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 XV

Sir William Hamilton’s Doctrine of Unconscious Mental Modifications

the laws of obliviscence noticed in the preceding chapter, are closely connected with a question raised by Sir W. Hamilton, and discussed at some length in his Lectures: Whether there are unconscious states of mind: or, as he expresses it in the eighteenth Lecture, “Whether the mind exerts energies, and is the subject of modifications, of neither of which it is conscious.” Our author pronounces decidedly for the affirmative, in opposition to most English philosophers, by whom, he says, “the supposition of an unconscious action or passion of the mind, has been treated as something either unintelligible or absurd;”^* and in opposition, no less, to ^aat least one expression^a of opinion by our author himself.^†b This is one of the numerous inconsistencies in Sir W. Hamilton’s professed opinions, which a close examination and comparison of his speculations brings to light, and which show how far he was in reality from being the systematic thinker which, on a first impression of his writings, he seems to be. In one point of view, these self-contradictions are fully as much an honour as a discredit to him; since they frequently arise from his having acutely seized some important psychological truth, greatly in advance of his general mode of thought, and not having brought the remainder of his philosophy up to it. Instead of having reasoned out a consistent scheme of thought, of which every part fits in with the other parts, he seems to have explored the deeper regions of the mind only at the points which had some direct connexion with the conclusions he had adopted on a few special questions of philosophy: and from his different explorations he occasionally, as in the present case, brought back different results. But, in the place where he treats directly of this particular question, he decides unequivocally for the existence of latent mental modifications. The subject is in itself not unimportant, and his treatment of it will serve as an example by which to estimate his powers of thought in the province of pure psychology.

Sir W. Hamilton recognises three different kinds, or, as he calls them, degrees, of mental latency. Two of these will be seen, on examination, to be entirely irrelevant.

The first kind of latency, is that which belongs to all the parts of our knowledge which we are not thinking of at the very moment. “I know a science, or language, not merely while I make a temporary use of it, but inasmuch as I can apply it when and how I will. Thus the infinitely greater part of our spiritual treasures lies always beyond the sphere of consciousness, hid in the obscure recesses of the mind.”^* But this stored-up knowledge, I submit, is not an “unconscious action or passion of the mind.” It is not a mental state, but a capability of being put into a mental state. When I am not thinking of a thing, it is not present to my mind at all. It may become present when something happens to recall it; but it is not latently present now; no more than any physical thing which I may have hoarded up. I may have a stock of food with which to nourish myself hereafter; but my body is not in a state of latent nourishment by the food which is in store. I have the power to walk across the room, though I am sitting in my chair; but we should hardly call this power a latent act of walking. What required to be shown was, not that I may possess knowledge without recalling it, but that it can be recalled to my mind, I remaining unconscious of it all the time.^†

He then cites from various authors some of the curious recorded cases “in which the extinct memory of whole languages was suddenly restored, and, what is even still more remarkable, in which the faculty was exhibited of actually repeating, in known or unknown tongues, passages which were never within the grasp of conscious memory in the normal state.”^* These, however, are not cases of latent states of mind, but of a very different thing—of latent memory. It is not the mental impressions that are latent, but the power of reproducing them. Every one admits, without any apparatus of proof, that we may have powers and susceptibilities of which we are not conscious; but these are capabilities of being affected, not actual affections. I have the susceptibility of being poisoned by prussic acid, but this susceptibility is not a present phænomenon, constantly taking place in my body without my perceiving it. The capability of being poisoned is not a present modification of my body; nor is the capability I perhaps have of recollecting, should I become delirious, something which I have forgotten while sane, a present modification of my mind. These are future contingent states, not present actual ones. The real question is, can I undergo a present actual mental modification without being aware of it?

