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 XIV

How Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel Dispose of the Law of Inseparable Association

it has been obvious in the preceding discussions, and is known to all who have studied the best masters of what I have called the Psychological, in opposition to the merely Introspective method of metaphysical enquiry, that the principal instrument employed by them for unlocking the deeper mysteries of mental science, is the Law of Inseparable Association. This law, which it would seem specially incumbent on the Intuitive school of metaphysicians to take into serious consideration, because it is the basis of the rival theory which they have to encounter at every point, and which it is necessary for them to refute first, as the condition of establishing their own, is not so much rejected as ignored by them. Reid and Stewart, who had met with it only in Hartley, thought it needless to take the trouble of understanding it. The best informed German and French philosophers are barely aware, if even aware, of its existence.^* And in this country and age, in which it has been employed by thinkers of the highest order as the most potent of all instruments of psychological analysis, the opposite school usually dismiss it with a few sentences, so smoothly gliding over the surface of the subject, as to prove that they have never, even for an instant, brought the powers of their minds into real and effective contact with it.

Sir W. Hamilton has written a rather elaborate Dissertation on the Laws of Association; and the more elementary of them had engaged a considerable share of his attention.^* But he nowhere shows that he had the smallest suspicion of this, the least familiar and most imperfectly understood of these laws. I find in all his writings only two or three passages in which he touches, even cursorily, on this mode of explaining mental phænomena. The first and longest of these occurs in the treatment, not of any of the greater problems of mental philosophy, but of a very minor question; whether, in the perception of outward objects, our cognition of wholes precedes that of their component parts, or the ^bcontrary.^b More fully; “whether, in Perception, do we first obtain a general knowledge of the complex wholes presented to us by sense, and then, by analysis and limited attention, obtain a special knowledge of their several parts; or do we not first obtain a particular knowledge of the smallest parts to which sense is competent, and then, by synthesis, collect them into greater and greater wholes?”^* Sir W. Hamilton declares for the first theory, and quotes as supporters of the second, Stewart and James Mill; to the latter of whom, more than to any other thinker, mankind are indebted for recalling the attention of philosophers to the law of Inseparable Association, and pointing out the important applications of which it is susceptible. Through the conflict with Mr. Mill on the very subordinate question which he is discussing, Sir W. Hamilton is led to quote a part of that philosopher’s exposition of Inseparable Association; and it is a sign how little he was aware of the importance of the subject, that a theory of so wide a scope and such large consequences should receive the only recognition he ever gives it in a bye corner of his work, incidentally to one of the smallest questions therein discussed. I shall extract the very passages which he quotes from Mr. Mill, because, in a small space, they state and illustrate very happily the two most characteristic properties of our closest associations: that the suggestions they produce are, for the time, irresistible; and that the suggested ideas (at least when the association is of the synchronous kind as distinguished from the successive) become so blended together, that the compound result appears, to our consciousness, simple.

“Where two or more ideas,” says Mr. Mill,

Other illustrations follow, concluding with these words: “The following of one idea after another idea, or after a sensation, so certainly that we cannot prevent the combination, nor avoid having the consequent feeling as often as we have the antecedent, is a law of association, the operation of which we shall afterwards find to be extensive, and bearing a principal part in some of the most important phænomena of the human mind.”^† And the promise of this sentence is amply redeemed in the sequel ^cof^c the treatise.

The only remark which this highly philosophical exposition suggests to Sir W. Hamilton, is a disparaging reflection on Mr. Mill’s philosophy in general. He says that Mr. Mill, in his “ingenious” treatise, “has pushed the principle of Association to an extreme which refutes its own exaggeration,—analysing not only our belief in the relation of effect and cause into that principle, but even the primary logical laws,” so that it is no wonder he should “account for our knowledge of complex wholes in perception, by the same universal principle.”^[*] Having, on the strength of this previous verdict of exaggeration, dispensed with enquiring how much the law of Inseparable Association can really accomplish, he makes no use of its most obvious applications, even while transcribing them into his own pages. One of the psychological facts stated in the passage quoted, the impossibility, to us, of separating the idea of extension and that of colour, is a truth strongly insisted on by Sir W. Hamilton himself. In the very next Lecture but one to that from which I have been quoting, he strenuously maintains, that we can neither conceive colour without extension, nor extension without colour. Even the born blind, he thinks, have the sensation of darkness, that is, of black colour, and mentally clothe all extended objects with it.^* Except the last position, which has no evidence and no probability,^† the doctrine is undoubtedly true, and the fact is so obviously a case of the law of association, that even Stewart, little partial as he was to that mode of explaining mental phænomena, does not dream of attributing it to anything else. “In consequence,” says Stewart, “of our always perceiving extension at the same time at which the sensation of colour is excited in the mind, we find it impossible to think of that sensation without conceiving extension along with it.” He gives this as one of the instances “of very intimate associations formed between two ideas which have no necessary connexion with one another.”^[†] A mental analysis by way of association which was sufficiently obvious to recommend itself to Stewart, will scarcely be charged with “pushing the principle to an extreme.” In fact, if an association can ever become inseparable by dint of repetition, how could the association between colour and extension fail of being so? The two facts never exist but in immediate conjunction, and the experience of that conjunction is repeated at every moment of life which is not spent in darkness. Yet after transcribing this explanation both from Stewart and from Mill, Sir W. Hamilton remains as insensible to it as if it had never been given; and without a word of refutation, composedly registers the inseparableness of the two ideas as an ultimate mental fact proving them both to be original perceptions of the same organ, the eye. Sir W. Hamilton’s authority can have little weight against the doctrine which accounts for the more complex parts of our mental constitution by the laws of association, when it is so evident that he rejected that doctrine not because he had examined it and found it wanting, but without examining it; having taken for granted that it did not deserve examination.^*

