under which alone he allows intelligence to be possible, necessarily exclude the possibility of a knowledge, not to say a conception, of the Absolute;” and “that the Absolute, as defined by him, is only a relative and a conditioned.”^* Of this argument in three parts, if we pass over (or, as our author would say, discount) as much as is only ad hominem, what is of general application is as follows:

^sFirst:^s M. Cousin and our author are agreed that there can be no knowledge except “where there exists a plurality of terms;”^[*] there are at least a perceived and a perceiver, a knower and a known. But this necessity of “difference and plurality” as a condition of knowledge, is inconsistent with the meaning of the Absolute, which

^tSecondly:^t In order to make the Absolute knowable by us, M. Cousin, says the author, is obliged to present it in the light of an absolute cause: now causation is a relation; therefore M. Cousin’s Absolute is but a relative. Moreover, “what exists merely as a cause, exists merely for the sake of something else—is not final in itself, but simply a mean towards an end. . . . Abstractly considered, the effect is therefore superior to the cause.” Hence an absolute cause “is dependent on the effect for its perfection;” and, indeed,

Let me ask, en passant,^vwhy M. Cousin is under an obligation to think^v that if the Absolute, or, to speak plainly, if God, is only known to us in the character of a cause, he must therefore “exist merely as a cause,” and be merely “a mean towards an end?” It is surely possible to maintain that the Deity is known to us only as he who feeds the ravens, without supposing that the Divine Intelligence exists solely in order that the ravens may be fed.^†

In reviewing the series of arguments adduced by Sir W. Hamilton for the incognoscibility and inconceivability of the Absolute, the first remark that occurs is, that most of them lose their application by simply substituting for the metaphysical abstraction “The Absolute,” the more intelligible concrete expression “Something Absolute.” If the first phrase has any meaning, it must be capable of being expressed in terms of the other. When we are told of an “Absolute” in the abstract, or of an Absolute Being, even though called God, we are entitled, and if we would know what we are talking about, are bound to ask, absolute in what? Do you mean, for example, absolute in goodness, or absolute in knowledge? or do you, perchance, mean absolute in ignorance, or absolute in wickedness? for any one of these is as much an Absolute as any other. And when you talk of something in the abstract which is called the Absolute, does it means one, or more than one, of these? or does it, peradventure, mean all of them? When (descending to a less lofty height of abstraction) we speak of The Horse, we mean to include every object of which the name horse can be predicated. Or, to take our examples from the same region of thought to which the controversy belongs—when The True or The Beautiful are spoken of, the phrase is meant to include all things whatever that are true, or all things whatever that are beautiful.^* If this rule is good for other abstractions, it is good for the Absolute. The word is devoid of meaning unless in reference to predicates of some sort. What is absolute must be absolutely something; absolutely this or absolutely that. The Absolute, then, ought to be a genus comprehending whatever is absolutely anything—whatever possesses any predicate in finished completeness. If we are told therefore that there is some one Being who is, or which is, The Absolute—not something absolute, but the Absolute itself,—the proposition can be understood in no other sense than that the supposed Being possesses in absolute completeness all predicates; is absolutely good, and absolutely bad; absolutely wise, and absolutely stupid; and so forth.^† The conception of such a being, I will not say of such a God, is worse than a “fasciculus of negations;” it is a fasciculus of contradictions: and our author might have spared himself the trouble of proving a thing to be unknowable, which cannot be spoken of but in words implying the impossibility of its existence. To insist on such a truism is not superfluous, for there have been philosophers who saw that this must be the meaning of “The Absolute,” and yet accepted it as a reality. “What kind of an Absolute Being is that,” asked Hegel, “which does not contain in itself all that is actual, even evil included?”^* Undoubtedly: and it is therefore necessary to admit, either that there is no Absolute Being, or that the law, that contradictory propositions cannot both be true, does not apply to the Absolute. Hegel chose the latter side of the alternative; and by this, among other things, has fairly earned the honour which will probably be awarded to him by posterity, of having logically extinguished transcendental metaphysics by a series of reductiones ad absurdissimum.

What I have said of the Absolute is true, mutatis mutandis, of the Infinite. This also is a phrase of no meaning, except in reference to some particular predicate; it must mean the infinite in something—as in size, in duration, or in power. These are intelligible conceptions. But an abstract Infinite, a Being not merely infinite in one or in several attributes, but which is “The Infinite” itself, must be not only infinite in greatness, but also in littleness; its duration is not only infinitely long, but infinitely short; it is not only infinitely awful, but infinitely contemptible; it is the same mass of contradictions as its companion the Absolute. There is no need to prove that neither of them is knowable, since, if the universal law of Belief is of objective validity, neither of them exists.

It is these unmeaning abstractions, however, these muddles of self-contradiction, which alone our author has proved, against Cousin and others, to be unknowable. He has shown, without difficulty, that we cannot know The Infinite or The Absolute. He has not shown that we cannot know a concrete reality as infinite or as absolute. Applied to this latter thesis, his reasoning breaks down.

We have seen his principal argument, the one on which he substantially relies. It is, that the Infinite and the Absolute are unknowable because inconceivable, and inconceivable because the only notions we can have of them are purely negative. If he is right in his antecedent, the consequent follows. A conception made up of negations is a conception of Nothing. It is not a conception at all.

But is a conception, by the fact of its being a conception of something infinite, reduced to a negation? This is quite true of the senseless abstraction “The Infinite.” That indeed is purely negative, being formed by excluding from the concrete conceptions classed under it, all their positive elements. But in place of “the Infinite,” put the idea of Something infinite, and the argument collapses at once. “Something infinite” is a conception which, like most of our complex ideas, contains a negative element, but which contains positive elements also. Infinite space, for instance: is there nothing positive in that? The negative part of this conception is the absence of bounds. The positive are, the idea of space, and of space greater than any finite space. So of infinite duration: so far as it signifies “without end” it is only known or conceived negatively; but in so far as it means time, and time longer than any given time, the conception is positive. The existence of a negative element in a conception does not make the conception itself negative, and a non-entity. It would surprise most people to be told that “the life eternal” is a purely negative conception; that immortality is inconceivable. Those who hope for it for themselves have a very positive conception of what they hope for. True, we cannot have an adequate conception of space or duration as infinite; but between a conception which though inadequate is real, and correct as far as it goes, and the impossibility of any conception, there is a wide difference. Sir W. Hamilton does not admit this difference. He thinks the distinction without meaning. “To say that the infinite can be thought, but only inadequately thought, is a contradiction in adjecto; it is the same as saying that the infinite can be known, but only known as finite.”^* I answer, that to know it as greater than anything finite is not to know it as finite. The conception of Infinite as that which is greater than any given quantity, is a conception we all possess, sufficient for all human purposes, and as genuine and good a positive conception as one need wish to have. It is not adequate; our conception of a reality never is. But it is positive; and the assertion that there is nothing positive in the idea of infinity can only be maintained by leaving out and ignoring, as Sir W. Hamilton invariably does, the very element which constitutes the idea. Considering how many recondite laws of physical nature, afterwards verified by experience, have been arrived at by trains of mathematical reasoning grounded on what, if Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine be correct, is a non-existent conception, one would be obliged to suppose that conjuring is a highly successful mode of the investigation of nature. If, indeed, we trifle by setting up an imaginary Infinite which is infinite in nothing in particular, our notion of it is truly nothing, and a “fasciculus of negations.” But this is a good example of the bewildering effect of putting nonsensical abstractions in the place of concrete realities. Would Sir W. Hamilton have said that the idea of God is but a ^xnegation, or a fasciculus of negations?^x As having nothing greater than himself, he is indeed conceived negatively. But as himself greater than all other real or imaginable existences, the conception of him is positive.

Put Absolute instead of Infinite, and we come to the same result. “The Absolute,” as already shown, is a heap of contradictions, but “absolute” in reference to any given attribute, signifies the possession of that attribute in finished perfection and completeness. A Being absolute in knowledge, for example, is one who knows, in the literal meaning of the term, everything. Who will pretend that this conception is negative, or unmeaning to us? We cannot, indeed, form an adequate conception of a being as knowing everything, since to do this we must have a conception, or mental representation, of all that he knows. But neither have we an adequate conception of any person’s finite knowledge. I have no adequate conception of a shoemaker’s knowledge, since I do not know how to make shoes: but my conception of a shoemaker and of his knowledge is a real conception; it is not a fasciculus of negations. If I talk of an Absolute Being (in the sense in which we are now employing the term) I use words without meaning; but if I talk of a Being who is absolute in wisdom and goodness, that is, who knows everything, and at all times intends what is best for every sentient creature, I understand perfectly what I mean: and however much the fact may transcend my conception, the shortcoming can only consist in my being ignorant of the details of which the reality is composed: as I have a positive, and may have a correct conception of the empire of China, though I know not the aspect of any of the places, nor the physiognomy of any of the human beings, comprehended therein.