We come, therefore, to the third case, which is the only one really in point, and enquire, whether there are, in our ordinary mental life, “mental modifications, i.e. mental activities and passivities, of which we are unconscious, but which manifest their existence by effects of which we are conscious?” Sir W. Hamilton decides that there are: and even “that what we are conscious of is constructed out of what we are not conscious of;” that “the sphere of our conscious modifications is only a small circle in the centre of a far wider sphere of action and passion, of which we are only conscious through its effects.”^*

His first example is taken from the perception of external objects. The facts which he adduces are these. 1st. Every minimum visibile is composed of still smaller parts, which are not separately capable of being objects of vision; “they are, severally and apart, to consciousness as zero.” Yet every one of these parts “must by itself have produced in us a certain modification, real though unperceived,”^† since the effect of the whole can only be the sum of the separate effects of the parts. 2nd. “When we look at a distant forest, we perceive a certain expanse of green. Of this, as an affection of our organism, we are clearly and distinctly conscious. Now, the expanse of which we are conscious is evidently made up of parts of which we are not conscious. No leaf, perhaps no tree, may be separately visible. But the greenness of the forest is made up of the greenness of the leaves; that is, the total impression of which we are conscious, is made up of an infinitude of small impressions of which we are not conscious.” 3rd. Our sense of hearing tells the same tale. There is a minimum audibile; the faintest sound capable of being heard. This sound, however, must be made up of parts, each of which must affect us in some manner, otherwise the whole which they compose could not affect us. When we hear the distant murmur of the sea,

It is a curious question how Sir W. Hamilton failed to perceive that an unauthorized assumption has slipped into his argument. Because the minimum visibile consists of parts (as we know through the microscope), and because the minimum visibile produces an impression on our sense of sight, he jumps to the conclusion that each one of the parts does so too. But it is a supposition consistent with what we know of nature, that a certain quantity of the cause may be a necessary condition to the production of any of the effect. The minimum visibile would on that supposition be this certain quantity; and the two halves into which we can conceive it divided, though each contributing its half to the formation of that which produces vision, would not each separately produce half of the vision, the concurrence of both being necessary to produce any vision whatever. And so of the distant murmur of the sea: the agency which produces it is made up of the rolling of many different waves, each of which, if sufficiently near, would affect us with a perceptible sound; but at the distance at which they are, it may require the rolling of many waves to excite an amount of vibration in the air sufficient, when enfeebled by extension, to produce any effect whatever on our auditory nerves, and, through them, on our mind. The supposition that each wave affects the mind separately because their aggregate affects it, is therefore, to say the least, an unproved hypothesis.

The counter-hypothesis, that in order to the production of any quantity whatever of the effect, there is needed a certain minimum quantity of the cause, it is the more extraordinary that Sir W. Hamilton should have overlooked, since he has not only himself adopted a similar supposition in some other cases,^* but it is a necessary part of his theory in this very case. He will not admit as possible, that less than a certain quantity of the external agent, produces no mental modification; but he himself supposes that less than a certain quantity of mental modification produces no consciousness. Yet if his à priori argument is valid for the one sequence, it is valid for the other. If the effect of a whole must be the sum of similar effects produced by all its parts, and if every state of consciousness is the effect of a modification of mind which is made up of an infinitude of small parts, the state of consciousness also must be made up of an infinitude of small states of consciousness, produced by these infinitely small mental modifications respectively. We are not at liberty to adopt the one theory for the first link in the double succession, and the other theory for the other link. Having shown no reason why either theory should be preferred, our author would have acted more philosophically in not deciding between them. But to accommodate half the fact to one theory and half to the other, without assigning any reason for the difference, is to exceed all rational license of scientific hypothesis.

After these examples from Perception, our author passes to cases of Association: and as he here states some important mental phænomena well and clearly, I shall quote him at some length.