How imperfect was his acquaintance with the secondary laws, the axiomata media^[*] of association, is plainly seen in his argument against Stewart and Mill on the comparatively insignificant question with which he started. The thesis he is asserting is, that “in place of ascending upwards, from the minimum of perception to its maxima, we descend from masses to details.”

“If the opposite doctrine” (says Sir W. Hamilton)

I have already made mention of a very important part of the Laws of Association, which may be termed the Laws of Obliviscence.^[*] If Sir W. Hamilton had sufficiently attended to those laws, he never could have maintained, that if we knew the parts before the whole, we must continue to know the parts better than the whole. It is one of the principal Laws of Obliviscence, that when a number of ideas suggest one another by association with such certainty and rapidity as to coalesce together in a group, all those members of the group which remain long without being specially attended to, have a tendency to drop out of consciousness. Our consciousness of them becomes more and more faint and evanescent, until no effort of attention can recall it into distinctness, or at last recall it at all. Any one who observes his own mental operations will find this fact exemplified in every day of his life. Now the law of attention is admitted to be, that we attend only to that which, either on its own or on some other account, interests us. In consequence, what interests us only momentarily we only attend to momentarily; and do not go on attending to it, when that, for the sake of which alone it interested us, has been attained. Sir W. Hamilton would have found these several laws clearly set forth, and abundantly exemplified, in the work of Mr. Mill which he had before him. It is there shown how large a proportion of all our states of feeling pass off without having been attended to, and in many cases so habitually that we become finally incapable of attending to them. This subject was also extremely well understood by Reid, who, little as he had reflected on the principle of Association, was much better acquainted with the laws of Obliviscence than his more recent followers, and has excellently illustrated and exemplified some of them.^* Among those which he has illustrated the most successfully, one is, that the very great number of our states of feeling which, being themselves neither painful nor pleasurable, are important to us only as signs of something else, and which by repetition have come to do their work as signs with a rapidity which to our feelings is instantaneous, cease altogether to be attended to; and through that inattention our consciousness of them either ceases altogether, or becomes so fleeting and indistinct as to leave no revivable trace in the memory. This happens, even when the impressions which serve the purpose of signs are not mere ideas, or reminiscences, of sensation, but actual sensations. After reading a chapter of a book, when we lay down the volume do we remember to have been individually conscious of the printed letters and syllables which have passed before us? Could we recall, by any effort of mind, the visible aspect presented by them, unless some unusual circumstance has fixed our attention upon it during the perusal? Yet each of these letters and syllables must have been present to us as a sensation for at least a passing moment, or the sense could not have been conveyed to us. But the sense being the only thing in which we are interested—or, in exceptional cases, the sense and a few of the words or sentences—we retain no impression of the separate letters and syllables. This instance is the more instructive, inasmuch as, the whole process taking place within our means of observation, we know that our knowledge began with the parts, and not with the whole. We know that we perceived and distinguished letters and syllables before we learnt to understand words and sentences; and the perceptions could not, at that time, have passed unattended to; on the contrary, the effort of attention of which those letters and syllables must have been the object, was probably, while it lasted, equal in intensity to any which we have been called upon to exercise in after life. Were Sir W. Hamilton’s argument valid, one of two things would follow. Either we have even now, when we read in a book, a more vivid consciousness of the letters and syllables than of the words and sentences, ^d(and by parity of reason a more vivid consciousness of the words and sentences than of the general purport of the discourse):^d or else, we could read sentences off hand at first, and only by subsequent analysis discovered the letters and syllables. If ever there was a reductio ad absurdum, this is one.

The facts on which Sir W. Hamilton’s argument rests, are obviously accounted for by the laws which he ignores. In our perceptions of objects, it is generally the wholes, and the wholes alone, that interest us. In his example, that of a friend’s countenance, it is (special motives apart) only the friend himself that we are interested about; we care about the features only as signs that it is our friend whom we see, and not another person. Unless therefore the face commands our attention by its beauty or strangeness, or unless we stamp the features on our memory by acts of attention directed upon them separately, they pass before us, and do their work as signs, with so little consciousness that no distinct trace may be left in the memory. We forget the details even of objects which we see every day, if we have no motive for attending to the parts as distinguished from the wholes, and have cultivated no habit of doing so. That this is consistent with having known the parts earlier than the wholes, is proved not only by the case of reading, but by that of playing on a musical instrument, and a hundred other familiar instances; by everything, in fact, which we learn to do. When the wholes alone are interesting to us, we soon forget our knowledge of the component parts, unless we purposely keep it alive by conscious comparison and analysis.

