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 X

Sir William Hamilton’s View of the Different Theories Respecting the Belief in an External World

sir w. hamilton brings a very serious charge against the great majority of philosophers. He accuses them of playing fast and loose with the testimony of consciousness; rejecting it when it is inconvenient, but appealing to it as conclusive when they have need of it to establish any of their opinions. “No philosopher has ever openly thrown off allegiance to the authority of consciousness.”^* No one denies “that as all philosophy is evolved from consciousness, so, on the truth of consciousness, the possibility of all philosophy is dependent.”^† But if any testimony of consciousness be supposed false,

That nearly all philosophers have merited this imputation, our author endeavours to show by a classified enumeration of the various theories which they have maintained respecting the perception of material objects. No instance can be better suited for trying the dispute. The question of an external world is the great battle-ground of metaphysics, not so much from its importance in itself, as because while it relates to the most familiar of all our mental acts, it forcibly illustrates the characteristic differences between the two metaphysical methods.

“We are immediately conscious in perception,” says Sir W. Hamilton,

Or rather (he should have said) such is the answer we receive, when we examine and interrogate our present consciousness. To assert more than this, merely on this evidence, is to beg the question instead of solving it.

This is, of course, the author’s own doctrine.

(But it is very far from impossible to believe that something which we now confound with consciousness, may have been altogether foreign to consciousness ^awhen this was unmingled with acquired impressions^a .)

The Realists, or Substantialists, those who do believe in a substratum, but reject the testimony of consciousness to an immediate cognizance of an Ego and a Non-ego, our author divides into two classes, according as they admit the real existence of two substrata, or only of one. These last, whom he denominates Unitarians or Monists, either acknowledge the ego alone, or the non-ego alone, or regard the two as identical. Those who admit the ego alone, looking upon the non-ego as a product evolved from it (i.e. as something purely mental) are the Idealists. Those who admit the non-ego alone, and regard the ego as evolved from it (i.e. as purely material) are the Materialists. The third class acknowledge the equipoise of the two, but deny their antithesis, maintaining “that mind and matter are only phænomenal modifications of the same common substance. This is the doctrine of Absolute Identity, a doctrine of which the most illustrious representatives among recent philosophers are Schelling, Hegel, and Cousin.”^*

There remain those who admit the coequal reality of the Ego and the Non-ego, of mind and matter, and also their distinctness from one another, but deny that they are known immediately. These are Dualists, but

In our own country the best known and typical specimen of this mode of thinking, is Brown; and it is upon him that our author discharges most of the shafts which this class of thinkers, as being the least distant from him of all his opponents, copiously receive from him.^*

With regard to the various opinions thus enumerated, I shall first make a remark of general application, and shall then advert particularly to the objects of Sir W. Hamilton’s more especial animadversion, the Cosmothetic Idealists.

Concerning all these classes of thinkers, except the Natural Realists, Sir W. Hamilton’s statement is, that they deny some part of the testimony of consciousness, and by so doing invalidate the appeals which they nevertheless make to consciousness, as a voucher for their own doctrines. If he had said that they all run counter, in some particular, to the general sentiment of mankind—that they all deny some common opinion, some natural belief (meaning by natural, not one which rests on a necessity of our nature, but merely one which, in common with innumerable varieties of false opinion, mankind have a strong tendency to adopt); had he said only this, no one could have contested its truth; but it would not have been a reductio ad absurdum of his opponents. For all philosophers, Sir W. Hamilton as much as the rest, deny some common opinions, which others might call natural beliefs, but which those who deny them consider, and have a right to consider, as natural prejudices; held, nevertheless, by the generality of mankind in the persuasion of their being self-evident, or, in other words, intuitive, and deliverances of consciousness. Some of the points on which Sir W. Hamilton is at issue with natural beliefs, relate to the very subject in hand—the perception of external things. We have found him maintaining that we do not see the sun, but an image of it, and that no two persons see the same sun; in contradiction to as clear a case as could be given of natural belief. And we shall find him affirming, in opposition to an equally strong natural belief, that we immediately perceive extension only in our own organs, and not in the objects we see or touch. Beliefs, therefore, which seem among the most natural that can be entertained, are sometimes, in his opinion, delusive; and he has told us that to discriminate which these are, is not within the competence of everybody, but only of philosophers. He would say, of course, that the beliefs which he rejects were not in our consciousness originally. And nearly all his opponents say the same thing of those which they reject. Those, indeed, who, like Kant, believe that there are elements present, even at the first moment of internal consciousness, which do not exist in the object, but are derived from the mind’s own laws, are fairly open to Sir W. Hamilton’s criticism. It is not my business to justify, in point of consistency, any more than of conclusiveness, the^b reasoning, by which Kant, after getting rid of the outward reality of all the attributes of Body, persuades himself that he demonstrates the externality of Body itself.^* But, as regards all existing schools of thought not descended from Kant, Sir W. Hamilton’s accusation is without ground.

There is something more to be said respecting the mixed multitude of metaphysicians whom our author groups together under the title of Cosmothetic Idealists, and whose mode of thought he judges more harshly than that of any other school. He represents them as holding the doctrine that we perceive external objects, not by an immediate, but by a mediate or representative perception. And he recognises three divisions of them, according to three different forms in which this hypothesis may be entertained.^† The supposed representative object may be regarded, first, as not a state of mind, but something else; either external to the mind, like the species sensibiles of some of the ancients, and the “motions of the brain” of some of the early moderns;^[*] or in the mind, like the Ideas of Berkeley. Secondly, it may be regarded as a state of mind, but a state different from the mind’s act in perceiving or being conscious of it: of this kind, perhaps, are the Ideas of Locke. Or, thirdly, as a state of mind identical with the act by which we are said to perceive it. This last is the form in which, as Sir W. Hamilton truly says, the doctrine was held by Brown.^*

Now, the first two of these three opinions may fairly be called what our author calls them—theories of mediate or representative perception. The object which, in these theories, the mind is supposed directly to perceive, is a tertium quid, which by the one theory is, and by the other is not, a state or modification of mind, but in both is distinct equally from the act of perception, and from the external object: and the mind is cognizant of the external object vicariously, through this third thing, of which alone it has immediate cognizance—of which alone, therefore, it is, in Sir W. Hamilton’s sense of the word, conscious. Against both these theories Reid, Stewart, and our author, are completely triumphant, and I am in no way interested in pressing for a rehearing of the cause.

But the third opinion, which is Brown’s, cannot with any justness of thought or propriety of language be called a theory of mediate or representative perception. Had Sir W. Hamilton taken half the pains to understand Brown which he took to understand far inferior thinkers, he never would have described Brown’s doctrine in terms so inappropriate.

