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 IX

Of the Interpretation of Consciousness

according to all philosophers, the evidence of Consciousness, if only we can obtain it pure, is conclusive. This is an obvious, but by no means a mere identical proposition. If consciousness be defined as intuitive knowledge, it is indeed an identical proposition to say, that if we intuitively know anything, we do know it, and are sure of it. But the meaning lies in the implied assertion, that we do know some things immediately, or intuitively. That we must do so is evident, if we know anything; for what we know mediately, depends for its evidence on our previous knowledge of something else: unless, therefore, we knew something immediately, we could not know anything mediately, and consequently could not know anything at all. That imaginary being, a complete Sceptic, might be supposed to answer, that perhaps we do not know anything at all. I shall not reply to this problematical antagonist in the usual manner, by telling him that if he does not know anything, I do. I put to him the simplest case conceivable of immediate knowledge, and ask, if we ever feel anything? If so, then, at the moment of feeling, do we know that we feel? Or if he will not call this knowledge, will he deny that when we have a feeling, we have at least some sort of assurance, or conviction, of having it? This assurance or conviction is what other people mean by knowledge. If he dislikes the word, I am willing in discussing with him to employ some other. By whatever name this assurance is called, it is the test to which we bring all our other convictions. He may say it is not certain; but such as it may be, it is our model of certainty. We consider all our other assurances and convictions as more or less certain, according as they approach the standard of this. I have a conviction that there are icebergs in the Arctic seas. I have not had the evidence of my senses for it: I never saw an iceberg. Neither do I intuitively believe it by a law of my mind. My conviction is mediate, grounded on testimony, and on inferences from physical laws. When I say I am convinced of it, I mean that the evidence is equal to that of my senses. I am as certain of the fact as if I had seen it. And, on a more complete analysis, when I say I am convinced of it, what I am convinced of is that if I were in the Arctic seas I should see it. We mean by knowledge, and by certainty, an assurance similar and equal to that afforded by our senses: if the evidence in any other case can be brought up to this, we desire no more. If a person is not satisfied with this evidence, it is no concern of anybody but himself, nor, practically, of himself, since it is admitted that this evidence is what we must, and may with full confidence, act upon. Absolute scepticism, if there be such a thing, may be dismissed from discussion, as raising an irrelevant issue, for in denying all knowledge it denies none. The dogmatist may be quite satisfied if the doctrine he maintains can be attacked by no arguments but those which apply to the evidence of the senses. If his evidence is equal to that, he needs no more; nay, it is philosophically maintainable that by the laws of psychology we can conceive no more, and that this is the certainty which we call perfect.

The verdict, then, of consciousness, or, in other words, our immediate and intuitive conviction, is admitted, on all hands, to be a decision without appeal. The next question is, to what does consciousness bear witness? And here, at the outset, a distinction manifests itself, which is laid down by Sir W. Hamilton, and stated, in a very lucid manner, in the first volume of his Lectures. I give it in his own words.

He adds, that since no doubt has been, or can be, entertained of the facts given in the act of consciousness itself, “it is only the authority of these facts as evidence of something beyond themselves,—that is, only the second class of facts,—which become matter of discussion; it is not the reality of consciousness that we have to prove, but its veracity.”^[*]

By the conception and clear exposition of this distinction, Sir W. Hamilton has contributed materially to make the issues involved in the great question in hand, more intelligible; and the passage is a considerable item for the appreciation both of his philosophy and of his philosophical powers. It is one of the proofs that, whatever be the positive value of his achievements in metaphysics, he had a greater capacity for the subject than many metaphysicians of high reputation, and particularly than his two distinguished predecessors in the same school of thought, Reid and Stewart.

There are, however, some points in this long extract which are open to criticism. The distinction it draws, is, in the main, beyond question, just. Among the facts which Sir W. Hamilton considers as revelations of consciousness, there is one kind which, as he truly says, no one does or can doubt, another kind which they can and do. The facts which cannot be doubted are those to which the word consciousness is by most philosophers confined: the facts of internal consciousness; “the mind’s own acts and affections.”^[†] What we feel, we cannot doubt that we feel. It is impossible to us to feel, and to think that perhaps we feel not, or to feel not, and think that perhaps we feel. What admits of being doubted, is the revelation which consciousness is supposed to make (and which our author considers as itself consciousness) of an external reality. But according to him, though we may doubt this external reality, we are compelled to admit that consciousness testifies to it. We may disbelieve our consciousness; but we cannot doubt what its testimony is. This assertion cannot be granted in the same unqualified manner as the others. It is true that I cannot doubt my present impression: I cannot doubt that when I perceive colour or weight, I perceive them as in an object. Neither can I doubt that when I look at two fields, I perceive which of them is the farthest off. The majority of philosophers, however, would not say that perception of distance by the eye is testified by consciousness; because although we really do so perceive distance, they believe it to be an acquired perception. It is at least possible to think that the reference of our sensible impressions to an external object is, in like manner, acquired; and if so, though a fact of our consciousness in its present artificial state, it would have no claim to the title of a fact of consciousness generally, ^aor to the unlimited credence given to what is originally consciousness^a . This point of psychology we shall have to discuss farther on.

Another remark needs to be made. All the world admits with our author, that it is impossible to doubt a fact of internal consciousness. To feel, and not to know that we feel, is an impossibility. But Sir W. Hamilton is not satisfied to let this truth rest on its own evidence. He wants a demonstration of it. As if it were not sufficiently proved by consciousness itself, he attempts to prove it by a reductio ad absurdum. No one, he says, can doubt consciousness, because, doubt being itself consciousness, to doubt consciousness would be to doubt that we doubt. He sets so high a value on this argument, that he is continually recurring to it in his writings; it actually amounts to a feature of his philosophy.^* Yet it seems to me no better than a fallacy. It treats doubt as something positive, like certainty, forgetting that doubt is uncertainty. Doubt is not a state of consciousness, but the negation of a state of consciousness. Being nothing positive, but simply the absence of a belief, it seems to be the one intellectual fact which may be true without self-affirmation of its truth; without our either believing or disbelieving that we doubt. If doubt is anything other than merely negative, it means an insufficient assurance; a disposition to believe, with an inability to believe confidently. But there are degrees of insufficiency; and if we suppose, for argument’s sake, that it is possible to doubt consciousness, it may be possible to doubt different facts of consciousness in different degrees. The general uncertainty of consciousness might be the one fact that appeared least uncertain. The saying of Socrates, that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, expresses a conceivable and not inconsistent state of mind.^[*] The only thing he felt perfectly sure of may have been that he was sure of nothing else. Omitting Socrates (who was no sceptic as to the reality of knowledge, but only as to its having yet been attained) and endeavouring to conceive the hazy state of mind of a person who doubts the evidence of his senses, it is quite possible to suppose him doubting even whether he doubts. Most people, I should think, must have found themselves in something like this predicament as to particular facts, of which their assurance is all but perfect; they are not quite certain that they are uncertain.^*