This is not the only fallacy in Sir W. Hamilton’s argument. Considered as a reply to Mr. Mill’s explanation of the origin of our ideas of objects, it entirely misses the mark. If the argument and examples had proved their point, which it has been seen that they do not, they would have proved that we perceive and know, to some extent or other, the object as a whole, before knowing its integrant parts. But it is not of integrant parts that Mr. Mill was speaking; and he might have admitted all that Sir W. Hamilton contends for, without surrendering his own opinion. The question does not relate to parts in extension. It does not concern Mr. Mill’s theory whether we know, or do not know, a man as such, before we distinguish, in thought or in perception, his head from his feet. What Mr. Mill said was, that our idea of an object, whether it be of the man, or of his head, or of his feet, is compounded by association from our ideas of the colour, the shape, the resistance, &c., which belong to those objects.^[*] These are what philosophers have called the metaphysical parts, not the integrant parts, of the total impression. Now I have never heard of any philosopher who maintained that these parts were not known until after the objects which they characterize; that we perceive the body first, and its colour, shape, form, &c., only afterwards. Our senses, which on all theories are at least the avenues through which our knowledge of bodies comes to us, are not adapted by nature to let in the perception of the whole object at once. They only open to let pass single attributes at a time. And this is as much Sir W. Hamilton’s opinion as any one’s else, except where he is sustaining an argument which makes him blind to it.

As is often the case with our author, the conclusion he is maintaining is worth more than his argument to prove it, and though not the whole truth, has truth in it. That we perceive the whole before the parts will not stand examination as a general law, but is very often true as a particular fact: our first impression is often that of a confused mass, of which all the parts seem blended, and our subsequent progress consists in elaborating this into distinctness. It was well to point out this fact: but if our author had paid more attention to its limits, he might have been able to give us a complete theory of it, instead of leaving it, as he has done, an empirical observation, which waits for some one to raise it into a scientific law.

The same want of comprehension of the power of an inseparable association, which was shown by Sir W. Hamilton in the case of Colour and Extension, is exhibited in the only other case in which he adduces any argument to prove that an idea was not produced by association. The case is that of causality, and the argument is the ordinary one of metaphysicians of his school. “The necessity of so thinking cannot be derived from a custom of so thinking. The force of custom, influential as it may be, is still always limited to the customary; and the customary never reaches, never even approaches to the necessary.”^*eIf this were so, not only could an inseparable association generate no necessity of belief, but there could be no such thing as inseparable association; no entirely irresistible conjunction between two mental states.^e The paviour^f, however,^f who cannot use his rammer without the accustomed cry, the orator who had so often while speaking twirled a string in his hand that he became unable to speak when he accidentally dropped it, are, it seems to me, examples of a “customary” which did approach to, and even reach, the “necessary.” “Association may explain a strong and special, but it can never explain a universal and absolutely irresistible belief.”^[*] Not when the conjunction of facts which engenders the association, is itself universal and irresistible? “What I cannot but think, must be à priori, or original to thought: it cannot be engendered by experience upon custom.”^† As if experience, that is to say, association, were not perpetually engendering both inabilities to think, and inabilities not to think. “We can think away each and every part of the knowledge we have derived from experience.”^‡ Associations derived from experience are doubtless separable by a sufficient amount of contrary experience; but, in the cases we are considering, no contrary experience is to be had. On the theory that the belief in causality results from association, “when association is recent, the causal judgment should be weak, and rise only gradually to full force, as custom becomes inveterate.”^§ And how do we know that it does not? The whole process of acquiring our belief in causation takes place at an age of which we have no remembrance, and which precludes the possibility of testing the matter by experiment: and all theories agree that our first type of causation is our own power of moving our limbs; which is as complete as it can be, and has formed as strong associations as it is capable of forming, long before the child can observe or communicate its mental operations.

It is strange that almost all the opponents of the Association psychology should found their main or sole argument in refutation of it upon the feeling of necessity; for if there be any one feeling in our nature which the laws of association are obviously equal to producing, one would say it is that. Necessary, according to Kant’s definition,^[†] and there is none better, is that of which the negation is impossible. If we find it impossible, by any trial, to separate two ideas, we have all the feeling of necessity which the mind is capable of. Those, therefore, who deny that association can generate a necessity of thought, must be willing to affirm that two ideas are never so knit together by association as to be practically inseparable. But to affirm this is to contradict the most familiar experience of life. Many persons who have been frightened in childhood can never be alone in the dark without irrepressible terrors. Many a person is unable to revisit a particular place, or to think of a particular event, without recalling acute feelings of grief or reminiscences of suffering. If the facts which created these strong associations in individual minds, had been common to all mankind from their earliest infancy, and had, when the associations were fully formed, been forgotten, we should have had a Necessity of Thought—one of the necessities which are supposed to prove an objective law, and an à priori mental connexion between ideas.^* Now, in all the supposed natural beliefs and necessary conceptions which the principle of Inseparable Association is employed to explain, the generating causes of the association did begin nearly at the beginning of life, and are common either to all, or to a very large portion of mankind.^†

The beggarly account now exhibited, is, I believe, all that Sir W. Hamilton has anywhere written against the Association psychology. But it is not all that has been said against that psychology from Sir W. Hamilton’s point of view. In this as in various other cases, to supply what Sir W. Hamilton has omitted, recourse may advantageously be had to Mr. Mansel.