Representative knowledge is always understood by our author to be knowledge of a thing by means of an image of it; by means of something which is like the thing itself. “Representative knowledge,” he says, “is only deserving of the name of knowledge in so far as it is conformable with the intuitions which it represents.”^† The representation must stand in a relation to what it represents, like that of a picture to its original: as the representation in memory of a past impression of sense, does to that past impression; as a representation in imagination does to a supposed possible presentation of sense; and as the Ideas of the earlier Cosmothetic Idealists were supposed to do to the outward objects of which they were the image or impress. But the Mental Modifications of Brown and those who think with him, are not supposed to bear any resemblance to the objects which excite them.^[†] These objects are supposed to be unknown to us, except as the causes of the mental modifications. The only relation between the two is that of cause and effect. Brown, being free from the vulgar error^d that a cause must be like its effect, and admitting no knowledge of the cause (beyond its bare existence) except the effect itself, naturally found nothing in it which it was possible to compare with the effect, or in virtue of which any resemblance could be affirmed to exist between the two. In another place, Sir W. Hamilton makes an ostensible distinction between the fact of resembling, and that of truly representing, the objects; but defines the last expression to mean, affording us “such a knowledge of their nature as we should have were an immediate intuition of the reality in itself competent to man.”^* No one who is at all acquainted with Brown’s opinions will pretend him to have maintained that we have anything of this sort. He did not believe that the mental modification afforded us any knowledge whatever of the nature of the external object. There is no need to quote passages in proof of this; it is a fact patent to whoever reads his Lectures.^[*] It is the more strange that Sir W. Hamilton should have failed to recognise this opinion of Brown, because it is exactly the opinion which he himself holds respecting our knowledge of objects in respect of their Secondary Qualities. These, he says, are “in their own nature occult and inconceivable,” and are known only in their effects on us, that is, by the mental modifications which they produce.^†

Further, Brown’s is not only not a theory of representative perception, but it is not even a theory of mediate perception. He assumes no tertium quid, no object of thought intermediate between the mind and the outward object. He recognises only the perceptive act; which with him means, and is always declared to mean, the mind itself perceiving. It will hardly be pretended that the mind itself is the “representative object” interposed by him between itself and the outward thing which is acting upon it; and if it is not, there certainly is no other. But if Brown’s theory is not a theory of mediate perception, it loses all that essentially distinguishes it from Sir W. Hamilton’s own doctrine. For Brown, also, thinks that we have, on the occasion of certain sensations, an instantaneous and irresistible conviction of an outward object. And if this conviction is immediate, and necessitated by the constitution of our nature, in what does it differ from our author’s direct consciousness? Consciousness, immediate knowledge, and intuitive knowledge, are, Sir W. Hamilton tells us, convertible expressions; and if it be granted that whenever our senses are affected by a material object, we immediately and intuitively recognise that object as existing and distinct from us, it requires a great deal of ingenuity to make out any substantial difference between this immediate intuition of an external world, and Sir W. Hamilton’s direct perception of it.

The distinction which our author makes, resolves itself, as explained by him, into the difference of which he has said so much, but of which he seemed to have so confused an idea, between Belief and Knowledge. In Brown’s opinion,^[*] and I will add, in Reid’s, the mental modification which we experience from the presence of an object, raises in us an irresistible belief that the object exists. No, says Sir W. Hamilton: it is not a belief, but a knowledge: we have indeed a belief, and our knowledge is certified by the belief; but this belief of ours regarding the object is a belief that we know it.

Accordingly, Brown is rebuked because, while rejecting our natural belief that we know the external object, he yet accepts our natural belief that it exists as a sufficient warrant for its existence. But what real distinction is there between Brown’s intuitive belief of the existence of the object, and Sir W. Hamilton’s intuitive knowledge of it? Just three pages previous, Sir W. Hamilton had said, “Our knowledge rests ultimately on certain facts of consciousness, which as primitive, and consequently incomprehensible, are given less in the form of cognitions than of beliefs.”^† The consciousness of an external world is, on his own showing, primitive and incomprehensible; it therefore is less a cognition than a belief. But if we do not so much know as believe an external world, what is meant by saying that we believe that we know it? Either we do not know, but only believe it, and if so, Brown and the other philosophers assailed were right; or knowledge and belief, in the case of ultimate facts, are identical, and then, believing that we know is only believing that we believe, which according to our author’s and to all rational principles, is but another word for simple believing.

It would not be fair, however, to hold our author to his own confused use of the terms Belief and Knowledge. He never succeeds in making anything like an intelligible distinction between these two notions considered generally, but in particular cases we may be able to find something which he is attempting to express by them. In the present case his meaning seems to be, that Brown’s Belief in an external object, though instantaneous and irresistible, was supposed to be suggested to the mind by its own sensation; ^ewhich suggestion Brown regarded as a case of a more general law,^[*] whereby every fact suggests the intuitive belief of a cause or antecedent with which it is invariably connected:^e while Sir W. Hamilton’s Knowledge of the object is supposed to arise along with the sensation, and to be co-ordinate with it. And this is what Sir W. Hamilton means by calling Brown’s a mediate, his own an immediate cognition of the object: the real difference being that, on Sir W. Hamilton’s theory, the cognition of the ego or ^fof^f its modification, and that of the non-ego, are simultaneous, while on Brown’s the one immediately precedes the other. Our author expresses this meaning, though much less clearly, when he declares Brown’s theory to be “that in perception, the external reality is not the immediate object of consciousness, but that the ego is only determined in some unknown manner to represent the non-ego, which representation, though only a modification of mind or self, we are compelled by an illusion of our nature, to mistake for a modification of matter, or non-self.”^* This being our author’s conception of the doctrine which he has to refute, let us see in what manner he proceeds to refute it.

“You will remark,” he says,

To this argument (of the worth of which something has been said already) I shall return presently. But he subjoins a second.

And further on:

Let me first remark that this reasoning assumes the whole point in dispute; it presupposes that the supposition which it is brought to disprove is impossible. The theory of the third form of Cosmothetic Idealism is, that though we are conscious only of the sensations which an object gives us, we are determined by a necessity of our nature, which some call an instinct, others an intuition, others a fundamental law of belief, to ascribe these sensations to something external, as their substratum, or as their cause. There is surely nothing à priori impossible in this supposition. The supposed instinct or intuition seems to be of the same family with many other Laws of Thought, or Natural Beliefs, which our author not only admits without scruple, but enjoins obedience to, under the usual sanction, that otherwise our intelligence must be a lie. In the present case, however, he, without the smallest warrant, excludes this from the list of possible hypotheses. He says that we cannot infer a reality from a mental representation, unless we already know the reality independently of the mental representation. Now he could hardly help being aware that this is the very matter in dispute. Those who hold the opinion he argues against, do not admit the premise upon which he argues. They say that we may be, and are, necessitated to infer a cause, of which we know nothing whatever except its effect. And why not? Sir W. Hamilton thinks us entitled to infer a substance from attributes, though he allows that we know nothing of the substance except its attributes.

But this is not the worst, and there are few specimens of our author in which his deficiencies as a philosopher stand out in a stronger light. As Burke in politics, so Sir W. Hamilton in metaphysics, was too often a polemic rather than a connected thinker: the generalizations of both, often extremely valuable, seem less the matured convictions of a scientific mind, than weapons snatched up for the service of a particular quarrel. If Sir W. Hamilton can only seize upon something which will strike a hard blow at an opponent, he seldom troubles himself how much of his own edifice may be knocked down by the shock. Had he examined the argument he here uses, sufficiently to determine whether he could stand by it as a deliberate opinion, he would have perceived that it committed him to the doctrine that there is no such thing as representative knowledge. But it is one of Sir W. Hamilton’s most positive tenets that there is representative knowledge, and that Memory, among other things, is an example of it. Let us turn back to his discussion of that subject, and see what he, at that time, considered representative knowledge to be.