It appears, then, that the leading argument of Sir W. Hamilton to prove the inconceivability and consequent unknowability of the Unconditioned, namely, that our conception of it is merely negative, holds good only of an abstract Unconditioned which cannot possibly exist, and not of a concrete Being, supposed infinite and absolute in certain definite attributes.^* Let us now see if there be any greater value in his other arguments.

The first of them is,^z that all knowledge is of things plural and different; that a thing is only known to us by being known as different from something else; from ourselves as knowing it, and also from other known things which are not it. Here we have at length something which the mind can rest on as a fundamental truth. It is one of the profound psychological observations which the world owes to Hobbes;^[*] it is fully recognised both by M. Cousin and by Sir W. Hamilton; and it has, more recently, been admirably illustrated and applied by Mr. Bain and by Mr. Herbert Spencer. That to know a thing is to distinguish it from other things, is, as I formerly remarked, one of the truths which the very ambiguous expression “the relativity of human knowledge” has been employed to denote^a . With this doctrine I have no quarrel. But Sir W. Hamilton proceeds to argue that the Absolute, being “absolutely One,” cannot be known under the conditions of plurality and difference, and as these are the acknowledged conditions of all our knowledge, cannot, therefore, be known at all. There is here, as it seems to me, a strange confusion of ideas. Sir W. Hamilton seems to mean that, being absolutely One, it cannot be known as plural. But the proposition that plurality is a condition of knowledge, does not mean that the thing known must be known as itself plural. It means, that a thing is only known, by being known as distinguished from something else. The plurality required is not within the thing itself, but is made up between itself and other things. Again, even if we concede that a thing cannot be known at all unless known as plural, does it follow that it cannot be known as plural because it is also One? ^bAre the One and the Many, then,^b incompatible things, instead of different aspects of the same thing? Sir W. Hamilton surely does not mean by Absolute Unity, an indivisible Unit; the minimum, instead of the maximum of Being. He must mean, as M. Cousin certainly means, an absolute Whole; the Whole which comprehends all things. If this be so, does not this Whole not only admit of, but necessitate, the supposition of parts? Is not an Unity which comprehends everything, ex vi termini known as a plurality, and the most plural of all pluralities, plural in an unsurpassable degree? If there is any meaning in the words, must not Absolute Unity be Absolute ^cTotality, which is the highest degree of Plurality^c ? There is no escape from the alternative: ^dthe Absolute^d either means a single atom or monad, or it means Plurality in the extreme degree.

Though it is hardly needful, we will try this argument by the test we applied to a previous one; by substituting the concrete, God, for the abstract Absolute. Would Sir W. Hamilton have said that God is not cognizable under the condition of Plurality—is not known as distinguished from ourselves, and from the objects in nature? Call any positive Thing by a name which expresses only its negative predicates, and you may easily prove it under that name to be incognizable and a non-entity. Give it back its full name (if Mr. Mansel’s reverential feelings will permit), its positive attributes reappear, and you find, to your surprise, that what is a reality can be known as one.^*

The next argument is chiefly directed against the doctrine of M. Cousin, that we know the Absolute as Absolute Cause.^[*] This doctrine, says Sir W. Hamilton, destroys itself. The idea of a Cause is irreconcilable with the Absolute, for a Cause is relative, and implies an Effect: this Absolute, therefore, is not an Absolute at all. ^efThis would be unanswerable, if by the Absolute we were obliged to understand something which is not only “out of” all relation, but incapable of ever passing into relation. But is this what any one can possibly mean by the Absolute, who identifies it with the Creator? Granting that the Absolute implies an existence in itself, standing in no relation to anything: the only Absolute with which we are concerned, or in which anybody believes, must not only be capable of entering into relation with things, but must be capable of entering into any relation whatever, except that of dependence, with anything. May it not be known in some, at least, of those relations, and particularly in the relation of a Cause? And if it is a “finished, perfected, completed”^[*] Cause, i.e. the most a cause that it is possible to be—the cause of everything except itself—then, if known as such, it is known as an Absolute Cause.^e Has Sir W. Hamilton shown that an Absolute Cause, thus understood, is inconceivable, or unknowable? No: all he shows is, that, though ^gcapable of being known, it^gf is known relatively to something else, namely, to its effects; and that such knowledge of God is not of God in himself, but of God in relation to his works. The truth is, M. Cousin’s doctrine is too legitimate a product of the metaphysics common to them both, to be capable of being refuted by Sir W. Hamilton. For this knowledge of God in and by his effects, according to M. Cousin, is knowing him as he is in himself: because the creative power whereby he causes, is in himself, is inseparable from him, and belongs to his essence.^[†] And as far as I can see, the principles common to the two philosophers are as good a warrant to M. Cousin for saying this, as to Sir W. Hamilton for maintaining that extension and figure are ^h“essential attributes”^h of matter, and perceived as such by intuition.

I have now examined, with one exception, every argument (which is not merely ad hominem) advanced by Sir W. Hamilton to prove against M. Cousin the unknowableness of the Unconditioned. The argument which I have reserved, is the emphatic and oracular one, that the Unconditioned must be unthinkable, because “to think is to condition.”^[‡] I have kept this for the last, because it will occupy us the longest time: for we must begin by finding the meaning of the proposition; which cannot be done very briefly, so little help is afforded us by the author.

According to the best notion I can form of the meaning of “condition,” either as a term of philosophy or of common life, it means that on which something else is contingent, or (more definitely) which being given, something else exists, or takes place. I promise to do something on condition that you do something else: that is, if you do this, I will do that; if not, I will do as I please. A Conditional Proposition, in logic, is an assertion in this form: “If so and so, then so and so.” The conditions of a phænomenon are the various antecedent circumstances which, when they exist simultaneously, are followed by its occurrence. As all these antecedent circumstances must coexist, each of them in relation to the others is a conditio sine quâ non; i.e. without it the phænomenon will not follow from the remaining conditions, though it perhaps may from some set of conditions totally different.

If this be the meaning of Condition, the Unconditioned should mean, that which does not depend for its existence or its qualities on any antecedent; in other words, it should be synonymous with ⁱUncausedⁱ . This, however, cannot be the meaning intended by Sir W. Hamilton: for, in a passage already quoted from his argument against Cousin, he speaks of the effect as a condition of its cause. The condition, therefore, as he understands it, needs not be an antecedent, and may be a subsequent fact to that which it conditions.

He appears, indeed, in his writings generally, to reckon as a condition of a thing, anything necessarily implied by it: and uses the word Conditioned almost interchangeably with Relative. For relatives are always in pairs: a term of relation implies the existence of two things, the one which it is affirmed of, and another: parent implies child, greater implies less, like implies another like, and vice versâ. Relation is an abstract name for all concrete facts which concern more than one object. Wherever, therefore, a relation is affirmed, or anything is spoken of under a relative name, the existence of the correlative may be called a condition of the relation, as well as of the truth of the assertion. When, accordingly, Sir W. Hamilton calls an effect a condition of its cause, he speaks intelligibly, and the received use of the term affords him a certain amount of justification for thus speaking.

But, if the Conditioned means the Relative, the Unconditioned must mean its opposite; and in this acceptation, the Unconditioned would mean all Noumena; Things in themselves, considered without reference to the effects they produce in us, which are called their phænomenal agencies or properties. Sir W. Hamilton does, very frequently, seem to use the term in this sense. In denying all knowledge of the Unconditioned, he often seems to be denying any other than phænomenal knowledge of Matter or of Mind. Not only, however, he does not consistently adhere to this meaning, but it directly conflicts with the only approach he ever makes to a definition or an explanation of the term. We have seen him declaring that the Unconditioned is the genus of which the Infinite and the Absolute are the two species. But Things in themselves are not all of them infinite and absolute. Matter and Mind, as such, are neither the one nor the other. It is evident that Sir W. Hamilton had never decided what extent he intended giving to the term Unconditioned. Sometimes he gives it one degree of amplitude, sometimes another. Between the meanings in which he uses it there is undoubtedly a link of connexion; but this only makes the matter still worse than if there were none. The phrase has that most dangerous kind of ambiguity, in which the meanings, though essentially different, are so nearly allied that the thinker unconsciously interchanges them one with another.^*

^j The probability is that when our author asserts that “to think is to condition,” he uses the word Condition in neither of these senses, but in a third meaning, equally familiar to him, and recurring constantly in such phrases as “the conditions of our thinking faculty,” “conditions of thought,” and the like. He means by Conditions something similar to Kant’s Forms of Sense and Categories of Understanding; a meaning more correctly expressed by another of his phrases, “Necessary Laws of Thought.” He is applying to the mind the scholastic maxim, “Quicquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis.” He means that our perceptive and conceptive faculties have their own laws, which not only determine what we are capable of perceiving and conceiving, but put into our perceptions and conceptions elements not derived from the thing perceived or conceived, but from the mind itself: That, therefore, we cannot at once infer that whatever we find in our perception or conception of an object, has necessarily a prototype in the object itself: and that we must, in each instance, determine this question by philosophic investigation. According to this doctrine, which no fault can be found with our author for maintaining, though often for not carrying it far enough—the “conditions of thought” would mean the attributes with which, it is supposed, the mind cannot help investing every object of thought—the elements which, derived from its own structure, cannot but enter into every conception it is able to form; even if there should be nothing corresponding in the object which is the prototype of the conception: though our author, in most cases, (therein differing from Kant) believes that there is this correspondence.