Mr. Mansel, though in some sense a pupil of Sir W. Hamilton, is a pupil who may be usefully consulted even after his master. Besides that he now and then sees things which his master did not see, he very often fights a better battle against adversaries. Moreover, as I before remarked,^[*] he has a decided taste for clear statements and definite issues; and this is no small advantage when the object is, not victory, but to understand the subject.

Mr. Mansel joins a distinct issue with the Association psychology, and brings the question to the proper test. “It has been already observed,” he says, in his Prolegomena Logica,

This is coming to the point, and evinces a correct apprehension of the conditions of scientific proof. If other associations, as close and as habitual as those existing in the cases in question, do not produce a similar feeling of necessity of thought, the sufficiency of the alleged cause is disproved, and the theory must fall. Mr. Mansel is within the true conditions of the Psychological Method.

But ^hwhat are^h these cases of uniform and intimate association, which do not give rise to a feeling of mental necessity? The following is Mr. Mansel’s first example of them:

The alternation of day and night is invariable in our experience; but is the phænomenon day so closely linked in our experience with the phænomenon night, that we never perceive the one, without, at the same or the immediately succeeding moment, perceiving the other? That is a condition present in the inseparable associations which generate necessities of thought. Uniformities of sequence in which the phænomena succeed one another only at a certain interval, do not give rise to inseparable associations.^† There are also mental conditions, as well as physical, which are required to create such an association. Let us take Mr. Mansel’s other instance, a stone sinking in the water.^[*] We have never seen it float, yet we have no difficulty in conceiving it floating. But, in the first place, we have not been seeing stones sinking in water from the first dawn of consciousness, and in nearly every subsequent moment of our lives, as we have been seeing two and two making four, intersecting straight lines diverging instead of enclosing a space, causes followed by effects and effects preceded by causes. But there is a still more radical distinction than this. No frequency of conjunction between two phænomena will create an inseparable association, if counter-associations are being created all the while. If we sometimes saw stones floating as well as sinking, however often we might have seen them sink, nobody supposes that we should have formed an inseparable association between them and sinking. We have not seen a stone float, but we are in the constant habit of seeing either stones or other things which have the same tendency to sink, remaining in a position which they would otherwise quit, being maintained in it by an unseen force. The sinking of a stone is but a case of gravitation, and we are abundantly accustomed to see the force of gravity counteracted. Every fact of that nature which we ever saw or heard of, is pro tanto an obstacle to the formation of the inseparable association which would make a violation of the law of gravity inconceivable to us. Resemblance is a principle of association, as well as contiguity: and however contradictory a supposition may be to our experience in hâc materiâ, if our experience in aliâ materiâ furnishes us with types even distantly resembling what the supposed phænomenon would be if realized, the associations thus formed will generally prevent the specific association from becoming so intense and irresistible, as to disable our imaginative faculty from embodying the supposition in a form moulded on one or other of those types.^*

Again, says Mr. Mansel, “experience has uniformly presented to me a horse’s body in conjunction with a horse’s head, and a man’s head with a man’s body; just as experience has uniformly presented to me space inclosed within a pair of curved lines and not within a pair of straight lines:” yet I have no difficulty in imagining a centaur, but cannot imagine a space inclosed by two straight lines.

I answer:—Because our experience furnishes us with a thousand models on which to frame the conception of a centaur, and with none on which to frame that of two straight lines inclosing a space. Nature, as known in our experience, is uniform in its laws, but extremely varied in its combinations. The combination of a horse’s body with a human head has nothing, primâ facie, to make any wide distinction between it and any of the numberless varieties which we find in animated nature. To a common, even if not to a scientific mind, it is within the limits of the variations in our experience. Every similar variation which we have seen or heard of, is a help towards conceiving this particular one; and tends to form an association, not of fixity but of variability, which frustrates the formation of an inseparable association between a human head and a human body exclusively. We know of so many different heads, united to so many different bodies, that we have little difficulty in imagining any head in combination with any body. Nay, the mere mobility of objects in space is a fact so universal in our experience, that we easily conceive any object whatever occupying the place of any other; we imagine without difficulty a horse with his head removed, and a human head put in its place. But what model does our experience afford on which to frame, or what elements from which to construct, the conception of two straight lines inclosing a space? There are no counter-associations in that case, and consequently the primary association, being founded on an experience beginning from birth, and never for many minutes intermitted in our waking hours, easily becomes inseparable. Had but experience afforded a case of ⁱpersistentⁱ illusion, in which two straight lines after intersecting had appeared again to approach, the counter-association formed might have been sufficient to render such a supposition imaginable, and defeat the supposed necessity of thought. In the case of parallel lines, the laws of perspective do present such an illusion: they do, to the eye, appear to meet in both directions, and consequently to inclose a space: and by supposing that we had no access to the evidence which proves that they do not really meet, an ingenious thinker, whom I formerly quoted, was able to give the idea of a constitution of nature in which all mankind might have believed that two straight lines could inclose a space.^[*] That we are unable to believe or imagine it in our present circumstances, needs no other explanation than the laws of association afford: for the case unites all the elements of the closest, intensest, and most inseparable association, with the greatest freedom from conflicting counter-associations which can be found within the conditions of human life.^*