Had Sir W. Hamilton totally forgotten all this, when a few lectures afterwards, having then in front of him a set of antagonists who needed the theory here laid down, he repudiated it—denying altogether the possibility of the mental state so truly and clearly expressed in this passage, and affirming that we cannot possibly recognise a mental modification to be representative of something else, unless we have a present knowledge of that something else, otherwise obtained?^[*] With merely the alteration of putting instead of a past state of mind, a present external object, the Cosmothetic Idealists might borrow his language down to the minutest detail. They, too, believe that the mental modification is a present state of mind, which we are conscious of, not as absolute, but as relative to, and representing, “an external object, and accompanied with the belief that the object as now represented, actually” is: that we know something (viz. matter) only “as represented in the present mental modification,” and that “its existence is only an inference, resting on the belief that the mental modification truly represents what is in itself beyond the sphere of knowledge.” They do not, strictly speaking, require quite so much as this: for the word “represents,” especially with “truly” joined to it, suggests the idea of a resemblance, such as does, in reality, exist between the picture of a fact in memory, and the present impression to which it corresponds; but the Cosmothetic Idealists only maintain that the mental modification arises from something, and that the reality of this unknown something is testified by a natural belief. That they apply to one case the same theory which our author applies to another, does not, of course, prove them to be right; but it proves the suicidal character (to use one of his favourite expressions)^[†] of our author’s argument, when he scouts the supposition of an instinctive inference from a known effect to an unknown cause, as an hypothesis which can in no possible case be legitimate; forgetful that its legitimacy is required by his own psychology, one of the leading doctrines of which is entirely grounded on it.

It is not only in treating of Memory, that Sir W. Hamilton requires a process of thought precisely similar to that which, when employed by opponents, he declares to be radically illegitimate. I have already mentioned^[*] that in his opinion our perceptions of sight are not perceptions of the outward object, but of its image, a “modification of light in immediate relation to our organ of vision,” and that no two persons see the same sun; propositions in direct conflict with the “natural beliefs” to which he so often refers, and to which Reid, not without reason, appeals in this instance;^[†] for assuredly people in general are as firmly convinced that what they see is the real sun, as that what they touch is the real table. Let us hear Sir W. Hamilton once more on this subject.

Here is a case in which we know something to be a representation, though, in our author’s opinion, that which it represents not only is not, at the present time, known to us, but never was, and never will be so. The Cosmothetic Idealists desire only the same liberty which Sir W. Hamilton here exercises, of concluding from a phænomenon directly known, to something unknown which is the cause of the phænomenon. They postulate the possibility that what our author holds to be true of the non-ego at a distance, may be true of the non-ego at the point of sense, namely, that it is not known immediately, but as a necessary inference from what is known. To shut the door upon this supposition as inherently inadmissible, and make an exactly similar one ourselves as often as our system requires it, does not befit a philosopher, or a critic of philosophers.^†

In the controversy with Brown, which forms the second paper in the Discussions,^[*] and much of which ^his reproduced verbatim in^h our author’s Lectures,^[†] the argument which I have now examined does not ⁱappear.ⁱ In the room of it, we have the following argument. If Brown is right, “the mind either knows the reality of what it represents, or it does not.” The first supposition is dismissed for the absurdities it involves, and because it is inconsistent with Brown’s doctrine. But if the mind does not know the reality of what it represents, the “alternative remains, that the mind is blindly determined to represent, and truly to represent, the reality which it does not know.” And if so, the mind “either blindly determines itself” or “is blindly determined” by a supernatural power. The latter supposition he rejects because it involves a standing miracle; the former as “utterly irrational, inasmuch as it would explain an effect, by a cause wholly inadequate to its production. On this alternative, knowledge is supposed to be the effect of ignorance,—intelligence of stupidity—life of death.”^* All this artillery is directed against the simple supposition that by a law of our nature, a modification of our own minds may assure us of the existence of an unknown cause. The author’s persistent ignorance of Brown’s opinion is^j surprising. Brown knows nothing of the mental modification as truly representing the unknown reality; he claims no knowledge as arising out of ignorance, no intelligence growing out of stupidity. He claims only an instinctive belief implanted by nature; and the menacing alternative, that the mind must either determine itself to this belief, or be determined to it by a special interference of Providence, could be applied with exactly as much justice to the earth’s motion. But though Sir W. Hamilton’s weapon falls harmless upon Brown, it recoils with terrible effect upon his own theories of representative cognition. A remembrance, for example, does represent, and truly represent, the past fact remembered: and we do, through that representation, mediately know the past fact, which in any other sense of the word, according to our author, we do not know. Although therefore the conclusion “that the mind is blindly determined to represent, and truly to represent, the reality which it does not know,” is not obligatory upon Brown, it is upon Sir W. Hamilton. On his own showing he has to choose between the absurdity that the mind “blindly determines itself,” and the perpetual miracle of its being determined by divine interference. This is one of the weakest exhibitions of Sir W. Hamilton that I have met with in his writings. For the difficulty by which he thought to overwhelm Brown, and which does not touch Brown, but falls back upon himself, is no difficulty at all, but the merest moonshine. The transcendent absurdity, as he considers it, that the mind should be blindly determined to represent, and truly to represent, the reality which “it does not know,” instead of an absurdity, is the exact expression of a fact. It is a literal description of what takes place in an act of memory. As often as we recollect a past event, and on the faith of that recollection, believe or know that the event really happened, the mind, by its constitution, is “blindly determined to represent, and truly to represent” a fact which, except as witnessed by that representation, “it does not know.”^†

It may generally, I think, be observed of Sir W. Hamilton, that his most recherché arguments are his weakest: they certainly are so in the present case. It would have been wiser in him to have been contented with his first and simpler argument, that Brown’s doctrine conflicts with consciousness, inasmuch as “we are conscious of no reference, of no representation:”^[*] or, to speak more clearly, we are not aware that the existence of an external reality is suggested to us by our sensations. We seem to become aware of both at once.

The fact is as alleged, but it proves nothing, being consistent with Brown’s doctrine. Whether the belief in a non-ego arose in our first act of perception, simultaneously with the sensation, or not until suggested by the sensation, we have, as I before remarked, no means of directly ascertaining.^[†] As far as depends on direct evidence, the subject is inscrutable. But this we may know, that even if the suggestion theory were true, the belief suggested would by the laws of association become so intimately blended with the sensation suggesting it, that long before we were able to reflect on our mental operations, we should have become entirely incapable of thinking of the two things as other than simultaneous. An appeal to consciousness avails nothing, when, even though the doctrine opposed were true, the appeal might equally, and with the same plausibility, be made. The facts are alike consistent with both opinions, and, for aught that appears, Brown’s is as likely to be true as Sir W. Hamilton’s. The difference between them, as already observed, is extremely small, and I will add, supremely unimportant. If the reality of matter is certified to us by an irresistible belief, it matters little whether we reach the belief by two steps, or by only one.

The really important difference of opinion on the subject of Perception, between Brown and Sir W. Hamilton, is far other than this. It is, that Sir W. Hamilton believes us to have a direct intuition not solely of the reality of matter, but also of its primary qualities, Extension, Solidity, Figure, &c., which, according to him, we know as in the material object, and not as modifications of ourselves: while Brown believed that matter is suggested to us only as an unknown something, all whose attributes, as known or conceived by us, are resolvable into affections of our senses. In Brown’s opinion we are cognizant of a non-ego in the perceptive act, only in the indefinite form of something external; all else we are able to know of it is only that it produces certain affections in us: which is also our author’s opinion as regards the Secondary Qualities. The difference therefore, between Brown and Sir W. Hamilton, is not of the kind which Sir W. Hamilton considers it to be, but consists mainly in this, that Brown really held what Sir W. Hamilton held only verbally, the doctrine of the Relativity ofⁿ our knowledge. I shall attempt, further on, to show that on the point on which they really differed, Brown was right, and Sir W. Hamilton totally wrong.^*