We have here an intelligible meaning for the doctrine that to think is to condition^k; and as Mr. Mansel, in his reply, guarantees this as the true meaning of Sir W. Hamilton,^[*] I will accept it as being so. If, then (which I do not here discuss), the philosophical doctrine be true, which was held partially by Sir W. Hamilton, and in a more thorough-going manner by Kant, viz. that, in the act of thought, the mind, by an à priori necessity, invests the object of thought with attributes which are not in itself, but are created by the mind’s own laws; and if we consent to call these necessities of thought the conditions of thought; then evidently to think is to condition, and to think the Unconditioned would be to think the unthinkable. But the Unconditioned, in this application of the term, is not identical with the Infinite plus the Absolute. The Infinite and the Absolute are not necessarily, in this sense, unconditioned. The words infinite and absolute, as I have already said, have no meaning save as expressing some concrete reality or supposed reality, possessing infinitely or absolutely attributes of some sort, which attributes, as finite and limited, we are able to think. In thinking these attributes, we are not able to divest ourselves of our mental conditions, but we can think the attributes as surpassing the conditions. “To condition,” and “to think under conditions,” are ambiguous phrases. An Infinite Being may be thought, and is thought, with reference to the conditions, but not as limited by them. The most familiar examples of the alleged necessary conditions of thought, are Time and Space: we cannot, it is affirmed, think anything, except in time and space. Now, an Infinite Being is not thought as in time and space, if this means as occupying a portion of time or a portion of space. But (substituting for Time the word Duration, to get rid of the theological antithesis of Time and Eternity) we do actually conceive God in reference to Duration and Extension, namely, as occupying ^lthe whole of both; and these being conceived as infinite, to conceive a Being as occupying the whole of them is to conceive that Being as infinite. If thinking God as eternal and omnipresent is thinking him in Space and Time, we do think God in Space and Time: if thinking him as eternal and omnipresent is not thinking him in Space and Time, we are capable of thinking something out of Space and Time. Mr. Mansel may make his choice between the two opinions. I have already shown that the ideas of infinite space and time are real and positive conceptions:^[*] that of a Being who is in all Space and in all Time is no less so. To think anything, must of course be to condition it by attributes which are themselves thinkable; but not necessarily to condition it by a limited quantum of those attributes: on the contrary, we may think it under a degree of them greater than all limited degrees, and this is to think it as infinite.^*kl

If we now ask ourselves, as the result of this long discussion, what Sir W. Hamilton can be considered as having accomplished in this celebrated Essay, our answer must be: That he has established, more thoroughly perhaps than he intended, the futility of all speculation respecting those meaningless abstractions “The Infinite” and “The Absolute,” notions contradictory in themselves, and to which no corresponding realities do or can exist.^*m Respecting the unknowableness, not of “the Infinite,” or “the Absolute,” but of concrete persons or things possessing infinitely or absolutely certain specific attributes, I cannot think that our author has proved anything; nor do I think it possible to prove them any otherwise unknowable, than that they can only be known in their relations to us, and not as Noumena, or Things in themselves. This, however, is true of the finite as well as of the infinite, of the imperfect as well as of the completed or absolute. Our author has merely proved the uncognoscibility of a being which is nothing but infinite, or nothing but absolute: and since nobody supposes that there is such a being, but only beings which are something positive carried to the infinite, or to the absolute, to have established this point cannot be regarded as any great achievement. He has not even refuted M. Cousin; whose doctrine of an intuitive cognition of the Deity,^[*] like every other doctrine relating to intuition, can only be disproved by showing it to be a mistaken interpretation of facts; which, again, as we shall see hereafter, can only be done by pointing out in what other way the seeming perceptions may have originated, which are erroneously supposed to be intuitive.

[[*] ]“On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,” in Discussions, pp. 1-38, a review of Victor Cousin, Cours de philosophie: Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Pichon and Didier, 1828); subsequent references are to the edition in Mill’s library (Brussels: Hauman, 1836).

[* ]Bampton Lectures. The Limits of Religious Thought. 4th ed. [London: Murray, 1859], p. 42.

[† ][67] Mr. Mansel denies the correctness of the representations made in this paragraph ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] pp. 90-6); and at least seems to assert, that the question between M. Cousin and Sir W. Hamilton did not relate to the possibility of knowing the Infinite Being, but to a “pseudo-concept of the Infinite,” [p. 93,] which Sir W. Hamilton believed to be not a proper predicate of God, but a representation of a non-entity. And Mr. Mansel affirms (p. 92) that to substitute the name of God in the place of the Infinite and the Absolute, is exactly to reverse Sir W. Hamilton’s argument. We have here a direct issue of fact, of which every one is a judge who will take the trouble to read Sir W. Hamilton’s Essay. I maintain thata what M. Cousin affirms and Sir W. Hamilton denies, is the cognoscibility not of an Infinite and Absolute which is not God, but of the Infinite and Absolute which is God. [See below pp. 35-6.] I might refer to almost any page of the Essay; I will only quote the application which Sir W. Hamilton himself makes of his own doctrine. “True, therefore, are the declarations of a pious philosophy: ‘A God understood would be no God at all.’ ‘To think that God is, as we can think him to be, is blasphemy.’ The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense, is concealed: he is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion, must be an altar Ἀγνώστῳ θεῷ—‘To the unknown and unknowable God.’ ” (Discussions, p. 15n. [For the quotation, see Acts, 17:23.]) When this is what the author of the Essay presents as its practical result, it is too much to tell us that the Essay is not concerned about God but about a “Pseudo-Infinite,” and that we are not entitled, when we find in it an assertion about the Infinite, to hold the author to the assertion as applicable to God. We shall next be told that Mr. Mansel himself, in his Bampton Lectures, is not treating the question of our knowledge of God. It is very true that the only Infinite about which either Sir W. Hamilton or Mr. Mansel proves anything, is a Pseudo-Infinite; but they are not in the least aware of this; they fancy that this Pseudo-Infinite is the real Infinite, and that in proving it to be unknowable by us, they prove the same thing of God.

The reader who desires further elucidation of this point, may consult the sixth chapter of Mr. Bolton’s Inquisitio Philosophica. That acute thinker also points out [see, e.g., pp. 190-4] various inconsistencies and other logical errors in Mr. Mansel’s work, with which I am not here concerned, my object in answering him not being recrimination, but to maintain my original assertions against his denial.

bMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, quotes from his Bampton Lectures [Limits of Religious Thought] some passages in which he says, and others in which he implies, that “our human conception of the Infinite is not the true one,” and that “the infinite of philosophy is not the true Infinite:” and thinks it very unfair that, with these passages before me, I should accuse him of mistaking a pseudo-infinite for the real Infinite. [“Supplementary Remarks,” p. 23, where Mansel gives the references in his Limits of Religious Thought for the passages he cites.] But the mistake from which he clears himself is not that which I charged him with. I maintained, that the abstraction “The Infinite,” in whatever manner understood, as distinguished from some particular attribute possessed in an infinite degree, has no existence, and is a pseudo-infinite. [See pp. 94ff. below.] Mr. Mansel, on the contrary, affirmed throughout, and affirms in the very passages which he quotes, that “The Infinite” has a real existence, and is God: though when we attempt to conceive what it is, we only reach a mass of contradictions, which is a pseudo-infinite. Mr. Mansel did not suppose his pseudo-infinite to be the true Infinite; but my assertion, which stands unrefuted, is, that his “true Infinite” is a pseudo-infinite; and that in proving it to be unknowable by us, he mistakenly fancied that he had proved this of God.b

[* ]Discussions, p. 9. [Mill’s square brackets.]

[[*] ]Ibid.