Though our author says that the facts here described can only be explained on the supposition that the intervening ideas never came into consciousness at all, he is aware that another explanation is conceivable, namely that they were momentarily in consciousness, but were forgotten, agreeably to the law of Obliviscence already spoken of: which, in fact, is the explanation given by Stewart. The same two explanations may be given of his final example, drawn from a class of phænomena also governed by laws of association, “our acquired dexterities and habits.”^* When we learn any manual operation, suppose that of playing on the pianoforte, the operation is at first a series of conscious volitions, followed by movements of the fingers: but when, by sufficient repetition, a certain facility has been acquired, the motions take place without our being able to recognise afterwards that we have been conscious of the volitions which preceded them. In this case, we may either hold with Sir W. Hamilton, that the volitions (to which ^cmust^c be added the feelings of muscular contraction, and of the contact of our fingers with the keys) are not, in the practised performer, present to consciousness at all; or, with Stewart, that he is conscious of them, but for so brief an interval, that he has no remembrance of them afterwards.^[*] The motions, in this case, are said by Hartley to have become secondarily automatic,^[†] which our author supposes to be a third opinion, but ^dthe difference, if difference it was, between this and Stewart’s theory, is not material to the present enquiry^d .

Let us now consider the reasons given by Sir W. Hamilton for preferring his explanation to Stewart’s. The first and principal of them is, that to suppose a state of consciousness which is not remembered, “violates the whole analogy of consciousness.” “Consciousness supposes memory; and we are only conscious as we are able to connect and contrast one instance of our intellectual existence with another.”^† “Of consciousness, however faint, there must be some memory, however short. But this is at variance with the phænomenon, for the ideas A and C may precede and follow each other without any perceptible interval, and without any the feeblest memory of B.”^‡

Here again I am obliged, not without wonder, to point out the inconclusive character of the argument. When Sir W. Hamilton says that consciousness implies memory, he means, as his words show, that we are only conscious by means of change; by discriminating the present state from a state immediately preceding. Granting this, as with proper explanations I do, all it proves is, that any conscious state of mind must be remembered long enough to be compared with the mental state immediately following it. The state of mind, therefore, which he supposes to have been latent, must, if it passed into consciousness, have been remembered until one other mental modification had supervened; which there is assuredly not a particle of evidence that it was not: for our having totally forgotten it a minute after, is no evidence, but a common consequence of the laws of Obliviscence. It is perhaps true that all consciousness must be followed by a memory, but I see no reason why an evanescent state of consciousness must be followed, if by any, by a more than evanescent memory. “It is a law of mind,” our author says further on, “that the intensity of the present consciousness determines the vivacity of the future memory. Vivid consciousness, long memory; faint consciousness, short memory.”^* Well, then: in the case supposed, the intensity of consciousness is at ^ea^e minimum, therefore on his own showing the duration of memory should be so too. If the consciousness itself is too fleeting to fix the attention, so, à fortiori, must the remembrance of it. In reality, the remembrance is often evanescent when the consciousness is by no means so, but is so distinct and prolonged as to be in no danger whatever of being supposed latent. Take the case of a player on the pianoforte while still a learner, and before the succession of volitions has attained the rapidity which practice ultimately gives it. In this stage of progress there is, beyond all doubt, a conscious volition, anterior to the playing of each particular note. Yet has the player, when the piece is finished, the smallest remembrance of each of these volitions, as a separate fact? In like manner, have we, when we have finished reading a volume, the smallest memory of our successive volitions to turn the pages? On the contrary, we only know that we must have turned them, because, without doing so, we could not have read to the end. Yet these volitions were not latent: every time we turned over a leaf, we must have formed a conscious purpose of turning; but, the purpose having been instantly fulfilled, the attention was arrested in the process for too short a time to leave a more than momentary remembrance of it. The sensations of sight, touch, and the muscles, felt in turning the leaves, were as vivid at the moment as any of our ordinary sensible impressions which are only important to us as means to an end. But because they had no pleasurable or painful interest in themselves; because the interest they had as means passed away in the same instant by the attainment of the end; and because there was nothing to associate the act of reading with these particular sensations, rather than with other similar sensations formerly experienced; their trace in the memory was only momentary, unless something unusual and remarkable connected with the particular leaves turned over, detained them in remembrance.