But though our author’s proof of the position is as untenable as it is superfluous, all agree with him in the position itself, that a real fact of consciousness cannot be doubted or denied. Let us now, therefore, return to his distinction between the facts “given in the act of consciousness,”^[†] and those “to the reality of which it only bears evidence.”^[‡] These last, or, in other words, “the veracity of consciousness,” Sir W. Hamilton thinks it possible to doubt or deny; he even says, that such facts, more or fewer in number, have been doubted or denied by nearly the whole body of modern philosophers. But this is a statement of the point in issue between Sir W. Hamilton and modern philosophers, the correctness of which, I will venture to affirm that very few if any of them would admit. He represents “nearly the whole body of modern philosophers”^[*] as in the peculiar and paradoxical position, of believing that consciousness declares to them and to all mankind the truth of certain facts, and then of disbelieving those facts. That great majority of philosophers of whom Sir W. Hamilton speaks, would, I apprehend, altogether deny this statement. They never dreamed of disputing the veracity of consciousness. They denied what Sir W. Hamilton thinks ^bit^b impossible to deny; the fact of its testimony. They thought it did not testify to the facts to which he thinks it testifies. Had they thought as he does respecting the testimony, they would have thought as he does respecting the facts. As it is, many of them maintained that consciousness gives no testimony to anything beyond itself; that whatever knowledge we possess, or whatever belief we find in ourselves, of anything but the feelings and operations of our own minds, has been acquired subsequently to the first beginnings of our intellectual life, and was not witnessed to by consciousness when it received its first impressions. Others, again, did believe in a testimony of consciousness, but not in the testimony ascribed to it by Sir W. Hamilton. Facts, to which in his opinion it testifies, some of them did not believe at all, others did not believe them to be known intuitively; nay, many of them both believed the facts, and believed that they were known intuitively, and if they differed from Sir W. Hamilton, differed in the merest shadow of a shade; yet it is with these last, as we shall see, that he has his greatest quarrel. In his contest, therefore, with (as he says) the majority of philosophers, Sir W. Hamilton addresses his arguments to the wrong point. He thinks it needless to prove that the testimony to which he appeals, is really given by Consciousness, for that he regards as undenied and undeniable: but he is incessantly proving to us that we ought to believe our consciousness, a thing which few, if any, of his opponents denied.^* It is true his appeal is always to the same argument, but that he is never tired of reiterating. It is stated the most systematically in the first Dissertation on Reid, that “on the Philosophy of Common Sense.” After saying that there are certain primary elements of cognition, manifesting themselves to us as facts of which consciousness assures us, he continues,

that man is “organized for the attainment, and actuated by the love of truth, only to become the dupe and victim of a perfidious creator.”^† It appears, therefore, that the testimony of consciousness must be believed, because to disbelieve it, would be to impute mendacity and perfidy to the Creator.

But there is a preliminary difficulty to be here resolved, which may be stated without irreverence. If the proof of the trustworthiness of consciousness is the veracity of the Creator, on what does the Creator’s veracity itself rest? Is it not on the evidence of consciousness? The divine veracity can only be known in two ways, 1st, by intuition, or 2ndly, through evidence. If it is known by intuition, it is itself a fact of consciousness, and to have ground for believing it, we must assume that consciousness is trustworthy. Those who say that we have a direct intuition of God, are only saying in other words that consciousness testifies to him. If we hold, on the contrary, with our author, that God is not known by intuition, but proved by evidence, that evidence must rest, in the last resort, on consciousness. All proofs of religion, natural or revealed, must be derived either from the testimony of the senses, or from internal feelings of the mind, or from reasonings of which one or other of these sources supplied the premises. Religion, thus itself resting on the evidence of consciousness, cannot be invoked to prove that consciousness ought to be believed. We must already trust our consciousness, before we can have any evidence of the truth of religion.

I know not whether it is from an obscure sense of this objection to his argument, that Sir W. Hamilton adopts what, in every other point of view, is a very extraordinary limitation of it. After representing the veracity of the Creator as staked on the truth of the testimony of Consciousness, he is content to claim this argument as not amounting to proof, but only to a primâ facie presumption. “Such a supposition” as that of a perfidious creator, “if gratuitous, is manifestly illegitimate.” “The data of our original consciousness must, it is evident, in the first instance” (the italics are the author’s), “be presumed true. It is only if proved false,” which ^cit^c can only be by showing them to be inconsistent with one another, “that their authority can, in consequence of that proof, be, in the second instance, disallowed.”^[*] “Neganti incumbit probatio. Nature is not gratuitously to be assumed to work, not only in vain, but in counteraction of herself; our faculty of knowledge is not, without a ground, to be supposed an instrument of illusion.”^* It is making a very humble claim for the veracity of the Creator, that it should be held valid merely as a presumption, in the absence of contrary evidence; that the Divine Being, like a prisoner at the bar, should be presumed innocent until proved guilty. Far, however, from intending this remark in any invidious sense against Sir W. Hamilton, I regard it as one of his titles to honour, that he has not been afraid, as many men would have been, to subject a proposition surrounded by reverence to the same logical treatment as any other statement, and has not felt himself obliged, as a philosopher, to consider it from the first as final. My complaint ^dcould only be^d , that his logic is not sufficiently consistent^e; and that the^e divine veracity is entitled either to more or to less weight than he accords to it. He is bound by the laws of correct reasoning to prove his premise without the aid of the conclusion which he means to draw from it. If he can do this—if the divine veracity is certified by stronger evidence than the testimony of consciousness, it may be appealed to, not merely as a presumption, but as a proof. If not, it is entitled to no place in the discussion, even as a presumption. There is no intermediate position for it, good enough for the one purpose, but not good enough for the other. It would be a new view of the fallacy of petitio principii to contend that a conclusion is no proof of the premises from which it is deduced, but is primâ facie evidence of them.

Our author, however, cannot be convicted of petitio principii. Though he has not stated, I think he has enabled us to see, in what manner he avoided it. True, he has deduced the trustworthiness of consciousness from the veracity of the Deity; and the veracity of the Deity can only be known from the evidence of consciousness. But he may fall back upon the distinction between facts given in consciousness itself, and facts “to the reality of which it only bears evidence.”^[†] It is for the trustworthiness of these last, that he assigns as presumptive evidence (which the absence of counter-evidence raises into proof) the divine veracity. That veracity itself, he may say, is proved by consciousness, but to prove it requires only the other class of facts of consciousness, those given in the act of consciousness itself. There are thus two steps in the argument. “The phænomena of consciousness considered merely in themselves,” with reference to which “scepticism is confessedly impossible,”^* suffice (we must suppose him to think) for proving the divine veracity; and that veracity, being proved, is in its turn a reason for trusting the testimony which consciousness pronounces to facts without and beyond itself.