The considerations which have now been adduced are subversive of a great mass of triumphant animadversion by our author on the ignorance and carelessness of Brown, and some milder criticism on Reid. Sir W. Hamilton thinks it astonishing that neither of these philosophers should have recognised Natural Realism, and the third form of Cosmothetic Idealism, as two different modes of thought. Reid, whom he makes a great point of claiming as a Natural Realist, was, he says, quite unaware of the possibility of the other opinion, and did not guard against it by his language, leaving it, therefore, open to dispute whether, instead of being a Natural Realist, he was not, like Brown, a Cosmothetic Idealist of the third class; while Brown, on the other hand, never conceived Natural Realism, nor thought it possible that Reid held any other than his own opinion, as he invariably affirms him to have done.^[*] I apprehend that both philosophers are entirely clear of the blame thus imputed to them. Reid never imagined Brown’s doctrine, nor Brown Reid’s, as anything different from his own, because in truth they were not different. If the distinction between a Natural Realist and a Cosmothetic Idealist of the third class, be that the latter believes the existence of the external object to be inferred from, or suggested by, our sensations, while the former holds it to be neither the one nor the other, but to be apprehended in consciousness simultaneously and co-ordinately with the sensations, Reid was as much a Cosmothetic Idealist as Brown^p . The question does not concern philosophy, but the history of philosophy, which is Sir W. Hamilton’s strongest point, and was not at all a strong point with either Brown or Reid; but the matter of fact is worth the few pages necessary for clearing it up, because Sir W. Hamilton’s vast and accurate learning goes near to obtaining for his statements, on any such matter, implicit confidence, and it is therefore important to show that even where he is strongest, he is sometimes wrong.

In the severe criticism on Brown from which I have quoted, and which, though in some respects unjust, in others I cannot deny to be well merited, some of the strongest expressions have reference to the gross misunderstanding of Reid, of which Brown is alleged to have been guilty in not perceiving him to have been a Natural Realist. “We proceed,” says our author,

And he did, in time, feel some misgiving as to his “own perspicacity.” When, in preparing an edition of Reid, he was obliged to look more closely into that author’s statements, we find a remarkable lowering of the high tone of these sentences; and he felt obliged, in revising the paper for the Discussions, to write “This is too strong,” after a passage in which he had said that “Brown’s interpretation of the fundamental tenet of Reid’s philosophy is not a simple misconception, but an absolute reversal of its real and even unambiguous import.”^† Well would it have been for Brown’s reputation if all Sir W. Hamilton’s attempts to bring home blunders to him, had been as little successful as this.

In the work in which Reid first brought his opinions before the world, the Inquiry into the Human Mind, his language is so unequivocally that of a Cosmothetic Idealist, that it admits of no mistake. It is almost more unambiguous than that of Brown himself. The external object is always said to be perceived through the medium of “natural signs:” these signs being our sensations, interpreted by a natural instinct. Our sensations, he says, belong to that

Again,

I must be excused if I am studious to prove, by an accumulation of citations, that these are not passing expressions of Reid, but the deliberate doctrine of his treatise.

This passage, with many others of like import, Sir W. Hamilton might usefully have meditated on, before he laid so much stress on the testimony of consciousness that the apprehension is not through the medium of a sign.

I doubt if it would be possible to extract from Brown himself an equal number of passages^q expressing as clearly and positively, and in terms as irreconcilable with any other opinion, the doctrine which our author terms the third form of Cosmothetic Idealism; in the exact shape, too, in which Brown held it, unencumbered by the gratuitous addition which Sir W. Hamilton fastens on him, that the sign must “truly represent” the thing signified,—a notion which Reid takes good care that he shall not be supposed to entertain, since he repeatedly declares that there is no resemblance between them. That Reid, at least when he wrote the Inquiry, was a Cosmothetic Idealist; that up to that time it had never occurred to him that the ^rconvictions^r of the existence and qualities of external objects could be regarded as anything but suggestions by, and conclusions from, our sensations—is too obvious to be questioned by any one who has the text fresh in his recollection. Accordingly Sir W. Hamilton acknowledges as much in his edition of Reid, both in the foot-notes and in the appended “Dissertations.” After restating his own doctrine, that our natural beliefs assure us of outward objects, only by assuring us that we are immediately conscious of them, he adds, “Reid himself seems to have become obscurely aware of this condition: and though he never retracted his doctrine concerning the mere suggestion of extension, we find in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers assertions in regard to the immediate perception of external things, which would tend to show that his later views were more in unison with the necessary convictions of mankind.”^* And in another place he says of the doctrine maintained by Reid “in his earlier work,” that it is one which “if he did not formally retract in his later writings, he did not continue to profess.”^† It is hard that Brown should be charged with blundering to a degree which is “portentous” and “without a parallel in the whole history of philosophy,” for attributing to Reid an opinion which Sir W. Hamilton confesses that Reid maintained in one of his only two important writings, and did not retract in the other. But Sir W. Hamilton is still more wrong than he confesses. He is in a mistake when he says that Reid, though he did not retract the opinion, did not continue to profess it. For some reason, not apparent, he did cease to employ the word Suggestion. But he continued to use terms equivalent to it.

Of this passage even Sir W. Hamilton honestly says in a foot-note, that it “appears to be an explicit disavowal of the doctrine of an intuitive or immediate perception.”^[*] Again:

All these are as unequivocal, and the last passage as full and precise a statement of Cosmothetic Idealism, as any in the Inquiry. In the “Dissertations” appended to Reid,^¶ Sir W. Hamilton, who never fails in candour, acknowledges in the fullest manner the inferences which may be drawn from passages like these, but thinks that they are balanced by others which “seem to harmonize exclusively with the conditions of natural presentationism,”^∥ and on the whole is “decidedly of opinion that, as the great end—the governing principle of Reid’s doctrine was to reconcile philosophy with the necessary convictions of mankind, he intended a doctrine of natural, consequently a doctrine of presentative, realism; and that he would have at once surrendered, as erroneous, every statement which was found at variance with such a doctrine.”^* But it is clear that the doctrine of perception through natural signs did not, in Reid’s opinion, contradict “the necessary convictions of mankind;” being brought into harmony with them by his doctrine, that the signs, after they have served their purpose, are “forgot,” which, as he conclusively shows in many places, it was both natural and inevitable that they should be. The passages which Sir W. Hamilton cites as inconsistent with any doctrine but Natural Realism,^[*] are those in which Reid affirms that we perceive objects immediately, and that the external things which really exist are the very ones which we perceive. But Reid evidently did not think these expressions inconsistent with the doctrine that the notion and belief of external objects are irresistibly suggested through natural signs. Having this notion and belief irresistibly suggested, is what he means by perceiving the external object. He says so in more than one of the passages I have just quoted: and neither in his chapter on Perception, nor anywhere else, does he speak of perception as implying anything more. In that chapter he says, “If we attend to that act of our mind which we call the perception of an external object of sense, we shall find in it these three things: First, some conception or notion of the object perceived; Secondly, a strong and irresistible conviction and belief of its present existence; and, Thirdly, that this conviction and belief are immediate, and not the effect of reasoning.”^† We see in this as in a hundred other places, what Reid meant when he said that our perception of outward objects is immediate. He did not mean that it is not a conviction suggested by something else, but only that the conviction is not the effect of reasoning. “This conviction is not only irresistible, but it is immediate; that is, it is not by a train of reasoning and argumentation that we come to be convinced of the existence of what we perceive.”^‡ As Nature has given us the signs, so it is by an original law of our nature that we are enabled to interpret them. When Reid means anything but this in contending for an immediate perception of objects, he merely means to deny that it takes place through an image in the brain or in the mind, as maintained by Cosmothetic Idealists of the first or the second class.