In all the instances of phænomena invariably conjoined which fail to create necessities of thought, I am satisfied it would be found that the case is wanting in some of the conditions required by the Association psychology, as essential to the formation of an association really inseparable. It is the more to be wondered at that Mr. Mansel should not have perceived the easy answer which could be given to his argument, since he himself comes very near to giving the same explanation of many impossibilities of thought, which is given by the Association theory. “We can only,” he says, “conceive in thought what we have experienced in presentation;”^† and no other reason is necessary for our being unable to conceive a thing, than that we have never experienced it. He even holds that the stock example of a necessity of thought, the belief in the uniformity of the course of nature, can be accounted for by experience, without any objective necessity at all. “We cannot conceive,” he says, “a course of nature without uniform succession, as we cannot conceive a being who sees without eyes or hears without ears; because we cannot, under existing circumstances, experience the necessary intuition. But such things may nevertheless exist; and under other circumstances, they might become objects of possible conception, the laws of the process of conception remaining unaltered.”^* I am aware that when Mr. Mansel uses the words Presentation and Intuition, he does not mean exclusively presentation by the senses. Nevertheless, if he had only written the preceding passage, no one would have suspected that he could have required any other cause for our inability to conceive a bilineal figure, than the impossibility of our perceiving one. It is sufficient, in his opinion, to constitute any propositions necessary, that “while our constitution and circumstances remain as they are, we cannot but think them.”^† It is superabundantly manifest that many propositions which all admit to be grounded only on experience, are necessary under this definition. Mr. Mansel even asserts a more complete dependence of our possibilities of thought upon our opportunities of experience than there appears to me to be ground for: since he affirms that “we can only conceive in thought what we have experienced in presentation,” while in reality it is sufficient that we should have experienced in presentation things bearing some similarity to it.

Dr. Ward, one of the ablest living defenders of the intuitional metaphysics, has, in the Dublin Review for October 1871, made a vigorous attack upon the doctrines of this chapter. His arguments in part coincide (though with a difference in the illustrations) with those already noticed, of Mr. Mansel: several of them, however, are distinct: and as I believe that in answering them, I am answering the best that is likely to be said by any future champion, I will take up Dr. Ward’s points one by one.

Not denying the validity of this distinction, I maintain that it does not affect the argument; because the one necessity is always proved by the other. The evidence always given, and the only evidence which I believe can be given, that we must think anything as necessary, is that we necessarily think it. This, under various names, a Fundamental Law of Belief, the Inconceivability of the Opposite, and so on, is the staple of the Intuitionist argument. Surely, if I disprove the necessity of thinking the thing at all, I disprove that it must be thought as necessary. What other proof can be given of the necessity of a truth, I confess myself ignorant. The consensus of mankind will not do, since that is disproved by being disputed; and Dr. Ward’s argument, that a truth must be independent of experience if it can be deduced from the conception, has been met by showing that it is deduced from the conception only after experience has put it there.

[* ]As lately as the year 1864 has been published the first work (I believe) in the French language, which recognises the Association Psychology in its modern developments: an able and instructive Etude sur l’Association des Idées [Paris: Durand, 1864], by M. P. M. Mervoyer. aSince then, the excellent introductory discourses prefixed by M. Cazelles to his translations from the English psychologists [see, e.g., “Introduction du traducteur,” in Herbert Spencer, Les premiers principes, 3rd ed. (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1883), pp. i-lxxx], and the remarkable work of M. Taine, De l’Intelligence [2 vols., Paris: Hachette, 1870], have, it is to be hoped, permanently naturalized the Association Psychology among French thinkers and students.a

[* ]In this Dissertation [D***], which originally broke off abruptly, but the conclusion of which has recently been supplied from the author’s papers, he attempts to simplify the theory of Association; reducing Association by Resemblance, not indeed to Association by Contiguity, but to that combined with an elementary law, for the first time expressly laid down by Sir W. Hamilton, though implied in all Association and in all Memory: viz., that a present sensation or thought suggests the remembrance of what he calls the same sensation or thought (meaning one exactly similar) experienced at a former time. This leaves Resemblance of simple sensations as a distinct principle of association, the foundation of all the rest, while it resolves resemblance of complex phenomena into that simple principle combined with the law of Contiguity.

By virtue of this speculation. Sir W. Hamilton thinks it possible to reduce Association to a single law: “Those thoughts suggest each other, which had previously constituted parts of the same entire or total act of cognition.” (Lectures, Vol. II, p. 238, and the corresponding passages of the Dissertation [see, e.g., p. 912].) This appears to me, I confess, far from a happy effort of generalization; for there is no possibility of bringing under it the elementary case of suggestion, which our author has the merit of being the first to put into scientific language. The sweet taste of to-day, and the similar sweet taste of a week ago which it reminds me of, have not “previously constituted parts of the same act of cognition;” unless we take literally the expression by which they are spoken of as the same taste, though they are no more the same taste than two men are the same man if they happen to be exactly alike. It is a further objection, that the attempted simplification, even if otherwise correct, would merely unite two clear notions into one obscure one; for the notion of feelings which suggest one another because they resemble, or because they have been experienced together, is universally intelligible, while that of forming parts of the same act of cognition involves all the metaphysical difficulties which surround the ideas of Unity, Totality, and Parts.