Unless, therefore, Sir W. Hamilton was guilty of a paralogism, by adducing religion in proof of what is necessary to the proof of religion, his opinion must have been that our knowledge of God rests upon the affirmation which Consciousness makes of itself, and not of anything beyond itself; that the divine existence and attributes may be proved without assuming that consciousness testifies to anything but our own feelings and mental operations. If this be so, we have Sir W. Hamilton’s authority for affirming, that even the most extreme form of philosophical scepticism, the Nihilism (as our author calls it)^[*] of Hume, which denies the objective existence of both Matter and Mind, does not touch the evidences of Natural Religion. And it really does not touch any evidences but such as religion can well spare. But what a mass of religious prejudice has been directed against this philosophical doctrine, on the strength of what we have now Sir W. Hamilton’s authority for treating as a mere misapprehension.^†

But something more is necessary to render the divine veracity available in support of the testimony of consciousness, against those, if such there be, who admit the fact of the testimony, but hesitate to admit its truth. The divine veracity can only be implicated in the truth of anything, by proving that the Divine Being intended it to be believed. As it is not pretended that he has made any revelation in the matter, his intention can only be inferred from the ^fresult^f : and our author draws the inference from his having made it an original and indestructible part of our nature that our consciousness should declare to us certain facts. Now this is what the philosophers who disbelieve the facts, would not, any of them, admit. Many indeed have admitted that we have a natural tendency to believe something which they considered to be an illusion: but it cannot be affirmed that God intended us to do whatever we have a natural tendency to. On every theory of the divine government, it is carried on, intellectually as well as morally, not by the mere indulgence of our natural tendencies, but by the regulation and control of them. One philosopher, Hume, has said that the tendency in question seems to be an “instinct,” and has called a psychological doctrine, which he regarded as groundless, as “universal and primary opinion of all men.” But he never dreamed of saying that we are compelled by our nature to believe it; on the contrary, he says that this illusive opinion “is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy.”^[*] Of all eminent thinkers, the one who comes nearest to our author’s description of those who reject the testimony of consciousness, is Kant. That philosopher did maintain that there is an illusion inherent in our constitution; that we cannot help conceiving as belonging to Things themselves, attributes with which they are only clothed by the laws of our sensitive and intellectual faculties.^[†] But he ^gdrew a marked distinction between an illusion and a delusion. He^g did not believe in a mystification practised on us by the Supreme Being, nor would he have admitted that God intended us permanently to mistake the conditions of our mental conceptions for properties of the things themselves. If God has provided us with the means of correcting an error, it is probable that he does not intend us to be misled by it: and in matters speculative as well as practical, it surely is more religious to see the purposes of God in the dictates of our deliberate reason, than in those of a “blind and powerful instinct of nature.”^[‡]

As regards almost all, however, if not all philosophers, it may truly be said, that the questions which have divided them have never turned on the veracity of consciousness. Consciousness, in the sense usually attached to it by philosophers,—consciousness of the mind’s own feelings and operations, cannot, as our author truly says, be disbelieved. The inward fact, the feeling in our own minds, was never doubted, since to do so would be to doubt that we feel what we feel. What our author calls the testimony of consciousness to something beyond itself, may be, and is, denied; but what is denied, has almost always been that consciousness gives the testimony; not that, if given, it must be believed.

At first sight it might seem as if there could not possibly be any doubt whether our consciousness does or does not affirm any given thing. Nor can there, if consciousness means, as it usually does, self-consciousness. If consciousness tells me that I have a certain thought or sensation, I assuredly have that thought or sensation. But if consciousness, as with Sir W. Hamilton, means a power which can tell me things that are not phænomena of my own mind, there is immediately the broadest divergence of opinion as to what are the things ^hto^h which consciousness testifies. There is nothing which people do not think and say that they know by consciousness, provided they do not remember any time when they did not know or believe it, and are not aware in what manner they came by the belief. For Consciousness, in this extended sense, is, as ⁱIⁱ have so often observed, but another word for Intuitive Knowledge: and whatever other things we may know in that manner, we certainly do not know by intuition what knowledge is intuitive. It is a subject on which both the vulgar and the ablest thinkers are constantly making mistakes. No one is better aware of this than Sir W. Hamilton. I transcribe a few of the many passages in which he has acknowledged it. “Errors” may arise by attributing to “intelligence as necessary and original data, what are only contingent generalizations from experience, and consequently, make no part of its complement of native truths.”^* And again: “Many philosophers have attempted to establish on the principles of common sense propositions which are not original data of consciousness; while the original data of consciousness, from which their propositions were derived, and to which they owed their whole necessity and truth—these data the same philosophers were (strange to say) not disposed to admit.”^† It fares still worse with the philosophers chargeable with this error, when Sir W. Hamilton comes into personal controversy with them. M. Cousin’s mode of proceeding, for example, he characterizes thus: “Assertion is substituted for proof; facts of consciousness are alleged, which consciousness never knew; and paradoxes that baffle argument, are promulgated as intuitive truths, above the necessity of confirmation.”^‡ M. Cousin’s particular misinterpretation of consciousness was, as we saw, that of supposing that each of its acts testifies to three things, of which three Sir W. Hamilton thinks that it testifies only to one. Besides the finite element, consisting of a Self and a Not-self, M. Cousin believes that there are directly revealed in Consciousness an Infinite (God) and a relation between this Infinite and the Finite.^[*] But it is not only M. Cousin who, in our author’s opinion, mistakes the testimony of consciousness. He brings the same charge against a thinker with whom he agrees much oftener than with M. Cousin; against Reid. That philosopher, as we have seen, is of opinion, contrary to Sir W. Hamilton, that we have an immediate knowledge of things past. This is to be conscious of them in Sir W. Hamilton’s sense of the word, though not in Reid’s. Finally, Sir W. Hamilton imputes a similar error, no longer to any particular metaphysician, but to the world at large. He says that we do not see the sun, but only a luminous image, in immediate contiguity to the eye, and that no two persons see the same sun, but every person a different one. Now it is assuredly the universal belief of mankind that all of them see the same sun, and that this is the very sun which rises and sets, and which is 95 (or according to more recent researches 92) millions of miles distant from the earth. Nor can any of the appeals of Reid and Sir W. Hamilton from the sophistries of metaphysicians to Common Sense and the universal sentiment of mankind, be more emphatic than that to which Sir W. Hamilton here lays himself open from Reid and from the non-metaphysical world.^*

We see, therefore, that it is not enough to say that something is testified by Consciousness, and refer all dissentients to Consciousness to prove it. Substitute for Consciousness the equivalent phrase (in our author’s acceptation at least) Intuitive Knowledge, and it is seen that this is not a thing which can be proved by mere introspection of ourselves. Introspection can show us a present belief or conviction, attended with a greater or a less difficulty in accommodating the thoughts to a different view of the subject: but that this belief, or conviction, or knowledge, if we call it so, is intuitive, no mere introspection can ever show; unless we are at liberty to assume that every mental process which is now as unhesitating and as rapid as intuition, was intuitive at its outset. Reid, in his commencements at least, often expressed himself as if he believed this to be the case: Sir W. Hamilton, wiser than Reid, knew better. With him (at least in his better moments) the question, what is and is not revealed by Consciousness, is a question for philosophers. “The first problem of philosophy” is “to seek out, purify, and establish, by intellectual analysis and criticism, the elementary feelings or beliefs, in which are given the elementary truths of which all are in possession:” this problem, he admits, is “of no easy accomplishment;” and the “argument from common sense” is thus

So far, good. But now, it being conceded that the question, what do we know intuitively, or, in Sir W. Hamilton’s phraseology, what does our consciousness testify, is not, as might be supposed, a matter of simple self-examination, but of science, it has still to be determined in what manner science should set about it. And here emerges the distinction between two different methods of studying the problems of metaphysics, forming the radical difference between the two great schools into which metaphysicians are fundamentally divided. One of these I shall call, for distinction, the introspective method; the other, the psychological.