The only plausible argument produced by Sir W. Hamilton in proof of Reid’s Natural Realism, and against his having held, as Brown thought,^[†] Brown’s own opinion, is, that when in the speculations of Arnauld he had before him exactly the same opinion, he failed to recognise it.^§ But on a careful examination of Reid’s criticism on Arnauld, it will be seen, that as long as Reid had to do with Arnauld’s direct statement of his opinion, he found nothing ^sin it different^s from his own; but was puzzled, and thought that Arnauld attempted to unite inconsistent opinions, because, after throwing over the “ideal theory,” and saying that the only real ideas are our perceptions, he maintained that it is still true, in a sense, that we do not perceive things directly, but through our ideas. What! asks Reid, do we perceive things through our perceptions? But if we merely put the word sensations instead of perceptions, the doctrine is exactly that of Reid in the Inquiry—that we perceive things through our sensations. Most probably Arnauld meant this, but was not so understood by Reid. If he meant anything else, his opinion was not the same as Reid’s, and we need no explanation of Reid’s not recognising it.^[*]

One of the collateral indications that Reid’s opinion agreed with Brown’s, and not with Sir W. Hamilton’s, is that in treating this question he seldom or never uses the word Knowledge, but only Belief. On Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine, the distinction between these two terms, however vaguely and mistily conceived by him, is indispensable. The total absence of any recognition of it in Reid, shows that of the two opinions, if there was one which he had never conceived the possibility of, it was not Brown’s, as Sir W. Hamilton supposes, but Sir W. Hamilton’s. In our author’s mind this indication ought to have decided the question: for in the case of another philosopher he, on precisely the same evidence, brings in a verdict of Cosmothetic Idealism. Krug’s system, he says, as first promulgated, “was, like Kant’s, a mere Cosmothetic Idealism; for while he allowed a knowledge of the internal world, he only allowed a belief of the external.”^*

It is true, Reid did not believe in what our author terms “representative perception,” if by this be meant perception through an image in the mind, supposed, like the picture of a fact in memory, to be like its original. But neither (as I have repeatedly observed) did Brown. What Brown held was exactly the doctrine of Reid in the passages that I have extracted. He thought that certain sensations, irresistibly, and by a law of our nature, suggest, without any process of reasoning, and without the intervention of any tertium quid, the notion of something external, and an invincible belief in its real existence. If representative perception be this, both Reid and Brown believed in it: if anything else, Brown believed ^tin^t it no more than Reid. Not only was Reid a Cosmothetic Idealist of Brown’s exact type, but in stating his own doctrine, he has furnished, as far as I am aware, the clearest and best statement extant of their common opinion. They differed, indeed, as to our having, in this or in any other manner, an intuitive perception of any of the attributes of objects; Reid, like Sir W. Hamilton, affirming, while Brown denied, that we have a direct intuition of the Primary Qualities of bodies. But Brown did not deny, nor would Sir W. Hamilton accuse him of denying, the wide difference between his opinion and Reid’s on this latter point.

Before closing this chapter, I will notice the curious fact, that after insisting with so much emphasis upon the recognition of an Ego and a Non-ego as an element in all consciousness, Sir W. Hamilton is obliged to admit that the distinction is in certain cases a mistake, and that our consciousness sometimes recognises a Non-ego where there is only an Ego. It is a doctrine of his, repeated in many parts of his works, that in our internal consciousness there is no non-ego. Even the remembrance of a past fact, or the mental image of an absent object, is not a thing separable or distinguishable from the mind’s act in remembering, but is another name for that act itself. Now it is certain, that in thinking of an absent or an imaginary object, we naturally imagine ourselves to be thinking of an objective something, distinguishable from the thinking act. Sir W. Hamilton, being obliged to acknowledge this, resolves the difficulty in the very manner for which he so often rebukes other thinkers—by representing this apparent testimony of consciousness as a kind of illusion. “The object,” he says, “is in this case given as really identical with the conscious ego, but still consciousness distinguishes it, as an accident, from the ego, as the subject of that accident: it projects, as it were, this subjective phænomenon from itself,—views it at a distance,—in a word, objectifies it.”^* But if, in one half of the domain of consciousness—the internal half—it is in the power of consciousness to “project” out of itself what is merely one of its own acts, and regard it as external and a non-ego, why are those accused of declaring consciousness a lie, who think that this may possibly be the case with the other half of its domain also, and that the non-ego altogether may be but a mode in which the mind represents to itself the possible modifications of the ego? How the truth stands in respect to this matter I will endeavour, in the following chapter, to investigate. For the present, I content myself with asking, why the same liberty in the interpretation of Consciousness, which Sir W. Hamilton’s own doctrine cannot dispense with, should be held to be an insurmountable objection to the ^ucounter-doctrine.^u

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 277.

[† ]Ibid., p. 285.

[‡ ]Ibid., pp. 283-4.

[[*] ]Ibid., p. 288.

[[*] ]Peter Poiret, according to Hamilton’s editors.

[a-a]651, 652, 67 in its primitive state

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 292-4. [See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. J. H. Fichte, 8 vols. (Berlin: Verlag von Veit, 1845), Vol. II, p. 245.]

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 296.

[† ]Ibid., pp. 295-6.

[* ]In one of the “Dissertations on Reid” (Note C) Sir W. Hamilton gives a much more elaborate, and more minutely discriminated enumeration and classification of the opinions which have been or might be held respecting our knowledge of mind and of matter. But the one which I have quoted from the Lectures is more easily followed, and sufficient for all the purposes for which I have occasion to advert to it. I shall only cite from the later exposition a single passage which exhibits in a strong light the sentiments of our author towards philosophers of the school of Brown.

“Natural Realism and Absolute Idealism are the only systems worthy of a philosopher; for, as they alone have any foundation in consciousness, so they alone have any consistency in themselves. . . . Both build upon the same fundamental fact, that the extended object immediately perceived is identical with the extended object actually existing;—for the truth of this fact, both can appeal to the common sense of mankind; and to the common sense of mankind Berkeley did appeal not less confidently, and perhaps more logically than Reid. . . . The scheme of Hypothetical Realism or Cosmothetic Idealism, which supposes that behind the non-existent world perceived, lurks a correspondent but unknown world existing, is not only repugnant to our natural beliefs, but in manifold contradiction with itself. The scheme of Natural Realism may be ultimately difficult—for, like all other truths, it ends in the inconceivable; but Hypothetical Realism—in its origin—in its development—in its result, although the favourite scheme of philosophers, is philosophically absurd.” (P. 817n.)

Sir W. Hamilton may in general be depended on for giving a perfectly fair statement of the opinions of adversaries; but in this case his almost passionate contempt for the later forms of Cosmothetic Idealism has misled him. No Cosmothetic Idealist would accept as a fair statement of his opinion, the monstrous proposition that a “non-existent world” is “perceived.”

[b]651, 652, 67 strangely sophistical

[* ]In the Lehrsatz of the 21st Supplement to the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft [p. 773]; the Lemma at p. 184 of Mr. Haywood’s Translation. [Critick of Pure Reason, trans. Francis Haywood, 2nd ed. (London: Pickering, 1848).] See also, in Haywood, the note at pp. xxxviii-xl of the Second Preface; being Supplement II [“Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage,”] in Rosenkranz and Schubert’s edition of the collected works, Vol. II, pp. 684-6. cThis reasoning of Kant, to my mind, strangely sophistical, nevertheless does not place the externality of Bodies out of the mind. It is “externality in Space,” and Space, in his philosophy, does not exist out of the mind.c

[† ]Discussions, p. 57.

[[*] ]Ibid., p. 72. See p. 15 above. For Descartes, see Principia Philosophia, p. 188 (IV, clxxxix).

[* ]Ibid., p. 58. [See Brown, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 22-90.]

[† ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note B,] p. 811.

[[†] ]See Brown, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 32-62.

[d]651, 652 of supposing

[* ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note D,] p. 842.

[[*] ]See Brown, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 22-90.

[† ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note D,] p. 846: and the fuller explanation at pp. 854 and 857.

[[*] ]See, e.g., Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 430-1; Vol. II, pp. 11, 85-90.

[* ]Discussions, p. 89.

[† ]Ibid., p. 86.

[e-e]+67, 72

[[*] ]See Brown, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 22-63.

[f-f]+67, 72

[* ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 86.

[* ]Ibid., p. 106.

[† ]Ibid., pp. 138-9.

[* ]Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 219-20.

[[*] ]See ibid., pp. 295ff.

[[†] ]See, e.g., Discussions, p. 64.

[[*] ]See pp. 112ff. above.

[[†] ]See, e.g., On the Intellectual Powers, pp. 284-5.

[* ]Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 153-4.

[† ]Some of the inconsistencies here pointed out in Sir W. Hamilton’s speculations respecting Perception have been noticed, and ably discussed, by Mr. Bailey, in the fourth letter of the Second Series of his Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind. [(London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), pp. 46-64.]

In treating of Modified Logic, Sir W. Hamilton justifies, after his own manner, the assumption made alike by himself and by the Cosmothetic Idealists; and the grounds of justification are as available to them as to him. “Real truth is the correspondence of our thoughts with the existences which constitute their objects. But here a difficulty arises: how can we know that there is, that there can be, such a correspondence? All that we know of the objects is through the presentations of our faculties; but whether these present the objects as they are in themselves, we can never ascertain, for to do this it would be requisite to go out of ourselves,—out of our faculties,—to obtain a knowledge of the objects by other faculties, and thus to compare our old presentations with our new.” The very difficulty which we have seen him throwing in the teeth of the Cosmothetic Idealists. “But all this, even were the supposition possible, would be incompetent to afford us the certainty required. For were it possible to leave our old, and to obtain a new, set of faculties, by which to test the old, still the veracity of these new faculties would be equally obnoxious to doubt as the veracity of the old. For what guarantee could we obtain for the credibility in the one case, which we do not already possess in the other? The new faculties could only assert their own truth; but this is done by the old; and it is impossible to imagine any presentations of the non-ego by any finite intelligence to which a doubt might not be raised, whether these presentations were not merely subjective modifications of the conscious ego itself.” It is a very laudable practice in philosophizing to state the difficulties strongly. But when the difficulty is one which in any case has to be surmounted, we should allow others to surmount it in the same mode which we adopt for ourselves. This mode, in the present case, is our author’s usual one: “All that could be said in answer to such a doubt is that if such were true, our whole nature is a lie:” in other words, our nature prompts us to believe that the modification of the conscious ego points to, and results from, a non-ego with corresponding properties. (Lectures, Vol. IV, pp. 67-8.) The Cosmothetic Idealistsdo but say the same thing: and they have as good a right to say it as our author.

gIn saying that the Cosmothetic Idealists can make out as good a case for their opinion as Sir W. Hamilton for his, I do not say that their case is good against Berkeley, who held that the non-ego we are compelled to postulate as the cause of our sensations is not matter, but a mind. Minds, Berkeley would say, we know to exist, in ourselves by consciousness, in other beings by evidence. Matter we do not know to exist, for all the indications of it are otherwise explicable: we ought not, therefore, to assume its existence until it is shown that our sensations cannot be caused by a Mind. Sir W. Hamilton escapes from this argument by his doctrine, that Matter with its Primary and Secundo-primary qualities is directly and immediately perceived.g

[[*] ]“Philosophy of Perception,” Discussions, pp. 39-99.

[h-h]651, 652 was transcribed from

[[†] ]See Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 278-83.

[i-i]651, 652 reappear. Sir W. Hamilton perhaps had meanwhile become aware of its inconsistency with his own principles.

[* ]Discussions, p. 67.

[j]651, 652 truly

[† ]Our belief in the veracity of Memory is evidently ultimate: no reason can be given for it which does not presuppose the belief, and assume it to be well grounded. This point is forcibly urged in the Philosophical Introduction to kDr.k Ward’s able work, On Nature and Grace: a book the readers of which are likely to be limited by its being addressed specially to Catholics, but showing a capacity in the writer which might otherwise have made him one of the most effective champions of the Intuitive school. [See William George Ward, On Nature and Grace (London: Burns and Lambert, 1860), esp. Chap. i, §1, pp. 5-6, and 25-9.] Though I do not believe morality to be intuitive in lDr.l Ward’s sense, I think his book of great practical worth, by the strenuous manner in which it maintains morality to have another foundation than the arbitrary decree of God, and shows, by great weight of evidence, that this is the orthodox doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.

mDr. Ward, returning to this subject in the Dublin Review, says that in declaring our belief in the veracity of Memory to be ultimate, I am admitting “an exception” to the doctrine of what he calls the Phenomenist school, and “an exception which no phenomenist had made before.” The necessity of making this exception, he deems a powerful argument against the doctrine itself. “If ever there were a paradoxical position” mine, according to him, “is one on the surface. It is most intelligible to say that there are no trustworthy intuitions; and it is most intelligible to say that there are many such; but on the surface it is the ne plus ultra of paradox, to say that there is just one such, and no more.” (“Mr. Mill’s Denial of Necessary Truth,” pp. 309-10.)

First, on what account is it more improbable that there should be “just one” source of intuitive knowledge besides present consciousness, making two in all, than that there should be three, four, or any other number. To me it seems that there is no antecedent presumption in the case, but a mere question of evidence. Dr. Ward, with good reason, challenges me to explain “where the distinction lies between acts of memory and other alleged intuitions” which I do not admit as such. The distinction is, that as all the explanations of mental phenomena presuppose Memory, Memory itself cannot admit of being explained. Whenever this is shown to be true of any other part of our knowledge, I shall admit that part to be intuitive. Dr. Ward thinks that there are various other intuitions “more favourably circumstanced for the establishment of their trustworthiness” than Memory itself, and he gives as an example our conviction of the wickedness of certain acts. [Ibid., p. 310.] My reason for rejecting this as a case of intuition is, that the conviction can be explained without presupposing, as part of the explanation, the very fact itself; which the belief in Memory cannot.

Dr. Ward has been too hasty in saying that no phenomenist ever before made this “exception.” I doubt if he could point out any phenomenist who has not made it, either expressly or by implication. All who have attempted the explanation of the human mind by sensation have postulated the knowledge of past sensations as well as of present; some of them have expressly said so. Take Hume, for instance, the most extreme of Phenomenists: he always excepts Memory from the sources of knowledge of which he attempts to find an explanation. In his “Sceptical Doubts,” he says “It may be a subject worthy curiosity, to inquire what is the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real existence and matter of fact, beyond the present testimony of our senses, or the records of our memory.” And again, “all reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded in the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone can we go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses.” [“Sceptical Doubts concerning the Operations of the Understanding,” Section iv of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Essays and Treatises, Vol. II, p. 39.] And in his “Sceptical Solution of these Doubts,” where he is attempting to explain Belief by the laws of Association, he asserts that belief “where it reaches beyond the memory and senses” is amenable to his theory. [Section v in ibid., p. 68.] It would be easy to quote equally decisive passages from other Phenomenists. How, indeed, could any one make Experience the source of all our knowledge without postulating the belief in Memory as the fundamental fact? What is Experience but Memory?