After thus, as he fancies, reducing all the phænomena of Association to a single law, Sir W. Hamilton asks, how is this law itself explained? and justly observes that it may be an ultimate law, and that ultimate laws are necessarily unexplainable. But he nevertheless quotes, with some approbation, an attempt by a German writer, H. Schmid, to explain it by an à priori theory of the human mind, which may be recommended to notice as a choice specimen of a school of German metaphysicians who have remained several centuries behind the progress of philosophical enquiry, having never yet felt the influence of the Baconian reform. See Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 240-3 [and Heinrich Schmid, Versuch einer Metaphysik der inneren Natur (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1834), pp. 242-4].

[b-b]651, 652 contrary?

[* ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 144.

[* ]Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Vol. I, pp. 68-73. [Quoted by Hamilton, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 146-9.]

[† ]Ibid., p. 75. [Not quoted by Hamilton.]

[c-c]651, 652 to

[[*] ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 146.

[* ]Ibid., pp. 168-72.

[† ]According to the doctrine of all advanced psychologists, to which Sir W. Hamilton gives an express adhesion, it is impossible to have a consciousness of darkness without having had a consciousness of light. Besides, it is a notorious optical fact that a completely black object occupying the whole sphere of vision is invisible; it reflects no light. Blackness, therefore, (the complete blackness of absolute darkness,) is not a sensation, but the total absence of sensation; it is, in fact, nothing at all; and to say that a person born blind cannot imagine extension without clothing it with nothing at all, is to assert something not very intelligible. In the case of a person who has become blind, it might have a meaning; for blackness to him, like darkness to us, does not stand for mere inability to see, but for the usual effort to see, not followed by the usual consequence.

[[†] ]Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 3 vols., Vol. I (London: Strahan and Cadell; Edinburgh: Creech, 1792), p. 341; quoted by Hamilton, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 161-2.

[* ][72] In one of the unfinished dissertations left among his papers, and intended for his edition of Reid (in which it now stands as Note E) Sir W. Hamilton did attempt to disprove the doctrine that our incapacity to conceive colour without extension is an effect of association. His arguments (pp. 919, 920), are first, that of D’Alembert (discussed in a former chapter), that when two colours meet we must be conscious of the line which separates them; and the junction, therefore, of two colours cannot be conceived apart from extension. But suppose that we are only perceiving a single colour, which occupies the whole field of vision: our invariably seeing this as extended cannot be explained by something which only happens when we see two colours; unless the impression received from the two adheres to the one by association. Sir W. Hamilton, therefore, is reduced to say that the field of vision “has a right and a left, an upper and an under side, and may be divided into halves, quarters, &c., indefinitely,” an argument which begs the question, since it assumes that the homogeneously coloured field is already perceived as composed of parts, that is, as extended.

Sir W. Hamilton’s other argument is that “we cannot be conscious of a colour without being conscious of that colour in contrast to, and therefore out of, another colour,—without, therefore, being conscious of the extended.” This seems an assumption without grounds. If a single colour occupies the whole field of vision, it can surely be recognised as colour. The contrast, which is essential to consciousness, needs not be between one colour and another; it may be between colour and the absence of sensation, or between colour and a sensation of some other sense. I am supposing the sensation of colour to be intermittent; for if it were constant, I admit that it would cease to be felt at all.

The converse incapacity to conceive extension without colour, Sir W. Hamilton deals with very summarily (p. 917), by saying that there is no object of vision, either actual or conceivable, which is not coloured. This is the very explanation given by the Association theory. All objects of vision are coloured, counting black as a colour, which, when it stands in contrast with positive colours, we may legitimately do; by the laws of Association, therefore, what is always seen as coloured is always conceived as coloured. In combating, as he thinks, the Association theory, Sir W. Hamilton is obliged to have recourse to it.

[[*] ]See Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longman, et al., 1857-74), Vol. I, p. 205 (Bk. I, Aph. 104).

[* ]Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 149-50. Those who are acquainted with Mr. Bailey’s attempt to disprove Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, will be reminded by this passage of an exactly similar argument employed by that able thinker and writer, to prove the intuitive character of what philosophers almost unanimously consider as the acquired perceptions of sight. [See Bailey, A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, pp. 105-17.] I have given the same answer to Mr. Bailey on another occasion, which I give to Sir W. Hamilton here. [See Mill, “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,” in Essays on Philosophy and the Classics, Collected Works, Vol. XI, pp. 257 ff.]

[[*] ]See p. 211 above.

[* ]See his Inquiry into the Human Mind, Chap. v, §§ 2 and 8; Chap. vi, §§ 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 19; Intellectual Powers, Essay II, Chaps. xvi and xvii.

[d-d]651, 652, 67 and a more . . . discourse;

[[*] ]See Analysis, Vol. I, pp. 40-82 (Chaps. ii-iii).

[* ]Discussions, Appendix I[A] on Causality, p. 615.

[e-e]+72

[f-f]+72

[[*] ]Ibid.

[† ]Lectures, Vol. II, p. 191.