The elaborate and acute criticism on the philosophy of Locke, which is perhaps the most striking portion of M. Cousin’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, sets out with a remark which sums up the characteristics of the two great schools of mental philosophy, by a summary description of their methods. M. Cousin observes, that Locke went wrong from the beginning, by placing before himself, as the question to be first resolved, the origin of our ideas.^[*] This was commencing at the wrong end. The proper course would have been to begin by determining what the ideas now are; to ascertain what it is that consciousness actually tells us, postponing till afterwards the attempt to frame a theory concerning the origin of any of the mental phænomena.

I accept the question as M. Cousin states it, and I contend, that no attempt to determine what are the direct revelations of consciousness, can be successful, or entitled to any regard, unless preceded by what M. Cousin says ought only to follow it, an inquiry into the origin of our acquired ideas. For we have it not in our power to ascertain, by any direct process, what Consciousness told us at the time when its revelations were in their pristine purity. It only offers itself to our inspection as it exists now, when those original revelations are overlaid and buried under a mountainous heap of acquired notions and perceptions.

It seems to M. Cousin that if we examine, with care and minuteness, our present states of consciousness, distinguishing and defining every ingredient which we find to enter into them—every element that we seem to recognise as real, and cannot, by merely concentrating our attention upon it, analyse into anything simpler—we reach the ultimate and primary truths, which are the sources of all our knowledge, and which cannot be denied or doubted without denying or doubting the evidence of consciousness itself, that is, the only evidence which there is for anything. I maintain this to be a misapprehension of the conditions imposed on inquirers by the difficulties of psychological investigation. To begin the inquiry at the point where M. Cousin takes it up, is in fact to beg the question. For he must be aware, if not of the fact, at least of the belief of his opponents, that the laws of the mind—the laws of association according to one class of thinkers, the Categories of the Understanding according to another—are capable of creating, out of those data of consciousness which are uncontested, purely mental conceptions, which become so identified in thought with all our states of consciousness, that we seem, and cannot but seem, to receive them by direct intuition; and, for example, the belief in Matter, in the opinion of some of these thinkers, is, or at least may be, thus produced. Idealists, and Sceptics, contend that the belief in Matter is not an original fact of consciousness, as our sensations are, and is therefore wanting in the requisite which, in M. Cousin’s and Sir W. Hamilton’s opinion, gives to our subjective convictions objective authority. Now, be these persons right or wrong, they cannot be refuted in the mode in which M. Cousin and Sir W. Hamilton attempt to do so—by appealing to Consciousness itself. For we have no means of interrogating consciousness in the only circumstances in which it is possible for it to give a trustworthy answer. Could we try the experiment of the first consciousness in any infant—its first reception of the impressions which we call external; whatever was present in that first consciousness would be the genuine testimony of Consciousness, and would be as much entitled to credit, indeed there would be as little possibility of discrediting it, as our sensations themselves. But we have no means of now ascertaining, by direct evidence, whether we were conscious of outward and extended objects when we first opened our eyes to the light. That a belief or knowledge of such objects is in our consciousness now, whenever we use our eyes or our muscles, is no reason for concluding that it was there from the beginning, until we have settled the question whether it could possibly have been brought in since. If any mode can be pointed out in which within the compass of possibility it might have been brought in, the hypothesis must be examined and disproved before we are entitled to conclude that the conviction is an original deliverance of consciousness. The proof that any of the alleged Universal Beliefs, or Principles of Common Sense, are affirmations of consciousness, supposes two things; that the beliefs exist, and that ^lthere are no means by which they could^l have been acquired. The first is in most cases undisputed, but the second is a subject of inquiry which often taxes the utmost resources of psychology. Locke was therefore right in believing that “the origin of our ideas” is the main stress of the problem of mental science, and the subject which must be first considered in forming the theory of the Mind.^[*] Being unable to examine the actual contents of our consciousness until our earliest, which are necessarily our most firmly knit associations, those which are most intimately interwoven with the original data of consciousness, are fully formed, we cannot study the original elements of mind in the facts of our present consciousness. Those original elements can only come to light as residual phænomena, by a previous study of the modes of generation of the mental facts which are confessedly not original; a study sufficiently thorough to enable us to apply its results to the convictions, beliefs, or supposed intuitions which seem to be original, and to determine whether some of them may not have been generated in the same modes, so early as to have become inseparable from our consciousness before the time ^mto which memory goes back^m . This mode of ascertaining the original elements of mind I callⁿ, for want of a better word,ⁿ the psychological, as distinguished from the simply introspective mode. It is the known and approved method of physical science, adapted to the necessities of psychology.^*

It might be supposed from incidental expressions of Sir W. Hamilton, that he was alive to the need of a methodical scientific investigation, to determine what portion of our “natural beliefs” are really original, and what are inferences, or acquired impressions, mistakenly deemed intuitive. To the declarations already quoted to this effect, the following may be added. Speaking of Descartes’ plan, of commencing philosophy by a reconsideration of all our fundamental opinions,^[*] he says, “There are among our prejudices, or pretended cognitions, a great many hasty conclusions, the investigation of which requires much profound thought, skill, and acquired knowledge. . . . To commence philosophy by such a review, it is necessary for a man to be a philosopher before he can attempt to become one.”^* And he elsewhere bestows high praise upon Aristotle for not falling “into the error of many modern philosophers, in confounding the natural and necessary with the habitual and acquired connexions of thought,” nor attempting “to evolve the conditions under which we think from the tendencies generated by thinking;”^† a praise which cannot be bestowed on our author himself. But, notwithstanding the ample concession which he appeared to make when he admitted that the problem was one of extreme difficulty, essentially scientific, and ought to be reserved for philosophers, I regret to say that he as completely sets at naught the only possible method of solving it, as M. Cousin himself. He even expresses his contempt for that method. Speaking of Extension, he says, “It is truly an idle problem to attempt imagining the steps by which we may be supposed to have acquired the notion of Extension, when, in fact, we are unable to imagine to ourselves the possibility of that notion not being always in our possession.”^‡ That things which we “are unable to imagine to ourselves the possibility of,” may be, and many of them must be, true, was a doctrine which we thought we had learnt from the author of the Philosophy of the Conditioned. That we cannot imagine a time at which we had no knowledge of Extension, is no evidence that there has not been such a time. There are mental laws, recognised by Sir W. Hamilton himself, which would inevitably cause such a state of things to become inconceivable to us, even if it once existed. There are artificial inconceivabilities equal in strength to any natural. Indeed it is questionable if there are any natural inconceivabilities, or if anything is inconceivable to us for any other reason than because Nature does not afford the combinations in experience which are necessary to make it conceivable.