For myself, I do admit other sources of knowledge than sensation and the memory of sensation, though not than consciousness and the memory of consciousness. I have distinctly declared that the elementary relations of our sensations to one another, viz. their resemblances, and their successions and coexistences, are subjects of direct apprehension. And I have avowedly left the question undecided whether our perception of ourselves—of our own personality—is not a case of the same kind. It is curious that while Dr. Ward [“Mill’s Denial,” pp. 309-10] thinks I am bound to explain why I acknowledge only one case of intuition, Dr. M‘Cosh charges me with postulating as great a number of first principles as are demanded by either the Scotch or the German metaphysicians, and has devoted a whole chapter of his book to an enumeration of them; including several which, as he might have known, I regard as truths indeed, but not as ultimate principles. [See McCosh, Examination, Chap. iii, pp. 50-69.] I do not know what extreme of supposed psychological analysis Dr. M‘Cosh thought it incumbent on me to profess. In my estimation, the doctrine of “all or none” is no more a necessity in philosophy than in politics.m

[[*] ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 106.

[[†] ]See pp. 139ff. above.

[n]651, 652, 67 all

[* ]There is also a difference between Brown and Sir W. Hamilton in the particular category of intuitive knowledge to which they referred the cognition of the existence of matter. Brown deemed it a case of the belief in causation, which again he regarded as a case of our intuitive belief in the constancy of the order of nature. “I do not,” he says, “conceive that it is by any peculiar intuition we are led to believe in the existence of things without. I consider this belief as the effect of that more general intuition, by which we consider a new consequent, in any series of accustomed events, as the sign of a new antecedent, and of that equally general principle of association, by which feelings that have frequently co-existed, flow together and constitute afterwards one complex whole.” (Lectures, Vol. II, p. 11; Lecture xxiv.) That is, he thought that when an infant finds the motions of his muscles, which have been accustomed to take place unimpeded, suddenly stopped by what he will afterwards learn to call the resistance of an external object, the infant intuitively (though perhaps not instantaneously) believes that this unexpected phænomenon, the stoppage of a series of sensations, is conjoined with, or as we now say, caused by, the presence of some new antecedent:o which, not being the infant himself, nor a state of his sensations, we may call an outward object.

[[*] ]See Lecture xxiii, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 63-85; “Dissertations on Reid,” Note C, pp. 819-24; cf. Brown, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 22-42.

[p]651, 652 , and in the very same manner

[* ]Discussions, p. 58.

[* ]Ibid., pp. 56-7.

[† ]Ibid., p. 60.

[‡ ]Inquiry into the Human Mind, Works (Hamilton’s ed.), p. 122.

[§ ]Ibid.

[¶ ]Ibid., p. 137.

[* ]Ibid., p. 111.

[† ]Ibid., p. 121.

[‡ ]Ibid.

[§ ]Ibid., pp. 123-4. [The words in square brackets are Mill’s.]

[¶ ]Ibid., p. 124.

[* ]Ibid., p. 125.

[† ]Ibid., p. 131.

[‡ ]Ibid., p. 188.

[§ ]Ibid., pp. 194-5.

[¶ ]Ibid., p. 195.

[q]651, 652, 67 (and I might have cited many more)

[r-r]651, 652 conviction

[* ]Foot-note to Reid, p. 129n.

[† ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note C,] p. 821.

[‡ ]Essays on the Intellectual Powers, Works, p. 312.

[§ ]Ibid., p. 311.

[* ]Ibid., p. 310.

[[*] ]Foot-note to Reid, p. 310n.

[† ]Essays on the Intellectual Powers, Works, p. 315.

[‡ ]Ibid., p. 320.

[§ ]Ibid., p. 332.

[¶ ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note C,] pp. 819-24, and [Note D*,] pp. 882-5.

[∥ ]Ibid., [Note D*,] p. 882.

[* ]Ibid., [Note C,] p. 820.

[[*] ]See, e.g., Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 80-4.

[† ]Essays on the Intellectual Powers, Essay II, Chap. v, p. 258.

[‡ ]Same Essay, p. 259.

[[†] ]See Brown, Lectures, Vol. II, p. 80.

[§ ]Same Essay, [i.e., Reid, Essay II,] Chap. xiii [pp. 295-8]. For Sir W. Hamilton’s remarks, see Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 50-3; Discussions, pp. 75-7; and “Dissertations on Reid,” [Note C,] p. 823.

[s-s]651 different in it

[[*] ]See Antoine Arnauld, Des vrayes et des fausses idées, contre ce qu’enseigne l’auteur de la Recherche de la vérité (Cologne: Schouten, 1683), pp. 34-58 (Chaps. v and vi).

[* ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note A,] p. 797.

[t-t]+652, 67, 72

[* ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 432.

[u-u]651 counter-doctrine?

[* ]In the Lehrsatz of the 21st Supplement to the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft [p. 773]; the Lemma at p. 184 of Mr. Haywood’s Translation. [Critick of Pure Reason, trans. Francis Haywood, 2nd ed. (London: Pickering, 1848).] See also, in Haywood, the note at pp. xxxviii-xl of the Second Preface; being Supplement II [“Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage,”] in Rosenkranz and Schubert’s edition of the collected works, Vol. II, pp. 684-6. cThis reasoning of Kant, to my mind, strangely sophistical, nevertheless does not place the externality of Bodies out of the mind. It is “externality in Space,” and Space, in his philosophy, does not exist out of the mind.c

[† ]Some of the inconsistencies here pointed out in Sir W. Hamilton’s speculations respecting Perception have been noticed, and ably discussed, by Mr. Bailey, in the fourth letter of the Second Series of his Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind. [(London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), pp. 46-64.]

In treating of Modified Logic, Sir W. Hamilton justifies, after his own manner, the assumption made alike by himself and by the Cosmothetic Idealists; and the grounds of justification are as available to them as to him. “Real truth is the correspondence of our thoughts with the existences which constitute their objects. But here a difficulty arises: how can we know that there is, that there can be, such a correspondence? All that we know of the objects is through the presentations of our faculties; but whether these present the objects as they are in themselves, we can never ascertain, for to do this it would be requisite to go out of ourselves,—out of our faculties,—to obtain a knowledge of the objects by other faculties, and thus to compare our old presentations with our new.” The very difficulty which we have seen him throwing in the teeth of the Cosmothetic Idealists. “But all this, even were the supposition possible, would be incompetent to afford us the certainty required. For were it possible to leave our old, and to obtain a new, set of faculties, by which to test the old, still the veracity of these new faculties would be equally obnoxious to doubt as the veracity of the old. For what guarantee could we obtain for the credibility in the one case, which we do not already possess in the other? The new faculties could only assert their own truth; but this is done by the old; and it is impossible to imagine any presentations of the non-ego by any finite intelligence to which a doubt might not be raised, whether these presentations were not merely subjective modifications of the conscious ego itself.” It is a very laudable practice in philosophizing to state the difficulties strongly. But when the difficulty is one which in any case has to be surmounted, we should allow others to surmount it in the same mode which we adopt for ourselves. This mode, in the present case, is our author’s usual one: “All that could be said in answer to such a doubt is that if such were true, our whole nature is a lie:” in other words, our nature prompts us to believe that the modification of the conscious ego points to, and results from, a non-ego with corresponding properties. (Lectures, Vol. IV, pp. 67-8.) The Cosmothetic Idealistsdo but say the same thing: and they have as good a right to say it as our author.