[c]651, 652 with Sir W. Hamilton

[d-d]651, 652 good

[e-e]651, 652 all

[f-f]651, 652 Though the idea of Absolute is thus contrasted with that of Infinite, the one is equally fitted with the other to be predicated of God; but not in respect of the same attributes. There is no incorrectness of speech in the phrase Infinite Power: because the notion it expresses is that of a Being who has the power of doing all things which we know, or can conceive, and more. But in speaking of knowledge, Absolute is the proper word, and not Infinite. The highest degree of knowledge that can be spoken of with a meaning, only amounts to knowing all that there is to be known: when that point is reached, knowledge has attained its utmost limit. So of goodness, or justice: they cannot be more than perfect. There are not infinite degrees of right. The will is either entirely right, or wrong in different degrees: downwards there are as many gradations as we choose to distinguish, but upwards there is an ideal limit. Goodness (unlike time or space) can be imagined complete—such that there can be no greater goodness beyond it.

Such is the signification of the term Absolute, when coupled and contrasted with Infinite. But the word has other meanings

[* ][67] In the first edition of this work it was maintained, that though Power admits of being regarded as Infinite, Knowledge does not; because “the highest degree of knowledge that can be spoken of with a meaning, only amounts to knowing all that there is to be known.” [See 37f-f above.] But Mr. Mansel [Philosophy of the Conditioned, p. 105] and the “Inquirer” (author of The Battle of the Two Philosophies [see pp. 24-6]) have justly remarked, that on the supposition of an Infinite Being, “all that there is to be known” includes all which a Being of infinite power can think or create; consequently, the power being infinite, the knowledge, if supposed complete, must be infinite too. In regard to the moral attributes, it was said in the first edition, that Absolute is the proper word for them, and not Infinite, since those attributes “cannot be more than perfect. There are not infinite degrees of right. The will is either entirely right, or wrong in different degrees.” [See 37f-f above.] In this I did not properly distinguish between moral rightness or justice gas predicated of acts or mental states, and the same regarded as attributes of a person. Conformity to the standard of right has a positive limit, which can only be reached, not surpassed; but persons, though all exactly conforming to the standard, may differ in the strength of their adherence to it: influences (temptations for example) might detach one of them from it, which would have no effect upon another. There are thus, consistently with complete observance of the rule of right, innumerable gradations of the attribute considered as in a person. But, on the other hand, there is an extreme limit to these gradations—the idea of a Person whom no influences or causes, either in or out of himself, can deflect in the minutest degree from the law of right. This I apprehend to be a conception of absolute, not of infinite, righteousness. The doctrine, therefore, of the first edition, that an Infinite Being may have attributes which are absolute, but not infinite, still appears to me maintainable. But as it is immaterial to my argument, and was only the illustration nearest at hand of the meaning of the terms, I withdraw it from the discussion.g

[h-h]651, 652 this

[i-i]651, 652 liable to be predicated of God

[j-j]651, 652 third sense as in the second

[k-k]651, 652 a] 67 the

[l]651, 652 [footnote:] *Sir W. Hamilton (Discussions, p. 14n) distinguishes and defines the first two of these meanings: Absolute in the sense of “finished, perfected, completed,” and Absolute as opposed to Relative. The third meaning he does not expressly notice, but seems to confuse it with the second. The meaning, however, with which it is really allied, and to which it may in a certain sense be reduced, is the first: as will be seen hereafter.

[m-m]651, 652 Sir W. Hamilton (after Kant) unites the Infinite and the Absolute under a larger abstraction, the Unconditioned, regarding it as a genus of which they are the two species.† [footnote:] †See the same note. [text:] Having often occasion to speak of the two in conjunction, he is entitled to a form of abridged expression: let us hope he takes due care that it shall be nothing more. But when the Absolute and the Infinite are thus spoken of as two species of the Unconditioned, it is necessary to know in which of the senses just discriminated the word Absolute is to be understood. Sir W. Hamilton professes that it is in the first sense; that of finished, perfected, completed. He adds that this is the only sense in which, for himself, he uses the term.‡ [footnote:] ‡Note, ut supra. [text:] If we should find, then, that he does not strictly keep to this resolution, we may conclude that the falling off is not intentional.

In accordance with his professions he

[* ]Discussions, p. 13.

[n-n]651, 652 and which is far from conveying so distinct a meaning, as, considering its great importance in Sir W. Hamilton’s philosophy, it ought. Indeed, throughout his writings, he uses the word Condition, and its derivatives, Conditioned and Unconditioned, as if it was impossible to understand them in more than one meaning, and as if nobody could require to be told what that meaning is: though in English metaphysics two of the three phrases, until he introduced them, were new, and though there are no expressions in all philosophy which require definition and illustration more.* [the footnote, without any change in its wording, was moved in 67 to 55 below]

[[*] ]See, e.g., Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, II, in Sextus Empiricus (Greek and English), trans. R. G. Bury, 4 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1933-49), Vol. II, p. 380 (273), and Plotinus, Operum philosophicorum omnium (Basil: Lecythus, 1580), Ennead VI, §§18 and 22, pp. 582-3 and 586-7.

[[†] ]See Aristotle, The Metaphysics (Greek and English), trans. Hugh Tredennick, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1923), Vol. I, p. 280 (V, xxvi, 1023b27ff.), p. 266 (V, xv, 1021b13ff.).

[* ][67] Discussions, p. 14n.

[† ][67] And, in consequence, erroneously charged Sir W. Hamilton with having, in one of his arguments against Cousin, departed from his own meaning of the term. I have freed the text from everything which depended on this error, the only serious misrepresentation of Sir W. Hamilton which has been established against me. [See, e.g., pp. 39l and 39m-m above, and 52-3e-e and 91b-b below, apparently in response to Mansel, Philosophy of the Conditioned, pp. 103ff.]

[‡ ][67] Mansel, [Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 104.

[§ ][67] But the assimilation with τὸ ὅλον and τὸ τέλειον again throws us out; for τὸ ὅλον, with all Greek thinkers, meant either the completed aggregate of all that exists, or an abstract entity which they conceived as the Principle of Wholeness—in virtue of which, and by participation in which, that universal aggregate and all other wholes are wholes. Either of these would be an additional meaning for the word Absolute, different from all which have yet been mentioned.

[* ][67] I demur, however, to Sir W. Hamilton’s assertion, that for himself he exclusively uses the term in this meaning. In the whole of the discussion respecting the relativity of our knowledge, Absolute, with Sir W. Hamilton, is simply the opposite of relative, and contains no implication of “finished, perfected, completed.” Moreover, in this very Essay, when arguing against M. Cousin, who uses Absolute in a sense compatible with Infinite, Sir W. Hamilton continually falls into M. Cousin’s sense.

[o-o]651, 652 Unconditioned is

[† ]Discussions, p. 13.

[‡ ]Ibid., p. 17.

[p-p]651, 652, 67 “only a

[q-q]651, 652 unnecessarily [printer’s error; Source agrees with 67, 72]

[[*] ]John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (London: Tonson, 1695), p. 62 (III, 12).

[* ]Discussions, pp. 14-15. [The quotation is mistakenly attributed to St. Augustine by Hamilton.]

[r-r]651, 652 , whatever be meant by it,

[* ]Ibid., p. 25.

[s-s]651, 652 Under the first head; that the Unconditioned is not a possible object of thought, because it includes both the Infinite and the Absolute, and these are exclusive of one another.† [footnote:] †Ibid., p. 28ff. [text:] [paragraph:] Under the second;

[[*] ]Ibid., p. 30, translating Cousin, Cours de philosophie: Introduction, Leçon v, p. 129.

[† ]Ibid., p. 33.

[t-t]651, 652 We now arrive at the third head.

[* ]Ibid., p. 35. uIn the first edition three points of our author’s argument were discussed, instead of two only: but I now perceive that the remaining argument is ad hominem merely, and has reference to M. Cousin’s confusion of the Absolute with the Infinite.u

[v-v]651, 652 where is the necessity for supposing

[† ][Cf. Job, 38:41, for the concluding image.] A passage follows, which being only directed against a special doctrine of M. Cousin, (that God is determined to create by the necessity of his own nature—that an absolute creative force cannot but pass into creative activity [see Cours de philosophie: Introduction, Leçon v, pp. 139-40])—I should have left unmentioned, were it not worth notice as a specimen of the kind of arguments which Sir W. Hamilton can sometimes use. On M. Cousin’s hypothesis, says our author, “One of two alternatives must be admitted. God, as necessarily determined to pass from absolute essence to relative manifestation, is determined to pass either from the better to the worse, or from the worse to the better. A third possibility, that both states are equal, as contradictory in itself and as contradicted by our author, it is not necessary to consider. The first supposition must be rejected. The necessity in this case determines God to pass from the better to the worse, that is, operates to his partial annihilation. The power which compels this must be external and hostile, for nothing operates willingly to its own deterioration; and as superior to the pretended God, is either itself the real deity, if an intelligent and free cause, or a negation of all deity, if a blind force or fate. The second is equally inadmissible: that God, passing into the universe, passes from a state of comparative imperfection into a state of comparative perfection. The divine nature is identical with the most perfect nature, and is also identical with the first cause. If the first cause be not identical with the most perfect nature, there is no God, for the two essential conditions of his existence are not in combination. Now, on the present supposition, the most perfect nature is the derived; nay, the universe, the creation, the γινόμενον, is, in relation to its cause, the actual, the ὄντως ὄν. [See, e.g., Plato, Sophist, in Theætetus, Sophist (Greek and English), trans. H. N. Fowler (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), p. 370 (245d3), p. 378 (247d7-e4).] It would also be the divine, but that divinity supposes also the notion of cause, while the universe, ex hypothesi, is only an effect.” (P. 36.)