I do not think that there can be found, in all Sir W. Hamilton’s writings, a single instance in which, before registering a belief as a part of our consciousness from the beginning, he thinks it necessary to ascertain that it ^ocannot^o have grown up subsequently. He demands, indeed, “that no fact be assumed as a fact of consciousness but what is ultimate and simple.” But to pronounce it ultimate, the only condition he requires is that we be not able to “reduce it to a generalization from experience.” This condition is realized by its possessing the “character of necessity.” “It must be impossible not to think it. In fact, by its necessity alone can we recognise it as an original datum of intelligence, and distinguish it from any mere result of generalization and custom.”^* In this Sir W. Hamilton is at one with the whole of his own section of the philosophical world; with Reid, with Stewart, with Cousin, with Whewell, ^pand we may add, with Kant^p .^† The test by which they all decide a belief to be a part of our primitive consciousness—an original intuition of the mind—is the necessity of thinking it. Their proof that we must always, from the beginning, have had the belief, is the impossibility of getting rid of it now. This argument, applied to any of the disputed questions of philosophy, is doubly illegitimate: neither the major nor the minor premise is admissible. For, in the first place, the very fact that the ^qquestions are^q disputed, disproves the alleged impossibility. Those against ^rwhose dissent^r it is needful to defend the belief which is affirmed to be necessary, are unmistakeable examples that it is not necessary. It may be a necessary belief to those who think it so; they may personally be quite incapable of not holding it. But even if this incapability extended to all mankind, it might be merely the effect of a strong association; like the impossibility of believing Antipodes; and it cannot be shown that even where the impossibility is, for the time, real, it might not, as in that case, be overcome. The history of science teems with inconceivabilities which have been conquered, and supposed necessary truths which have first ceased to be thought necessary, then to be thought true, and have finally come to be deemed impossible.^* These philosophers, therefore, and among them Sir W. Hamilton, mistake altogether the true conditions of psychological investigation, when, instead of proving a belief to be an original fact of consciousness by showing that it ^scannot, by any known means,^s have been acquired, they conclude that it was not acquired, for the reason, often false, and never sufficiently substantiated, that our consciousness cannot get rid of it now.

Since, then, Sir W. Hamilton not only neglects, but repudiates, the only scientific mode of ascertaining our original beliefs, what does he mean by treating the question as one of science, and in what manner does he apply science to it? Theoretically, he claims for science an exclusive jurisdiction over the whole domain, but practically he gives it nothing to do except to settle the relations of the supposed intuitive beliefs among themselves. It is the province of science, he thinks, to resolve some of these beliefs into others. He prescribes, as ^ta^t rule of judgment, what he calls “the Law of Parcimony.” No greater number of ultimate beliefs are to be postulated than is strictly indispensable. Where one such belief can be looked upon as a particular case of another—the belief in Matter, for instance, of the cognition of a Non-ego—the more special of the two necessities of thought merges in the more general one. This identification of two necessities of thought, and subsumption of one of them under the other, he is not wrong in regarding as a function of science. He affords an example of it, when, in a manner which we shall hereafter characterize, he denies to Causation the character, which philosophers of his school have commonly assigned to it, of an ultimate belief, and attempts to identify it with another and more general law of thought. This limited function is the only one which, it seems to me, is reserved for science in Sir W. Hamilton’s mode of studying the primary facts of consciousness. In the mode he practises of ascertaining them to be facts of consciousness, there is nothing for science to do. For, to call them so because in his opinion he himself, and those who agree with him, cannot get rid of the belief in them, does not seem exactly a scientific process.^* It is, however, characteristic of what I have called the introspective, in contradistinction to the psychological, method of metaphysical inquiry. The difference between these methods will now be exemplified by showing them at work on a particular question, the most fundamental one in philosophy, the distinction between the Ego and the Non-ego.

We shall first examine what Sir W. Hamilton has done by his method, and shall afterwards attempt to exemplify the use which can be made of the other.

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 271-5. [The references to Stewart are to Philosophical Essays (Edinburgh: Creech and Constable, 1810), pp. 3-11.]

[[*] ]Ibid., p. 276.

[[†] ]Ibid., p. 193.

[a-a]651, 652, 67 not having been in consciousness from the beginning

[* ]It is rather more speciously put in a foot-note on Reid: “To doubt that we are conscious of this or that, is impossible. For the doubt must at least postulate itself; but the doubt is only a datum of consciousness: therefore in postulating its own reality, it admits the truth of consciousness, and consequently annihilates itself.” (P. 231n.) In another foot-note he says, “In doubting the fact of his consciousness, the sceptic must at least affirm the fact of his doubt; but to affirm a doubt is to affirm the consciousness of it; the doubt would, therefore, be self-contradictory—i.e., annihilate itself.” (P. 442n.) And again: “As doubt is itself only a manifestation of consciousness, it is impossible to doubt that what consciousness manifests, it does manifest, without in thus doubting, doubting that we actually doubt; that is, without the doubt contradicting and therefore annihilating itself.” (“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note A,] p. 744.)

[[*] ]See, e.g., Plato, Apology, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo, Phædrus (Greek and English), trans. H. N. Fowler (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), p. 82 (21d).

[* ]In another passage of our author, the same argument reappears in different words, and for a different purpose. He is speaking of the Criterion of Truth. This criterion, he says, “is the necessity determined by the laws which govern our faculties of knowledge, and the consciousness of this necessity is certainty. That the necessity of a cognition, that is, the impossibility of thinking it other than as it is presented—that this necessity, as founded on the laws of thought, is the criterion of truth, is shown by the circumstance that where such necessity is found, all doubt in regard to the correspondence of the cognitive thought and its object must vanish; for to doubt whether what we necessarily think in a certain manner, actually exists as we conceive it, is nothing less than an endeavour to think the necessary as the not necessary or the impossible, which is contradictory.” (Lectures, Vol. IV, p. 69.)

It is very curious to find Sir W. Hamilton maintaining that our necessities of thought are proof of corresponding realities of existence—that things must actually be so and so because it is impossible for us to think them as being otherwise; forgetful of the whole “Philosophy of the Conditioned,” and the principle so often asserted by him, that things may, nay, must be true, of which it is impossible for us to conceive even the possibility. But we are here only concerned with his argument, and in that he forgets that to doubt is not a positive but a negative fact. It simply means, not to have any knowledge or assured belief on the subject. Now, how can it be asserted that this negative state of mind is “an endeavour to think” anything? And (even if it were) an endeavour to think a contradiction is not a contradiction. An endeavour to think what cannot be thought, far from being impossible, is the test by which we ascertain its unthinkability. The failure of the endeavour in the case supposed, would not prove that what we were endeavouring to think was unreal, but only that it was unthinkable; which was already assumed in the hypothesis: and our author has carried us round a long circuit, to return to the point from which we set out.