[‡ ]Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 74.

[§ ]Discussions, [App. I(A),] p. 615.

[[†] ]See Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, p. 462.

[* ][72] Dr. Ward ([“Mr. Mill’s Denial of Necessary Truth,”] p. 291) takes exception to these instances, as exemplifying not a necessity of thought but a necessity of feeling—which has never been affirmed to prove an objective law, or an à priori connexion between ideas. I answer that what I sought to prove by the instances, was that two ideas may be “so knit together by association as to be practically inseparable.” And I added, not that a necessity of feeling proves a necessity of thought, but that under certain conditions it would generate one. If the person in whose mind a given spot is associated with terrors, had entirely forgotten the fact by which it came to be so; and if the rest of mankind, or even only a great number of them, felt the same terror on coming to the same place, and were equally unable to account for it; there would certainly grow up a conviction that the place had a natural quality of terribleness, which would probably fix itself in the belief that the place was under a curse, or was the abode of some invisible object of terror. Feelings common to many persons, which are at once irresistible and unaccountable, almost always pass into equivalent judgments and beliefs. Indeed, this is the precise way in which the fact of our sensations is translated into belief in an external world; and we should, in the case supposed, seem to have the same evidence of the terrific quality, which we have of any of the qualities of objects.

[† ][67] I find it necessary here to correct a misunderstanding to which I never should have suspected myself to be liable. Dr. M‘Cosh employs nearly the whole of his ninth chapter (Judgment or Comparison) in protesting against the doctrine, that an inseparable association necessarily produces belief; and concludes with a solemn appeal to the young to raise themselves above the influence of mere association, and learn “that it is our duty to found our beliefs on a previous judgment” and “to base our beliefs on an inspection of realities and actualities.” ([Examination,] pp. 214-15.) In all of which, aimed as it is at myself, Dr. M‘Cosh is preaching not only to a person already converted, but to an actual missionary of the same doctrine. I have certainly called attention [see pp. 75 and 145n above] to the important psychological truth, not unrecognised by Dr. M‘Cosh, that a strong mental association between two facts, even short of inseparability, has a great tendency to make us believe in a connexion between the facts themselves; but I thought that if there ever had been a writer who was assiduous in warning people against this tendency (to which, in my Logic [Collected Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 750ff. (Bk. V, Chap. iii, §3)], I have given a conspicuous place in the enumeration of Fallacies) and exhorting them to ground their beliefs exclusively on the evidence, that writer was myself. Dr. M‘Cosh’s work is unimpeachable in point of candour and fairness; but this instance shows how little he is to be relied on for correctly apprehending the maxims and tendencies of a philosophy different from his own.

gDr. M‘Cosh, in his reply, interprets the phraseology of this Note as if I had accused him of “preaching” in some disparaging sense. [“Mill’s Reply,” p. 356.] I was merely alluding to the almost proverbial expression, “prêcher un converti,” which I thought that Dr. M‘Cosh would have understood. [Cf. I Corinthians, 1:21.]g

[[*] ]See p. 91 above.

[* ]Prolegomena Logica, beginning of Chap. iv, pp. 90-1.

[h-h]651what are

[* ]Ibid., pp. 96-7.

[† ][67] Mr. Mahaffy has misunderstood the meaning of this statement, which is certainly too incautiously expressed. (P. xxiv.) The phænomena which must have been simultaneous or immediately successive to create an inseparable association, need not have been actual perceptions: an association, and even an inseparable association, may be created between two ideas, if they have been habitually present together, or in immediate succession, merely in thought. This truth is so universally recognised by writers on Association, that it did not seem to require statement. But the succession which generates an inseparable association, must, either in fact or in thought, be an immediate succession; or rather, one without any conscious or perceptible interval.

[[*] ]Prolegomena Logica, p. 97.

[* ][67] In an able manuscript critique on “the Experience Hypothesis” which has been communicated to me, the familiar truth that fire burns is given as an example of an uniform sequence which does not generate a necessity of thought. No one (the writer observes) will say that we have a more frequent perception of the fact that parallel lines do not inclose a space, than we have of the fact that fire burns: yet we can without difficulty imagine human beings remaining unburnt in a fiery furnace; nay, we may even believe it, if we admit the supposition either of magic or of a miracle. No doubt: but this is fully explained by the counter-associations. Though we have never seen a human being in the fire unburnt, being in the fire is not inseparably associated with destruction, for we have seen abundance of other objects, immersed in intense fire, yet resisting its action. The conception of a man in the same position, is within the limits of the power characteristic of imagination, of varying (only slightly in this instance) our mental combinations of the elements given by experience. The writer asks, why then cannot imagination produce all combinations? The only ones it cannot produce are precisely those which are prevented by associations really irresistible, associations that have never been counteracted by counter-associations, and by the operation of which, elements with which certain combinations in imagination would be incompatible, are forced into our mental representations.