This curious subtlety, that creation must be either passing from the better to the worse or from the worse to the better (which, if true, would prove that God cannot have created anything unless from all eternity) can be likened to nothing but the Eleatic argument that motion is impossible, because if a body moves it must either move where it is or where it is not; an argument, by the way, for which Sir W. Hamilton often expresses high respect; and of which he has here produced a very successful imitation. If it were worth while expending serious argument upon such a curiosity of dialectics, one might say it assumes that whatever is now worse must always have been worse, and that whatever is now better must always have been better. For, on the opposite supposition, perfect wisdom would have begun to will the new state at the precise moment when it began to be better than the old. We may add that our author’s argument, though never so irrefragable, in no way avails him against M. Cousin; for (as he has himself said, only a sentence before) on M. Cousin’s theory the universe can never have had a beginning, and God, therefore, never was in the dilemma supposed.

wOn this Mr. Mansel remarks, “Hamilton is not speaking of states of things, but of states of the Divine nature, as creative or not creative: and Mr. Mill’s argument, to refute Hamilton, must suppose a time when the new nature of God begins to be better than the old.” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 107n.) This is not a happy specimen of Mr. Mansel’s powers of confutation. If God made the universe at the precise moment when it was wisest and best to do so—and if the universe was made by a perfectly wise and good being, this must have been the case—who besides Mr. Mansel, or, according to him, Sir W. Hamilton, would assert that God, in doing so, acquired a new nature? or passed out of one state into another state of his own nature? Did he not simply remain in the state of perfect wisdom and goodness in which he was before?

Mr. Mansel makes the odd assertion [ibid.], that this argument of Sir W. Hamilton is taken from Plato. There is very little in common between it and the passage in the Republic in which Socrates, to disprove the fabulous metamorphoses of the gods into the forms of men, animals, or inanimate things, argues that no being would voluntarily change itself from better to worse. I cannot be mistaken in the passage of Plato which Mr. Mansel has in view, for he had himself cited a part of it, with the same intention, in the notes to his Bampton Lectures ([Limits of Religious Thought,] p. 209).w [See Plato, Republic (Greek and English), trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), Vol. I, pp. 190-2 (II, 381b-c).]

[* ][67] Mr. Mansel considers this sentence a curious specimen of my reading in philosophy, and informs me that “Plato expressly distinguishes between ‘the beautiful’ and ‘things that are beautiful’ as the One in contrast to the Many—the Real in contrast to the Apparent.” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] pp. 108-9 [referring to Republic, pp. 516-18 (V, 476a-e)].) Mr. Mansel will doubtless be glad to hear that I already possessed the very elementary knowledge of Plato which he seeks to impart to me; indeed (if it were of any consequence) I have elsewhere given an account of this theory of Plato, and made the excuses which may justly be made for such a doctrine in Plato’s time. [See “Grote’s Plato,” in Essays on Philosophy and the Classics, Collected Works, Vol. XI (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 421ff.] But to recognize it as a theory which it is necessary to take into consideration now, is to follow the example of the later German transcendentalists in putting philosophy back to its very incunabula.

[† ][67] The “Inquirer” objects, that merely negative predicates should be excluded from the account; and that many of those here mentioned are merely negative: absolute littleness being but the negation of greatness; weakness, of strength; folly, of wisdom; evil, of good (p. 22). But (without meddling with the very disputable position, that all bad qualities are merely deficiency of good ones) the question is, not whether the qualities which the “Inquirer” enumerates are negative, but whether they are capable of being predicated as absolute. If they are, the general or abstract Absolute logically includes them. And, surely, negations are still more susceptible of being absolute than positive qualities. The “Inquirer” will hardly deny that “absolutely none” is as correct an employment of the word absolute as “absolutely all.” With regard to Infinite, the same writer says, “To talk of infinite littleness—infinite non-extension or non-duration—is to talk of infinite nothing. Which is indeed to talk, we must not say infinite, but absolute nonsense.” [Ibid.] It is hardly fair to refer a pupil of Sir W. Hamilton to mathematics; but the “Inquirer” might have learnt from Sir W. Hamilton himself that it is not nonsense to talk of infinitely small quantities.

[* ]Quoted by Mr. Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought, p. 30 [translated by Mansel from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Carl Ludwig Michelet, in Werke, 20 vols. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1834-54), Vol. XV, p. 275].

[* ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 375.

[x-x]651, 652, 67 “fasciculus of negations?”

[* ][67] The answer of Mr. Mansel and the “Inquirer” [pp. 20-6] to the preceding argument, is, that it confounds the infinite with the indefinite. They could not have understood the argument worse if they had never read it. Indefinite, in its ordinary acceptation, is that which has a limit, but a limit either variable in itself, or unknown to us. Infinite is that which has no limit. In what Mr. Mansel calls the metaphysical use of the word indefinite, he affirms it to mean “indefinitely increasable.” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 114.) Elsewhere he says “An indefinite time is that which is capable of perpetual addition: an infinite time is one so great as to admit of no addition.” ([Ibid.,] p. 50n.) I now ask, which of these is the correct expression for that which is greater than everything finite. Is this a property which can be affirmed of anything which has an undetermined limit? or of anything which is indefinitely increasable? or of anything which is capable of perpetual addition? Is a merely indefinite time greater than every finite time? Is a merely indefinite space greater than every finite space? Is a merely indefinite space greater than every finite space? Is a merely indefinite power greater than every finite power? The property of being greater than everything finite belongs, and can belong, only to what is in the strictest sense of the term, both popular and philosophical, Infinite.

yMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, defends himself by saying that Descartes and Cudworth agree with him in giving the name indefinite to what I (and as he acknowledges, the mathematicians) understand by infinite. [“Supplementary Remarks,” pp. 24-5.] I cannot affirm that Descartes and Cudworth have nowhere done this; but they certainly have not done it in the passages which Mr. Mansel quoted, either in his first reply [Philosophy of the Conditioned, pp. 112-13,] or in this. All that either Descartes or Cudworth says in those passages is that the indefiniteness, to our minds, of the possible extension of the physical universe, is not tantamount to, nor a proof of, its infinity; as of course it is not. [In the Philosophy of the Conditioned, Mansel refers to René Descartes, Principia Philosophia, pp. 6-7 (I, xxvi-xxvii) and 27-8 (II, xxi), and a letter of Descartes to Henry More, in Lettres de Mr Descartes, ed. Claude Clerselier, 3 vols. (Paris: Angot, 1657-67), Vol. I, pp. 360-1; and to Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, trans. John Harrison, 3 vols. (London: Tegg, 1845), Vol. III, p. 131. In his “Supplementary Remarks,” Mansel adds a reference to Leibniz, but does not cite any further passages from Descartes or Cudworth.]

Mr. Mansel adds that even supposing me to be in the right, it would only follow, not that Sir W. Hamilton is wrong, but that he and I do not mean the same thing by the same term. Whoever has read the present note must, however, be aware, that I maintain my position to be true even in what Mr. Mansel affirms to be Sir W. Hamilton’s meaning of the term.y

[z]651, 652 that the Unconditioned is inconceivable, because it includes both the Infinite and the Absolute, and these are contradictory of one another. This is not an argument against the possibility of knowing the Infinite and the Absolute, but against jumbling the two together under one name. If the Infinite and the Absolute are each cognisable separately, of what importance is it that the two conceptions are incompatible? If they are so, the fault is in lumping up incompatible conceptions into an incomprehensible and impossible compound. The argument is only tenable as against the knowability and the possible existence of something which is at once “The Infinite” and “The Absolute,” abstractions which do contradict one another, but not more flagrantly than each of them contradicts itself. When, instead of abstractions, we speak of Things which are infinite and absolute in respect of given attributes, there is no incompatibility. There is nothing contradictory in the notion of a Being infinite in some attributes and absolute in others, according to the different nature of the attributes.

The next argument is,

[[*] ]Mill would appear to be referring to the ideas expounded by Thomas Hobbes in “Physics, or the Phenomena of Nature,” Part IV of Elements of Philosophy: The First Section, Concerning Body, in The English Works, ed. William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: Bohn, 1839-45), Vol. I, pp. 393-6 (Chap. xxv, §§5-6).