[[†] ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 275.

[[‡] ]Ibid., p. 277.

[[*] ]Cf. ibid., p. 272.

[b-b]+72

[* ][67] The philosophers who have most insisted on the necessity of a test for consciousness, have always found that test in consciousness itself. Hear Mr. Stirling, the latest of them, who in this respect represents them all: “It is the function of consciousness, though itself infallible, inviolable, and veracious as nothing else is or can be, to test and try and question consciousness to the uttermost” (p. 58).

[* ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note A,] p. 743.

[† ]Ibid., p. 745.

[c-c]+67, 72

[[*] ]Ibid., p. 743.

[* ]Ibid., p. 745.

[d-d]651, 652 is

[e-e]651, 652 The

[[†] ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 275.

[* ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note A,] p. 745.

[[*] ]See, e.g., Lectures, Vol. I, p. 294.

[† ]Accordingly Sir W. Hamilton says elsewhere: “Religious disbelief and philosophical scepticism are not merely not the same, but have no natural connexion.” I regret that this statement is followed by a declaration that the former “must ever be a matter” not merely “of regret,” but of “reprobation.” This imputation of moral blame to an opinion sincerely entertained and honestly arrived at, is a blot which one would willingly not have found in a thinker of so much ability, and in general of so high a moral tone. (Lectures, Vol. I, App. i, p. 394.)

[f-f]651, 652 fact

[[*] ]David Hume, “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy,” Section xii of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1793), Vol. II, p. 169.

[[†] ]See Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, pp. 238-50.

[g-g]+67, 72

[[‡] ]Hume, “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy,” p. 169.

[h-h]+67, 72

[i-i]651, 652 we

[* ]Lectures, Vol. IV, p. 137. There are writers of reputation in the present day, who maintain in unqualified terms, that we know by intuition the impossibility of miracles. “La négation du miracle,” says M. [Auguste] Nefftzer [“La Vie de Jésus par M. Ernest Renan,”] (Revue Germanique [et Française, XXVIII] for September 1863, p. 183), “n’est pas subordonnée à l’expérience; elle est une nécessité logique et un fait de certitude interne; elle doit être le premier article du credo de tout historien et de tout penseur.”

[† ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note A,] p. 749.

[‡ ]Discussions, p. 25.

[[*] ]Cf. pp. 34-7 above.

[* ]Reid himself places the “natural belief” which Sir W. Hamilton rejects, on exactly the level of those which he most strenuously maintains, saying in a passage which our author himself quotes, “The vulgar are firmly persuaded that the very identical objects which they perceive continue to exist when they do not perceive them: and are no less firmly persuaded that when ten men look at the sun or the moon, they all see the same individual object.” (On the Intellectual Powers, p. 284.) And Reid avows that he agrees with the vulgar in both opinions. But Sir W. Hamilton, while he upholds the former of these as one to deny which would be to declare our nature a lie, thinks that nothing can be more absurd than the latter of them. “Nothing,” he says, “can be conceived more ridiculous than the opinion of philosophers in regard to this. For example, it has been curiously held (and Reid is no exception) that in looking at the sun, moon, or any other object of sight, we are, on the one doctrine, actually conscious of these distant objects, or, on the other, that these distant objects are those really represented in the mind. Nothing can be more absurd: we perceive, through no sense, aught external but what is in immediate relation and in immediate contact with its organ. . . . Through the eye we perceive nothing but the rays of light in relation to, and in contact with, the retina.” (Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 129-30.)

The basis of the whole Ideal System, which it is thought to be the great merit of Reid to have exploded, was a natural prejudice, supposed to be intuitively evident, namely, that that which knows, must be of a similar nature jtoj that which is known by it. “This principle,” says our author, “has, perhaps, exerted a more extensive influence on speculation than any other. . . . It would be easy to show that the belief, explicit or implicit, that what knows and what is immediately known must be of an analogous nature, lies at the root of almost every theory of cognition, from the very earliest to the very latest speculations. . . . And yet it has not been proved, and is incapable of proof,—nay, is contradicted by the evidence of consciousness itself.” (Foot-note to Reid, p. 300n.)

But though Sir W. Hamilton manifests himself thus thoroughly aware how wide the differences of opinion may be and are respecting our intuitive perceptions, I by no means intend to deny that he on certain occasions affirms the contrary. In the fourth volume of the Lectures (p. 95), he says, “I have here limited the possibility of error to Probable Reasoning, for in Intuition and Demonstration, there is but little possibility of important error.” After a certain amount of reading of Sir W. Hamilton, one is used to these contradictions. What he here asserts to be so nearly impossible, that no account needs to be taken of it in a classification of Error, he is continually fighting against in detail, and imputing to nearly all philosophers. And when he says that the “revelation” of consciousness is “naturally clear,” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 266,) and only mistaken by philosophers because they resort to it solely for confirmation of their own opinions, he kmerely transportsk into psychology the dogmatism of theologians.

[* ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note A,] p. 752.

[[*] ]See Victor Cousin, Cours de philosophie. Histoire de la philosophie du dixhuitième siècle, 2 vols. (Brussels: Hauman, 1836), Vol. II, pp. 114 ff. (17e leçon).

[l-l]651, 652 they cannot possibly

[[*] ]See Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Works, Vol. I, pp. 82-98 (Bk. II, Chap. i).

[m-m]651, 652, 67 at which memory commences

[n-n]+67, 72

[* ][67] The “Inquirer” thinks he refutes the preceding paragraph when he says that Consciousness may not have given its full revelation in the infant, and that it would be “contrary to all analogy” to suppose “that consciousness alone, of all our natural properties, needs no development, no education.” (P. 52.) If this supposed improvement of consciousness by exercise be admitted, it goes even harder with the Introspective Method than I had maintained. I pointed out an experiment not realizable, but conceivable, which by ascertaining the contents of consciousness antecedently to any acquired experience, would authenticate as the original data of consciousness whatever that experiment revealed. But if consciousness does not tell its tale at once, but requires time and practice to tell it, and does not get it completed until there has been time for impressions originating in experience to be formed, then there is no period at which the Introspective Method, applied to the case, would yield a conclusive result: the natural and acquired testimonies of consciousness are inseparably blended at every stage, and to separate them by mere self-observation, and show that any particular item belongs to the one and not to the other, involves a double impossibility, instead of the single one I contended for.

[[*] ]See Descartes, Dissertatio de Methodo, in Opera Philosophica, 4th ed. (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1664), pp. 6 ff. (II).

[* ]Lectures, Vol. IV, p. 92.

[† ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note D**,] p. 894n.

[‡ ]Ibid., [Note D*,] p. 882.