The same writer says, we believe by a necessity of thought that a tangent touches a circle at one point only, yet this necessary belief, far from being the result of uniform experience, is contradicted by uniform experience, since the tangents and circles of experience touch one another at more than one point—coalesce in an appreciable portion of their extent. I answer, that the circle in our imagination is copied from those only, among the circles of our experience, in which sense can detect no variation from the definition of a circle, i.e. whose radii are not perceptibly unequal. Now, if the radii are, to our perception, equal, a line which is to our perception straight, will touch the circle in what is to our perception a single point. And there are many such circles, not perhaps in nature, but certainly in the products of mechanical art. The belief therefore does not conflict, but accords, with an uniform experience. And even on the contrary supposition—even if there were no circles in experience but such as are appreciably different from the geometrical ideal, our senses would no less inform us that in the degree in which a visible circle and straight line approximate to the definitions, the extent of their contact with one another approximates to a point: which, by the principles of Induction, makes the ultimate truth as much a truth of experience, as if it were directly cognised by the senses.

[* ]Prolegomena Logica, pp. 99-100.

[i-i]+67, 72

[[*] ]Stephen; see above, p. 72n.

[* ][67] Mr. Mahaffy says that I need not have gone beyond our present world for illusions which, according to my doctrine, ought to have made it possible to conceive something that is contradictory to a mathematical axiom: and proceeds to mention illusions the illusory character of which is at once seen, from the immediate accessibility of the evidence which disproves them; double vision, and the apparent crookedness of a stick in the water. As a protection against future irrelevances of this kind, I have inserted in the text the word “persistent” before “illusion.” [Seei-i above.] Mr. Mahaffy argues as if the illusions in our experience never got corrected by contrary experience, but would permanently deceive us unless overridden by an à priori conviction. “Every child,” he says, “who looks down a long street, sees two parallel right lines converging, and we very rarely proceed to verify or question the result. . . . Most assuredly no child has verified for himself that the very long parallel lines which he has met, and sees to be equidistant, as far as he can easily judge, and which he sees do not change their direction suddenly—that these parallel lines do not meet.” (Pp. xxvii-xxviii.) Does a child, then, never walk down a street? or does Mr. Mahaffy think it necessary to the child’s enlightenment that he should walk down every street?

[† ]Prolegomena Logica, p. 112n.

[* ]Ibid., pp. 149-50.

[† ]Ibid., p. 150.

[* ]As lately as the year 1864 has been published the first work (I believe) in the French language, which recognises the Association Psychology in its modern developments: an able and instructive Etude sur l’Association des Idées [Paris: Durand, 1864], by M. P. M. Mervoyer. aSince then, the excellent introductory discourses prefixed by M. Cazelles to his translations from the English psychologists [see, e.g., “Introduction du traducteur,” in Herbert Spencer, Les premiers principes, 3rd ed. (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1883), pp. i-lxxx], and the remarkable work of M. Taine, De l’Intelligence [2 vols., Paris: Hachette, 1870], have, it is to be hoped, permanently naturalized the Association Psychology among French thinkers and students.a

[† ][67] I find it necessary here to correct a misunderstanding to which I never should have suspected myself to be liable. Dr. M‘Cosh employs nearly the whole of his ninth chapter (Judgment or Comparison) in protesting against the doctrine, that an inseparable association necessarily produces belief; and concludes with a solemn appeal to the young to raise themselves above the influence of mere association, and learn “that it is our duty to found our beliefs on a previous judgment” and “to base our beliefs on an inspection of realities and actualities.” ([Examination,] pp. 214-15.) In all of which, aimed as it is at myself, Dr. M‘Cosh is preaching not only to a person already converted, but to an actual missionary of the same doctrine. I have certainly called attention [see pp. 75 and 145n above] to the important psychological truth, not unrecognised by Dr. M‘Cosh, that a strong mental association between two facts, even short of inseparability, has a great tendency to make us believe in a connexion between the facts themselves; but I thought that if there ever had been a writer who was assiduous in warning people against this tendency (to which, in my Logic [Collected Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 750ff. (Bk. V, Chap. iii, §3)], I have given a conspicuous place in the enumeration of Fallacies) and exhorting them to ground their beliefs exclusively on the evidence, that writer was myself. Dr. M‘Cosh’s work is unimpeachable in point of candour and fairness; but this instance shows how little he is to be relied on for correctly apprehending the maxims and tendencies of a philosophy different from his own.

gDr. M‘Cosh, in his reply, interprets the phraseology of this Note as if I had accused him of “preaching” in some disparaging sense. [“Mill’s Reply,” p. 356.] I was merely alluding to the almost proverbial expression, “prêcher un converti,” which I thought that Dr. M‘Cosh would have understood. [Cf. I Corinthians, 1:21.]g

[aSince then, the excellent introductory discourses prefixed by M. Cazelles to his translations from the English psychologists [see, e.g., “Introduction du traducteur,” in Herbert Spencer, Les premiers principes, 3rd ed. (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1883), pp. i-lxxx], and the remarkable work of M. Taine, De l’Intelligence [2 vols., Paris: Hachette, 1870], have, it is to be hoped, permanently naturalized the Association Psychology among French thinkers and students.a]+72

[gDr. M‘Cosh, in his reply, interprets the phraseology of this Note as if I had accused him of “preaching” in some disparaging sense. [“Mill’s Reply,” p. 356.] I was merely alluding to the almost proverbial expression, “prêcher un converti,” which I thought that Dr. M‘Cosh would have understood. [Cf. I Corinthians, 1:21.]g]+72