gIn saying that the Cosmothetic Idealists can make out as good a case for their opinion as Sir W. Hamilton for his, I do not say that their case is good against Berkeley, who held that the non-ego we are compelled to postulate as the cause of our sensations is not matter, but a mind. Minds, Berkeley would say, we know to exist, in ourselves by consciousness, in other beings by evidence. Matter we do not know to exist, for all the indications of it are otherwise explicable: we ought not, therefore, to assume its existence until it is shown that our sensations cannot be caused by a Mind. Sir W. Hamilton escapes from this argument by his doctrine, that Matter with its Primary and Secundo-primary qualities is directly and immediately perceived.g

[† ]Our belief in the veracity of Memory is evidently ultimate: no reason can be given for it which does not presuppose the belief, and assume it to be well grounded. This point is forcibly urged in the Philosophical Introduction to kDr.k Ward’s able work, On Nature and Grace: a book the readers of which are likely to be limited by its being addressed specially to Catholics, but showing a capacity in the writer which might otherwise have made him one of the most effective champions of the Intuitive school. [See William George Ward, On Nature and Grace (London: Burns and Lambert, 1860), esp. Chap. i, §1, pp. 5-6, and 25-9.] Though I do not believe morality to be intuitive in lDr.l Ward’s sense, I think his book of great practical worth, by the strenuous manner in which it maintains morality to have another foundation than the arbitrary decree of God, and shows, by great weight of evidence, that this is the orthodox doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.

mDr. Ward, returning to this subject in the Dublin Review, says that in declaring our belief in the veracity of Memory to be ultimate, I am admitting “an exception” to the doctrine of what he calls the Phenomenist school, and “an exception which no phenomenist had made before.” The necessity of making this exception, he deems a powerful argument against the doctrine itself. “If ever there were a paradoxical position” mine, according to him, “is one on the surface. It is most intelligible to say that there are no trustworthy intuitions; and it is most intelligible to say that there are many such; but on the surface it is the ne plus ultra of paradox, to say that there is just one such, and no more.” (“Mr. Mill’s Denial of Necessary Truth,” pp. 309-10.)

First, on what account is it more improbable that there should be “just one” source of intuitive knowledge besides present consciousness, making two in all, than that there should be three, four, or any other number. To me it seems that there is no antecedent presumption in the case, but a mere question of evidence. Dr. Ward, with good reason, challenges me to explain “where the distinction lies between acts of memory and other alleged intuitions” which I do not admit as such. The distinction is, that as all the explanations of mental phenomena presuppose Memory, Memory itself cannot admit of being explained. Whenever this is shown to be true of any other part of our knowledge, I shall admit that part to be intuitive. Dr. Ward thinks that there are various other intuitions “more favourably circumstanced for the establishment of their trustworthiness” than Memory itself, and he gives as an example our conviction of the wickedness of certain acts. [Ibid., p. 310.] My reason for rejecting this as a case of intuition is, that the conviction can be explained without presupposing, as part of the explanation, the very fact itself; which the belief in Memory cannot.

Dr. Ward has been too hasty in saying that no phenomenist ever before made this “exception.” I doubt if he could point out any phenomenist who has not made it, either expressly or by implication. All who have attempted the explanation of the human mind by sensation have postulated the knowledge of past sensations as well as of present; some of them have expressly said so. Take Hume, for instance, the most extreme of Phenomenists: he always excepts Memory from the sources of knowledge of which he attempts to find an explanation. In his “Sceptical Doubts,” he says “It may be a subject worthy curiosity, to inquire what is the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real existence and matter of fact, beyond the present testimony of our senses, or the records of our memory.” And again, “all reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded in the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone can we go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses.” [“Sceptical Doubts concerning the Operations of the Understanding,” Section iv of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Essays and Treatises, Vol. II, p. 39.] And in his “Sceptical Solution of these Doubts,” where he is attempting to explain Belief by the laws of Association, he asserts that belief “where it reaches beyond the memory and senses” is amenable to his theory. [Section v in ibid., p. 68.] It would be easy to quote equally decisive passages from other Phenomenists. How, indeed, could any one make Experience the source of all our knowledge without postulating the belief in Memory as the fundamental fact? What is Experience but Memory?

For myself, I do admit other sources of knowledge than sensation and the memory of sensation, though not than consciousness and the memory of consciousness. I have distinctly declared that the elementary relations of our sensations to one another, viz. their resemblances, and their successions and coexistences, are subjects of direct apprehension. And I have avowedly left the question undecided whether our perception of ourselves—of our own personality—is not a case of the same kind. It is curious that while Dr. Ward [“Mill’s Denial,” pp. 309-10] thinks I am bound to explain why I acknowledge only one case of intuition, Dr. M‘Cosh charges me with postulating as great a number of first principles as are demanded by either the Scotch or the German metaphysicians, and has devoted a whole chapter of his book to an enumeration of them; including several which, as he might have known, I regard as truths indeed, but not as ultimate principles. [See McCosh, Examination, Chap. iii, pp. 50-69.] I do not know what extreme of supposed psychological analysis Dr. M‘Cosh thought it incumbent on me to profess. In my estimation, the doctrine of “all or none” is no more a necessity in philosophy than in politics.m

[* ]There is also a difference between Brown and Sir W. Hamilton in the particular category of intuitive knowledge to which they referred the cognition of the existence of matter. Brown deemed it a case of the belief in causation, which again he regarded as a case of our intuitive belief in the constancy of the order of nature. “I do not,” he says, “conceive that it is by any peculiar intuition we are led to believe in the existence of things without. I consider this belief as the effect of that more general intuition, by which we consider a new consequent, in any series of accustomed events, as the sign of a new antecedent, and of that equally general principle of association, by which feelings that have frequently co-existed, flow together and constitute afterwards one complex whole.” (Lectures, Vol. II, p. 11; Lecture xxiv.) That is, he thought that when an infant finds the motions of his muscles, which have been accustomed to take place unimpeded, suddenly stopped by what he will afterwards learn to call the resistance of an external object, the infant intuitively (though perhaps not instantaneously) believes that this unexpected phænomenon, the stoppage of a series of sensations, is conjoined with, or as we now say, caused by, the presence of some new antecedent:o which, not being the infant himself, nor a state of his sensations, we may call an outward object.

[cThis reasoning of Kant, to my mind, strangely sophistical, nevertheless does not place the externality of Bodies out of the mind. It is “externality in Space,” and Space, in his philosophy, does not exist out of the mind.c]+72

[gIn saying that the Cosmothetic Idealists can make out as good a case for their opinion as Sir W. Hamilton for his, I do not say that their case is good against Berkeley, who held that the non-ego we are compelled to postulate as the cause of our sensations is not matter, but a mind. Minds, Berkeley would say, we know to exist, in ourselves by consciousness, in other beings by evidence. Matter we do not know to exist, for all the indications of it are otherwise explicable: we ought not, therefore, to assume its existence until it is shown that our sensations cannot be caused by a Mind. Sir W. Hamilton escapes from this argument by his doctrine, that Matter with its Primary and Secundo-primary qualities is directly and immediately perceived.g]+72

[kDr.k]651, 652, 67 Mr.

[lDr.l]651, 652, 67 Mr.

[mDr. Ward, returning to this subject in the Dublin Review, says that in declaring our belief in the veracity of Memory to be ultimate, I am admitting “an exception” to the doctrine of what he calls the Phenomenist school, and “an exception which no phenomenist had made before.” The necessity of making this exception, he deems a powerful argument against the doctrine itself. “If ever there were a paradoxical position” mine, according to him, “is one on the surface. It is most intelligible to say that there are no trustworthy intuitions; and it is most intelligible to say that there are many such; but on the surface it is the ne plus ultra of paradox, to say that there is just one such, and no more.” (“Mr. Mill’s Denial of Necessary Truth,” pp. 309-10.)]+72

[o]651, 652 something