[o-o]651, 652 could not

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 268-70.

[p-p]651, 652 we may add, with Kant, and even with Mr. Herbert Spencer [at the end of the text in 652 (cf. 504m) the following note (partly reproduced in 143n above) appears:] Addendum./Note to p. 150./After this page had passed through the press, there appeared in the fifth number of the Fortnightly Review, a paper by Mr. Herbert Spencer, discussing several of the philosophical questions which divide me from that powerful thinker, and especially the question whether inconceivability is a test of truth. As I have no special controversy with Mr. Spencer in the present work, some other occasion would be more suitable for an examination of his arguments; but since he expresses surprise at my having classed him with Sir W. Hamilton and others, as one of those whose test for deciding a belief to be an original intuition of the mind, is the necessity of thinking it, I deem it right that the same volume in which his opinion has been erroneously stated, should contain the correction. As I . . . as 72 . . . I had, in truth, confounded . . . as 72 . . . with that of the intuitive school, which . . . as 72 . . . refutation by substantially the same arguments.

[† ][67] In the first edition I added, “and even with Mr. Herbert Spencer:” but that powerful thinker, in his paper in the Fortnightly Review, disclaims the doctrine. [See “Mill versus Hamilton,” Fortnightly Review, I (15 July, 1865), 536-9.] As I now understand Mr. Spencer, he maintains that the impossibility of getting rid of a belief is a proof of its truth, and also of its being a primary, or ultimate, truth, but not of its being intuitive, since even our primary forms of thought are, in Mr. Spencer’s opinion, products of experience, either our own, or inherited by us from ancestors by the laws of the development of organization. I had confounded the two ideas, of a primary truth and an intuitive truth, which had never, as far as I know, been distinguished by any one except Mr. Spencer; and had, therefore, identified his theory with the ordinary doctrine of the intuitive philosophy; which I now see to be a misconception, though I think both theories open to refutation by the same arguments, and the difference between them not material to the test of truth, though highly important to psychology. [Cf. p-p below.]

I perceive also that I was mistaken, when, in an early chapter of this work (Chap. ii [p. 10]) I classed Mr. Spencer among the philosophers who hold, in its widest sense, the doctrine of the Relativity of human knowledge: for the external things which, he contends, we cannot help believing to be connected with all our sensations, are not, according to him, entirely uncognizable by us. [See ibid., pp. 546-8.] On the contrary, he believes that “the more or less coherent relations among” one’s “states of consciousness, are generated by experience of the more or less constant relations in something beyond his consciousness:” i.e., that for every proposition which we can truly assert about the similitudes, successions, and coexistences of our states of consciousness, there is a corresponding similitude, succession, or coexistence really obtaining among Noumena beyond our consciousness, and even that we can have “experience” of the same. (Ibid., p. 548.) This prodigious amount of knowledge respecting the “Unknowable” is only consistent with the doctrine of Relativity if we understand that doctrine in the very limited sense in which Sir W. Hamilton holds it. This abates nothing from the value of the psychological analyses due to Mr. Spencer, whose services to philosophy as an applier and defender of the “experience hypothesis” are beyond all price.

Mr. Spencer, in the same paper, adheres to his doctrine that the test of truth in the last resort is the inconceivability of its negation, and maintains that doctrine with his usual argumentative power. In one part of his argument, he seems to put a sense upon it which would leave little, if any, difference between his opinion and my own. He seems to say that the proposition, Things equal to the same thing are equal to one another, is known to be true by the inconceivability of its negation, in the same manner in which it might be said that two unequal lines placed side by side are known to be unequal by the inconceivability of their being equal, i.e., “I find it impossible, while contemplating the lines, to get rid of the consciousness” of their inequality. (Ibid., p. 539.) If the inconceivableness of the negative only means that I cannot resist the evidence of my senses for the affirmative, I have no objection to admit this as the test of any truth, even a geometrical axiom. I believe that my knowledge of the axiom is of exactly the same kind as my knowledge of the inequality of the two lines: I know it because I see it; and as I cannot have this positive intuition together with its negative, this may be called, if any one pleases, the inconceivability of the negative. But I do not therefore rest the belief that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another on an à priori incapacity of my mind to conceive them unequal. I believe that I am only unable to conceive them unequal because I have always seen them to be equal, and am renewing that experience at almost every instant of my life.

Mr. Spencer asks, If an axiom of mathematics is said to be known “only by induction from personal experiences,” “on what warrant are personal experiences asserted? The testimony of experience is given only through memory,” and the “trustworthiness of memory” is open to more doubt than the “immediate consciousness” of the mathematical truth. (Ibid., p. 549.) Instead, however, of immediate consciousness, let us call it immediate observation, which is a mode of consciousness, and the “personal experiences” which it yields become the most certain evidence which it is possible to have: not depending upon memory, but upon direct perception, which can be repeated at any moment; corroborated, however, by a vast mass of memories, both of our own and of other people, which by their number, ubiquity, and variety operate as a complete insurance against the possible error of memory in any single instance.

[q-q]651, 652 question is

[r-r]651, 652 whom

[* ][67] Mr. Mahaffy, after distinguishing, as I have done, between the two kinds of so-called inconceivables [see pp. 69ff. above], the Unimaginable and the simply Incredible, says, “There seems to be a definite distinction between them, not of degree, but of kind. We may safely defy Mr. Mill to point out a case where an unimaginable (inconceivable) was proved true, or even possible. And the reason is plain. The latter depends upon the form of the thinking or intuiting faculty; the former, merely upon empirical association.” (Pp. viii-ix.) In Mr. Mahaffy’s philosophical system the distinction passes for one of kind, but he must surely see that it admits of being construed as a difference only of degree. If an empirical association between two ideas, not so strong as to be altogether irresistible, makes it difficult to image in our own minds the corresponding facts as disjoined, it is but rational to believe that a stronger empirical association, produced by still more incessant repetition, will convert that difficulty into a conditional impossibility; an inability only to be overcome by contrary experience, which experience the conditions of our terrestrial existence may not permit. And if, as I have before observed, “a mental association between two facts, which is not intense enough to make their separation unimaginable, may yet create, and if there are no counter-associations, always does create, more or less of difficulty in believing that the two can exist apart; a difficulty often amounting to a local or temporary impossibility;” [p. 75 above] an association which is so intense as to make the separation unimaginable, may surely create an impossibility of belief, not local or temporary, but as durable as the experience which gave rise to the association.

Mr. Spencer, who is almost willing to rest the claims of inconceivability as a test of truth on its expressing “the net result of our experience up to the present time,” has given an excellent exposition of this point. [“Mill versus Hamilton,” p. 536.] He sees clearly that the difference between the two kinds of inconceivable is only one of degree—the degree of strength of the cohesion between the two ideas. The proposition “the ice was hot” he justly classes as not unimaginable, but merely unbelievable; the unbelievableness, however, arising from a difficulty, though not amounting to an impossibility, of combining the two ideas in a representation. “The elements of the proposition cannot be put together in thought without great resistance. Between those other states of consciousness which the word ice connotes, and the state of consciousness named cold, there is an extremely strong cohesion—a cohesion measured by the resistance to be overcome in thinking of the ice as hot.” (Ibid., p. 543.) The merely unbelievable is thus distinguished from Mr. Mahaffy’s unimaginable, not by a generic difference, but by a minor degree of unimaginability. And the seeming incredibility is strictly proportioned to the degree of difficulty in combining the two thoughts in one representation.