[a]651, 652 : and in the case of Sir W. Hamilton the shadow of this other Relativity always floats over his discussion of the doctrine of Relativity in its more special sense, and at times (as in the paper “Conditions of the Thinkable” forming an Appendix [I(A), pp. 601-33] to the Discussions) entirely obscures it

[b-b]651, 652 Since when have the One and the Many been

[c-c]651, 652 Plurality likewise

[d-d]651, 652 “The Absolute”] 67 The Absolute

[* ][67] Mr. Mansel, as I have mentioned [see p. 34n above], vehemently objects to testing what Sir W. Hamilton says of the Infinite by its applicability to God, affirming that the Infinite which Sir W. Hamilton is speaking of, namely the Infinite as we conceive it, is a “pseudo-infinite.” [Philosophy of the Conditioned, p. 93.] This is a curious inversion of the parts of Sir W. Hamilton and of his critic. It is I who assert that Sir W. Hamilton’s Infinite is a pseudo-infinite; it is he who maintains that it is the real. At least he substitutes this pseudo-infinite which is really inconceivable, for an intelligible infinite, a concrete Deity, and proving the inconceivability of the one, thinks he has sufficiently proved the inconceivability of the other. It was his business, it is what he professes, to prove that God, considered as Infinite, is inconceivable by us. Instead of this, he proves the inconceivability of an Infinite which is not and cannot be God, and which does not and cannot exist, and leaves it to Mr. Mansel to discover (after others have pointed it out) that this is a pseudo-infinite.

Mr. Mansel is still more indignant that I should try what Sir W. Hamilton says of the Absolute, by the test of applicability to God, and says that this is actually inverting Sir W. Hamilton’s meaning, since his definition of the Absolute, “the unconditionally limited,” is contradictory to the nature of God. [Hamilton, Discussions, p. 13; Mansel, Philosophy of the Conditioned, p. 106.] But Sir W. Hamilton is here arguing with M. Cousin, who does not mean by Absolute the limited, but the complete, and who does predicate it of God. As Mr. Bolton truly remarks “In discussing the doctrines of Schelling and Cousin, Hamilton uses the word Absolute in conformity with their usage, according to which the Infinite and the Absolute are not opposed, or contraries, as in Hamilton’s own terminology.” (P. 159n.) Nor for this does he deserve any blame; for if the Absolute which he affirms to be unknowable, because it cannot be known under the conditions of Plurality, is Absolute only in his own sense of the term, and not in M. Cousin’s, he has not refuted M. Cousin.

[[*] ]See Discussions, p. 33, directed against Cousin, Cours de philosophie: Introduction, Leçon v, pp. 149-50.

[e-e]651, 652 Here, surely, is one of the most unexpected slips in logic ever made by an experienced logician. At the beginning of the discussion we noted three meanings of the word Absolute. Two of them Sir W. Hamilton himself discriminated with precision. Of these, we thought that the one concerned in the present discussion was that of “finished, perfected, completed.” Sir W. Hamilton said so; and added, that it is the meaning which, for himself, he exclusively employs: and, up to this time, he has really kept to it. But now, suddenly and without notice, that meaning is dropped, and another substituted, that in which absolute is the reverse of relative. We are told, as a sufficient refutation of M. Cousin’s doctrine, that his Absolute, since it is defined as a Cause, is only a Relative. But if Absolute means finished, perfected, completed, may there not be a finished, perfected, and completed Cause? i.e. the most a Cause that it is possible to be—the cause of everything except itself?

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

[[*] ]Discussions, p. 14n; cf. p. 39l above.

[g-g]651, 652 absolute in the only sense relevant to the question, it is not absolute in another and a totally different sense; since what is known as a cause,

[[†] ]See Cours de philosophie: Introduction, Leçon v, pp. 140-1.

[h-h]651, 652 of the essence

[[‡] ]Discussions, p. 14; cf. p. 42 above.

[i-i]651, 652, 67 the First Cause

[* ]In page 8 of the Discussions, speaking of the one of M. Cousin’s three elements of Consciousness which that author “variously expresses by the terms unity, identity, substance, absolute cause, the infinite, pure thought, &c.,” Sir W. Hamilton says, “we will briefly call it the Unconditioned.” What M. Cousin “denominates plurality, difference, phænomenon, relative cause, the finite, determined thought, &c.,” Sir W. Hamilton says, “we would style the Conditioned.” [See, e.g., Cousin, Cours de philosophie: Introduction, Leçon iv, pp. 108ff., and Leçon v, pp. 122-4.] This, I think, is as near as he ever comes to an explanation of what he means by these words. It is obviously no explanation at all. It tells us what (in logical language) the terms denote, but not what they connote. An enumeration of the things called by a name is not a definition. If the name, for instance, were “dog,” it would be no definition to say that what are variously denominated spaniels, mastiffs, and so forth, “we would style” dogs. The thing wanted is to know what attributes common to all these the word signifies,—what is affirmed of a thing by calling it a dog. [For the placing of this footnote in 651, 652, see 39-41n-n above.]

[j]651, 652 But now, will either of these two meanings of Condition—the condition which means a correlative, or the conditions the aggregate of which composes the cause,—will either of them give a meaning to the proposition, “To think is to condition?” The second we may at once exclude. Our author cannot possibly mean that to think an object is to assign to it a cause. But he may, perhaps, mean that to think it is to give it a correlative. For this is true, and true in more senses than one. Whoever thinks an object, gives it at least one correlative, by giving it a thinker; and as many more as there are objects from which he distinguishes it. But is this any argument against those who say that the Absolute is thinkable? Did any of them ever suggest the possibility of thinking it without a thinker? Or did any of them profess to think it in any other manner than by distinguishing it from other things? If to do this is to condition, those who say that we can think the Absolute, say that we can condition it: and if the word Unconditioned is employed to make an apparent hindrance to our doing so, it is employed to beg the question.

[k-k]57651, 652 : but the doctrine is of as little use for our author’s purpose in this interpretation as in the two preceding. What he aims at proving against Cousin is, that the Absolute is unthinkable. His argument for this (if I have interpreted him right) is, that we can only think anything, in conformity to the laws of our thinking faculty. But his opponents never alleged the contrary. Even Schelling was not so gratuitously absurd as to deny that the Absolute must be known according to the capacities of that which knows it—though he was forced to invent a special capacity for the purpose. And M. Cousin holds that the Absolute is known by the same faculties by which we know other things. They both maintained, not that the Absolute could be thought, apart from the conditions of our thinking faculty, but that those conditions are compatible with thinking the Absolute: and the only answer that could be made to them would be to disprove this: which the author has been trying to do; by what inconclusive arguments, I have already endeavoured to show.

[[*] ]Philosophy of the Conditioned, pp. 66-7.

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

[[*] ]See pp. 48ff. above.

[* ][67] “To be conceived as unconditioned,” says Mr. Mansel, “God must be conceived as exempt from action in time: to be conceived as a person, if his personality resembles ours, he must be conceived as acting in time.” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] pp. 17-18.) Exempt from action in time, as much as you please; in other words, not necessitated to it, nor restricted by its conditions; but did any one ever conceive the Deity as not acting in time? Nay, even if he is not conceived as a person, but only as the first principle of the universe, “one absolutely first principle on which everything else depends,” [p. 7,] a belief which is held by Mr. Mansel along with the Christian doctrine of the Divine Personality (pp. 7-18); even so, the first principle of everything which takes place in Time, must, from the very meaning of the words, not only be conceived as acting in Time, but must really act in Time, and in all Time. Action in Time does not belong to the Deity as a Person, but quite as much to the Deity as the first principle of all things, which is what Mr. Mansel means by the Unconditioned.

[* ][67] On this Mr.Mansel’s remark is that Sir W. Hamilton did not assert these to be unmeaning abstractions. ([Ibid.,] pp. 110-11.) I never pretended that he did; the gist of my complaint against him is, that he did not perceive them to be unmeaning. “Hamilton,” says Mr. Mansel, “maintains that the terms absolute and infinite are perfectly intelligible as abstractions, as much so as relative and finite.” [Ibid., p. 110.] Quis dubitavit? It is not the terms absolute and infinite that are unmeaning; it is “The Infinite” and “The Absolute.” Infinite and Absolute are real attributes, abstracted from concrete objects of thought, if not of experience, which are at least believed to possess those attributes. “The Infinite” and “The Absolute” are illegitimate abstractions of what never were, nor could without self-contradiction be supposed to be, attributes of any concrete. I regret to differ, on this point, from my distinguished reviewer [George Grote] in the Westminster Review, who considers these to be intelligible abstractions, though of a higher reach of abstraction than the preceding (p. 14). The distinction is seized by one of my American critics, Dr. H. B. Smith, who regards it as the difference between talking “about the Infinite and Absolute as entities,” and considering them “simply as modes or predicates of real existences.” ([“Mill’s Examination,”] p. 134.) That there are persons “in Laputa or the Empire” (as Sir W. Hamilton phrases it [Discussions, p. 21]) who do talk about them as entities, up to any pitch of wild nonsense, I am quite aware; and against these Sir W. Hamilton’s Essay, as the protest, though the insufficient protest, of a rival Transcendentalist, has its value.

[m]651, 652 His own favourite abstraction “The Unconditioned,” considered as the sum of these two, necessarily shares the same fate. If, indeed, it be applied conformably to either of the received meanings of the word condition—if it be understood either as denoting a First Cause, or as a name for all Noumena—it has in each case a signification which can be understood and reasoned about. But as a phrase afflicted with incurable ambiguity, and habitually used by its introducer in several meanings, with no apparent consciousness of their not being the same, it seems to me a very infelicitous creation, and a useless and hurtful intruder into the language of philosophy. [paragraph]

[[*] ]See Cours de philosophie: Introduction, Leçon v, passim.

[† ][67] Mr. Mansel denies the correctness of the representations made in this paragraph ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] pp. 90-6); and at least seems to assert, that the question between M. Cousin and Sir W. Hamilton did not relate to the possibility of knowing the Infinite Being, but to a “pseudo-concept of the Infinite,” [p. 93,] which Sir W. Hamilton believed to be not a proper predicate of God, but a representation of a non-entity. And Mr. Mansel affirms (p. 92) that to substitute the name of God in the place of the Infinite and the Absolute, is exactly to reverse Sir W. Hamilton’s argument. We have here a direct issue of fact, of which every one is a judge who will take the trouble to read Sir W. Hamilton’s Essay. I maintain thata what M. Cousin affirms and Sir W. Hamilton denies, is the cognoscibility not of an Infinite and Absolute which is not God, but of the Infinite and Absolute which is God. [See below pp. 35-6.] I might refer to almost any page of the Essay; I will only quote the application which Sir W. Hamilton himself makes of his own doctrine. “True, therefore, are the declarations of a pious philosophy: ‘A God understood would be no God at all.’ ‘To think that God is, as we can think him to be, is blasphemy.’ The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense, is concealed: he is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion, must be an altar Ἀγνώστῳ θεῷ—‘To the unknown and unknowable God.’ ” (Discussions, p. 15n. [For the quotation, see Acts, 17:23.]) When this is what the author of the Essay presents as its practical result, it is too much to tell us that the Essay is not concerned about God but about a “Pseudo-Infinite,” and that we are not entitled, when we find in it an assertion about the Infinite, to hold the author to the assertion as applicable to God. We shall next be told that Mr. Mansel himself, in his Bampton Lectures, is not treating the question of our knowledge of God. It is very true that the only Infinite about which either Sir W. Hamilton or Mr. Mansel proves anything, is a Pseudo-Infinite; but they are not in the least aware of this; they fancy that this Pseudo-Infinite is the real Infinite, and that in proving it to be unknowable by us, they prove the same thing of God.

The reader who desires further elucidation of this point, may consult the sixth chapter of Mr. Bolton’s Inquisitio Philosophica. That acute thinker also points out [see, e.g., pp. 190-4] various inconsistencies and other logical errors in Mr. Mansel’s work, with which I am not here concerned, my object in answering him not being recrimination, but to maintain my original assertions against his denial.

bMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, quotes from his Bampton Lectures [Limits of Religious Thought] some passages in which he says, and others in which he implies, that “our human conception of the Infinite is not the true one,” and that “the infinite of philosophy is not the true Infinite:” and thinks it very unfair that, with these passages before me, I should accuse him of mistaking a pseudo-infinite for the real Infinite. [“Supplementary Remarks,” p. 23, where Mansel gives the references in his Limits of Religious Thought for the passages he cites.] But the mistake from which he clears himself is not that which I charged him with. I maintained, that the abstraction “The Infinite,” in whatever manner understood, as distinguished from some particular attribute possessed in an infinite degree, has no existence, and is a pseudo-infinite. [See pp. 94ff. below.] Mr. Mansel, on the contrary, affirmed throughout, and affirms in the very passages which he quotes, that “The Infinite” has a real existence, and is God: though when we attempt to conceive what it is, we only reach a mass of contradictions, which is a pseudo-infinite. Mr. Mansel did not suppose his pseudo-infinite to be the true Infinite; but my assertion, which stands unrefuted, is, that his “true Infinite” is a pseudo-infinite; and that in proving it to be unknowable by us, he mistakenly fancied that he had proved this of God.b

[* ][67] In the first edition of this work it was maintained, that though Power admits of being regarded as Infinite, Knowledge does not; because “the highest degree of knowledge that can be spoken of with a meaning, only amounts to knowing all that there is to be known.” [See 37f-f above.] But Mr. Mansel [Philosophy of the Conditioned, p. 105] and the “Inquirer” (author of The Battle of the Two Philosophies [see pp. 24-6]) have justly remarked, that on the supposition of an Infinite Being, “all that there is to be known” includes all which a Being of infinite power can think or create; consequently, the power being infinite, the knowledge, if supposed complete, must be infinite too. In regard to the moral attributes, it was said in the first edition, that Absolute is the proper word for them, and not Infinite, since those attributes “cannot be more than perfect. There are not infinite degrees of right. The will is either entirely right, or wrong in different degrees.” [See 37f-f above.] In this I did not properly distinguish between moral rightness or justice gas predicated of acts or mental states, and the same regarded as attributes of a person. Conformity to the standard of right has a positive limit, which can only be reached, not surpassed; but persons, though all exactly conforming to the standard, may differ in the strength of their adherence to it: influences (temptations for example) might detach one of them from it, which would have no effect upon another. There are thus, consistently with complete observance of the rule of right, innumerable gradations of the attribute considered as in a person. But, on the other hand, there is an extreme limit to these gradations—the idea of a Person whom no influences or causes, either in or out of himself, can deflect in the minutest degree from the law of right. This I apprehend to be a conception of absolute, not of infinite, righteousness. The doctrine, therefore, of the first edition, that an Infinite Being may have attributes which are absolute, but not infinite, still appears to me maintainable. But as it is immaterial to my argument, and was only the illustration nearest at hand of the meaning of the terms, I withdraw it from the discussion.g

[* ]Ibid., p. 35. uIn the first edition three points of our author’s argument were discussed, instead of two only: but I now perceive that the remaining argument is ad hominem merely, and has reference to M. Cousin’s confusion of the Absolute with the Infinite.u

[† ][Cf. Job, 38:41, for the concluding image.] A passage follows, which being only directed against a special doctrine of M. Cousin, (that God is determined to create by the necessity of his own nature—that an absolute creative force cannot but pass into creative activity [see Cours de philosophie: Introduction, Leçon v, pp. 139-40])—I should have left unmentioned, were it not worth notice as a specimen of the kind of arguments which Sir W. Hamilton can sometimes use. On M. Cousin’s hypothesis, says our author, “One of two alternatives must be admitted. God, as necessarily determined to pass from absolute essence to relative manifestation, is determined to pass either from the better to the worse, or from the worse to the better. A third possibility, that both states are equal, as contradictory in itself and as contradicted by our author, it is not necessary to consider. The first supposition must be rejected. The necessity in this case determines God to pass from the better to the worse, that is, operates to his partial annihilation. The power which compels this must be external and hostile, for nothing operates willingly to its own deterioration; and as superior to the pretended God, is either itself the real deity, if an intelligent and free cause, or a negation of all deity, if a blind force or fate. The second is equally inadmissible: that God, passing into the universe, passes from a state of comparative imperfection into a state of comparative perfection. The divine nature is identical with the most perfect nature, and is also identical with the first cause. If the first cause be not identical with the most perfect nature, there is no God, for the two essential conditions of his existence are not in combination. Now, on the present supposition, the most perfect nature is the derived; nay, the universe, the creation, the γινόμενον, is, in relation to its cause, the actual, the ὄντως ὄν. [See, e.g., Plato, Sophist, in Theætetus, Sophist (Greek and English), trans. H. N. Fowler (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), p. 370 (245d3), p. 378 (247d7-e4).] It would also be the divine, but that divinity supposes also the notion of cause, while the universe, ex hypothesi, is only an effect.” (P. 36.)