With regard to Mr. Mahaffy’s assertion, that nothing unimaginable has ever been “proved true, or even possible;” the point would have been more effectually maintained if he could have said “nothing which seemed unimaginable;” for whatever has been “proved true” or even “possible” has thereby become imaginable. People had much difficulty, and most people have some difficulty still, in representing to themselves sunrise as a motion not of the sun but of the earth; but no one has called this notion of sunrise either inconceivable or unimaginable after knowing it to be the true notion. Let us first, then, state the question correctly: Has anything which seemed unimaginable been proved true, or possible? It is hardly practicable to give such an answer to this question as will silence the retort, that what was called unimaginable was really no more than incredible; for since unimaginableness, as I have said, exists in numerous degrees, graduating from a slight difficulty to at least a temporary impossibility, there is no definite line of demarcation between the absolutely unimaginable (if there be such a thing) and the totally incredible, nor even between what is unimaginable by a given person, and what is merely incredible to him. Most of the questions which lie on that border land are still disputed. For example: is a creation a nihilo, or Matter capable of thinking, unimaginable, or only incredible? Both the one and the other are habitually ranked among the most unimaginable of all things. Yet the one is firmly believed by all Materialists, and the other by all Christians. Every Materialist, therefore, and every Christian, may be called as a witness that things which are unimaginable are not only possible but true. To take another instance—an event without a cause. Is that unimaginable, or only incredible? All who regard the category of Cause and Effect as a necessity of thought, including Sir W. Hamilton, and Mr. Mahaffy himself [pp. iii-xvi], maintain it to be unimaginable. Yet most of these believe it to be both possible and true in the case of human freewill. Not only therefore what to one man seems unimaginable, another believes to be true, but the same man believes to be true what to himself seems unimaginable: witness the whole Philosophy of the Conditioned.

Dr. M‘Cosh thinks that antipodes were unbelievable, not in consequence of an association, but because “the alleged fact seemed contrary to a law of nature established by observation. A gathered experience seemed to show that there was an absolute up and down, and that heavy bodies tended downwards.” ([Examination,] p. 240.) Of course it was the apparent experience that generated the association. But if there had been no more in the matter than an intellectual conviction, the conviction would have given way as soon as any one made the remark that the experience was confined to a region in which the direction of down coincided with direction towards the earth. It is because our intellectual convictions generate temporarily inseparable associations, that they give way so slowly before evidence.

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[* ][67] The “Inquirer” thinks that Sir W. Hamilton demanded, as evidence that a supposed fact of consciousness is not acquired, but original, not only that it should not be reducible to a generalization from experience, but that it should lie “at the root of all experience;” which the “Inquirer” understands to mean “that no experience is possible unless this belief, this mode of thought, is already present with us.” (P. 54.) If Sir W. Hamilton meant this, he took no pains to show that he meant it. The authority quoted is a passing expression: “Whenever in an analysis of the intellectual phenomenon, we arrive at an element which we cannot reduce to a generalization from experience, but which lies at the root of all experience, and which we cannot, therefore, resolve into any higher principle, this we properly call a fact of consciousness.” (Lectures, Vol. I, p. 270.) The idea of the words in italics is no further developed; it is omitted from the definition in the next page, “A fact of consciousness is thus, that whose existence is given and guaranteed by an original and necessary belief” (unless the idea is supposed to be implied in the word “original”); and Sir W. Hamilton never, as far as I am aware, recurs to it in his attempts to prove the originality of a belief. This is the more remarkable, because Kant makes a continual and obtrusive use of this criterion; we are always hearing from him that this or that mental element cannot be the product of experience, because its pre-existence is required to render experience possible; which goes far to show that Sir W. Hamilton’s abstinence was intentional, and grounded on a sense of the extreme difficulty of proving, in any of the disputed cases, what Kant so confidently affirms. It is not unusual with Sir W. Hamilton to adopt, from other philosophers, single expressions of which the full meaning forms no part of his own mode of thought.

[* ]Reid himself places the “natural belief” which Sir W. Hamilton rejects, on exactly the level of those which he most strenuously maintains, saying in a passage which our author himself quotes, “The vulgar are firmly persuaded that the very identical objects which they perceive continue to exist when they do not perceive them: and are no less firmly persuaded that when ten men look at the sun or the moon, they all see the same individual object.” (On the Intellectual Powers, p. 284.) And Reid avows that he agrees with the vulgar in both opinions. But Sir W. Hamilton, while he upholds the former of these as one to deny which would be to declare our nature a lie, thinks that nothing can be more absurd than the latter of them. “Nothing,” he says, “can be conceived more ridiculous than the opinion of philosophers in regard to this. For example, it has been curiously held (and Reid is no exception) that in looking at the sun, moon, or any other object of sight, we are, on the one doctrine, actually conscious of these distant objects, or, on the other, that these distant objects are those really represented in the mind. Nothing can be more absurd: we perceive, through no sense, aught external but what is in immediate relation and in immediate contact with its organ. . . . Through the eye we perceive nothing but the rays of light in relation to, and in contact with, the retina.” (Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 129-30.)

The basis of the whole Ideal System, which it is thought to be the great merit of Reid to have exploded, was a natural prejudice, supposed to be intuitively evident, namely, that that which knows, must be of a similar nature jtoj that which is known by it. “This principle,” says our author, “has, perhaps, exerted a more extensive influence on speculation than any other. . . . It would be easy to show that the belief, explicit or implicit, that what knows and what is immediately known must be of an analogous nature, lies at the root of almost every theory of cognition, from the very earliest to the very latest speculations. . . . And yet it has not been proved, and is incapable of proof,—nay, is contradicted by the evidence of consciousness itself.” (Foot-note to Reid, p. 300n.)

But though Sir W. Hamilton manifests himself thus thoroughly aware how wide the differences of opinion may be and are respecting our intuitive perceptions, I by no means intend to deny that he on certain occasions affirms the contrary. In the fourth volume of the Lectures (p. 95), he says, “I have here limited the possibility of error to Probable Reasoning, for in Intuition and Demonstration, there is but little possibility of important error.” After a certain amount of reading of Sir W. Hamilton, one is used to these contradictions. What he here asserts to be so nearly impossible, that no account needs to be taken of it in a classification of Error, he is continually fighting against in detail, and imputing to nearly all philosophers. And when he says that the “revelation” of consciousness is “naturally clear,” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 266,) and only mistaken by philosophers because they resort to it solely for confirmation of their own opinions, he kmerely transportsk into psychology the dogmatism of theologians.

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