This curious subtlety, that creation must be either passing from the better to the worse or from the worse to the better (which, if true, would prove that God cannot have created anything unless from all eternity) can be likened to nothing but the Eleatic argument that motion is impossible, because if a body moves it must either move where it is or where it is not; an argument, by the way, for which Sir W. Hamilton often expresses high respect; and of which he has here produced a very successful imitation. If it were worth while expending serious argument upon such a curiosity of dialectics, one might say it assumes that whatever is now worse must always have been worse, and that whatever is now better must always have been better. For, on the opposite supposition, perfect wisdom would have begun to will the new state at the precise moment when it began to be better than the old. We may add that our author’s argument, though never so irrefragable, in no way avails him against M. Cousin; for (as he has himself said, only a sentence before) on M. Cousin’s theory the universe can never have had a beginning, and God, therefore, never was in the dilemma supposed.

wOn this Mr. Mansel remarks, “Hamilton is not speaking of states of things, but of states of the Divine nature, as creative or not creative: and Mr. Mill’s argument, to refute Hamilton, must suppose a time when the new nature of God begins to be better than the old.” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 107n.) This is not a happy specimen of Mr. Mansel’s powers of confutation. If God made the universe at the precise moment when it was wisest and best to do so—and if the universe was made by a perfectly wise and good being, this must have been the case—who besides Mr. Mansel, or, according to him, Sir W. Hamilton, would assert that God, in doing so, acquired a new nature? or passed out of one state into another state of his own nature? Did he not simply remain in the state of perfect wisdom and goodness in which he was before?

Mr. Mansel makes the odd assertion [ibid.], that this argument of Sir W. Hamilton is taken from Plato. There is very little in common between it and the passage in the Republic in which Socrates, to disprove the fabulous metamorphoses of the gods into the forms of men, animals, or inanimate things, argues that no being would voluntarily change itself from better to worse. I cannot be mistaken in the passage of Plato which Mr. Mansel has in view, for he had himself cited a part of it, with the same intention, in the notes to his Bampton Lectures ([Limits of Religious Thought,] p. 209).w [See Plato, Republic (Greek and English), trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), Vol. I, pp. 190-2 (II, 381b-c).]

[* ][67] The answer of Mr. Mansel and the “Inquirer” [pp. 20-6] to the preceding argument, is, that it confounds the infinite with the indefinite. They could not have understood the argument worse if they had never read it. Indefinite, in its ordinary acceptation, is that which has a limit, but a limit either variable in itself, or unknown to us. Infinite is that which has no limit. In what Mr. Mansel calls the metaphysical use of the word indefinite, he affirms it to mean “indefinitely increasable.” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 114.) Elsewhere he says “An indefinite time is that which is capable of perpetual addition: an infinite time is one so great as to admit of no addition.” ([Ibid.,] p. 50n.) I now ask, which of these is the correct expression for that which is greater than everything finite. Is this a property which can be affirmed of anything which has an undetermined limit? or of anything which is indefinitely increasable? or of anything which is capable of perpetual addition? Is a merely indefinite time greater than every finite time? Is a merely indefinite space greater than every finite space? Is a merely indefinite space greater than every finite space? Is a merely indefinite power greater than every finite power? The property of being greater than everything finite belongs, and can belong, only to what is in the strictest sense of the term, both popular and philosophical, Infinite.

yMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, defends himself by saying that Descartes and Cudworth agree with him in giving the name indefinite to what I (and as he acknowledges, the mathematicians) understand by infinite. [“Supplementary Remarks,” pp. 24-5.] I cannot affirm that Descartes and Cudworth have nowhere done this; but they certainly have not done it in the passages which Mr. Mansel quoted, either in his first reply [Philosophy of the Conditioned, pp. 112-13,] or in this. All that either Descartes or Cudworth says in those passages is that the indefiniteness, to our minds, of the possible extension of the physical universe, is not tantamount to, nor a proof of, its infinity; as of course it is not. [In the Philosophy of the Conditioned, Mansel refers to René Descartes, Principia Philosophia, pp. 6-7 (I, xxvi-xxvii) and 27-8 (II, xxi), and a letter of Descartes to Henry More, in Lettres de Mr Descartes, ed. Claude Clerselier, 3 vols. (Paris: Angot, 1657-67), Vol. I, pp. 360-1; and to Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, trans. John Harrison, 3 vols. (London: Tegg, 1845), Vol. III, p. 131. In his “Supplementary Remarks,” Mansel adds a reference to Leibniz, but does not cite any further passages from Descartes or Cudworth.]

Mr. Mansel adds that even supposing me to be in the right, it would only follow, not that Sir W. Hamilton is wrong, but that he and I do not mean the same thing by the same term. Whoever has read the present note must, however, be aware, that I maintain my position to be true even in what Mr. Mansel affirms to be Sir W. Hamilton’s meaning of the term.y

[a]67 there is not a shadow of ground for this statement of Mr. Mansel; and that

[bMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, quotes from his Bampton Lectures [Limits of Religious Thought] some passages in which he says, and others in which he implies, that “our human conception of the Infinite is not the true one,” and that “the infinite of philosophy is not the true Infinite:” and thinks it very unfair that, with these passages before me, I should accuse him of mistaking a pseudo-infinite for the real Infinite. [“Supplementary Remarks,” p. 23, where Mansel gives the references in his Limits of Religious Thought for the passages he cites.] But the mistake from which he clears himself is not that which I charged him with. I maintained, that the abstraction “The Infinite,” in whatever manner understood, as distinguished from some particular attribute possessed in an infinite degree, has no existence, and is a pseudo-infinite. [See pp. 94ff. below.] Mr. Mansel, on the contrary, affirmed throughout, and affirms in the very passages which he quotes, that “The Infinite” has a real existence, and is God: though when we attempt to conceive what it is, we only reach a mass of contradictions, which is a pseudo-infinite. Mr. Mansel did not suppose his pseudo-infinite to be the true Infinite; but my assertion, which stands unrefuted, is, that his “true Infinite” is a pseudo-infinite; and that in proving it to be unknowable by us, he mistakenly fancied that he had proved this of God.b]+72

[gas predicated of acts or mental states, and the same regarded as attributes of a person. Conformity to the standard of right has a positive limit, which can only be reached, not surpassed; but persons, though all exactly conforming to the standard, may differ in the strength of their adherence to it: influences (temptations for example) might detach one of them from it, which would have no effect upon another. There are thus, consistently with complete observance of the rule of right, innumerable gradations of the attribute considered as in a person. But, on the other hand, there is an extreme limit to these gradations—the idea of a Person whom no influences or causes, either in or out of himself, can deflect in the minutest degree from the law of right. This I apprehend to be a conception of absolute, not of infinite, righteousness. The doctrine, therefore, of the first edition, that an Infinite Being may have attributes which are absolute, but not infinite, still appears to me maintainable. But as it is immaterial to my argument, and was only the illustration nearest at hand of the meaning of the terms, I withdraw it from the discussion.g][manuscript fragment exists; see Appendix A below]

[uIn the first edition three points of our author’s argument were discussed, instead of two only: but I now perceive that the remaining argument is ad hominem merely, and has reference to M. Cousin’s confusion of the Absolute with the Infinite.u]+67, 72

[wOn this Mr. Mansel remarks, “Hamilton is not speaking of states of things, but of states of the Divine nature, as creative or not creative: and Mr. Mill’s argument, to refute Hamilton, must suppose a time when the new nature of God begins to be better than the old.” ([Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 107n.) This is not a happy specimen of Mr. Mansel’s powers of confutation. If God made the universe at the precise moment when it was wisest and best to do so—and if the universe was made by a perfectly wise and good being, this must have been the case—who besides Mr. Mansel, or, according to him, Sir W. Hamilton, would assert that God, in doing so, acquired a new nature? or passed out of one state into another state of his own nature? Did he not simply remain in the state of perfect wisdom and goodness in which he was before?]+67, 72

[yMr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, defends himself by saying that Descartes and Cudworth agree with him in giving the name indefinite to what I (and as he acknowledges, the mathematicians) understand by infinite. [“Supplementary Remarks,” pp. 24-5.] I cannot affirm that Descartes and Cudworth have nowhere done this; but they certainly have not done it in the passages which Mr. Mansel quoted, either in his first reply [Philosophy of the Conditioned, pp. 112-13,] or in this. All that either Descartes or Cudworth says in those passages is that the indefiniteness, to our minds, of the possible extension of the physical universe, is not tantamount to, nor a proof of, its infinity; as of course it is not. [In the Philosophy of the Conditioned, Mansel refers to René Descartes, Principia Philosophia, pp. 6-7 (I, xxvi-xxvii) and 27-8 (II, xxi), and a letter of Descartes to Henry More, in Lettres de Mr Descartes, ed. Claude Clerselier, 3 vols. (Paris: Angot, 1657-67), Vol. I, pp. 360-1; and to Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, trans. John Harrison, 3 vols. (London: Tegg, 1845), Vol. III, p. 131. In his “Supplementary Remarks,” Mansel adds a reference to Leibniz, but does not cite any further passages from Descartes or Cudworth.]]+72