If sensations which are evidently in consciousness may leave so brief a memory that they are not felt to leave any memory ^fwhatever^f , what wonder that the same should happen when the sensations are of so fugitive a character, that it can be debated whether they were in consciousness at all? However true it may be that there must be some memory wherever there is consciousness, what argument is this against a theory which supposes a low degree of consciousness, attended by just the degree of memory which properly belongs to it?

Imagine an argument in physics, corresponding to this in metaphysics. Some of my readers are probably acquainted with the important experiments of M. Pasteur, which ^gappear to^g have finally exploded the ancient hypothesis of Equivocal Generation, by showing that even the smallest microscopic animalcules are not produced in a medium from which their still more microscopic germs have been effectually excluded. What should we think of any one who deemed it a refutation of M. Pasteur, that the germs are not discernible by the naked eye? who maintained that invisible animalcules must proceed, if from germs at all, from visible germs? This reasoning would be an exact parallel to that of Sir W. Hamilton.

The only other argument of our author against Stewart’s doctrine, is confined to the phænomenon of acquired habits, in which case, he says, the supposition of real but forgotten consciousness “would constrain our assent to the most monstrous conclusions:” since, in reading aloud, if the matter be uninteresting, we may be carrying on a train of thought (even of “serious meditation”) on a totally different subject, and this, too, “without distraction or fatigue:” which, he says, would be impossible, if we were separately conscious of, or (as he rather gratuitously alters the idea), separately attentive to, “each least movement in either process.”^* Sir W. Hamilton here loses sight of a part of his own philosophy, which deserves his forgetfulness the less as it is a very valuable part. In one of the most important psychological discussions in his Lectures,^† he forcibly maintains that we are capable of carrying on several distinct series of states of consciousness at once; and goes so far as to contend not only that our consciousness, but what is more than consciousness, our “concentrated consciousness, or attention,”^[*] is capable of being divided among as many as six simultaneous impressions.^* Returning to the same subject in another place, he quotes from a modern French philosopher, Cardaillac (in a work entitled Etudes Elémentaires de Philosophie),^[*] an excellent and conclusive passage, showing the great multitude of states more or less conscious, which often coexist in the mind, and help to determine the subsequent trains of thought or feeling; and illustrating the causes that determine which of these shall in any particular case predominate over the rest.^† Our consciousness, therefore, according to Sir W. Hamilton, ought not to have much difficulty in finding room for the two simultaneous series of states which he quarrels with Stewart’s hypothesis for requiring: and we are not bound, under the penalty of “monstrous conclusions,” to consider one of these series as latent. Sir W. Hamilton indeed says truly, that “the greater the number of objects to which our consciousness is simultaneously extended, the smaller is the intensity with which it is able to consider each;”^‡ but the intensity of consciousness necessary for reading aloud with correctness in a language familiar to us, not being very considerable, a great part of our power of attention is disposable for “the train of serious meditation”^[†] which is supposed to be passing through our minds at the same time. For all this, I would not advise any person (unless one with the peculiar gift ascribed to Julius Cæsar)^[‡] to stake anything on the substantial value of a train of thought carried on by him while reading aloud a book on another subject. Such thoughts, I imagine, are always the better for being revised when the mind has nothing else to do than to consider them.

It is strange, but characteristic, that Sir W. Hamilton cannot be depended on for remembering, in one part of his speculations, the best things which he has said in another; not even the truths into which he has thrown so much of the powers of his mind, as to have made them, in an especial manner, his own.

Notwithstanding the failure of Sir W. Hamilton to adduce a single valid reason for preferring his hypothesis to that of Stewart, it does not follow that he is not, at least in certain cases, in the right. The difference between the two opinions being beyond the reach of experiment, and both being equally consistent with the facts which present themselves spontaneously, it is not easy to obtain sure grounds for deciding between them. The essential part of the phænomenon is, that we have, or once had, many sensations, and that many ideas do, or once did, enter into our trains of thought, which sensations and ideas we afterwards, in the words of James Mill, are “under an acquired incapacity of attending to:”^* and that when our incapacity of attending to them has become complete, it is, to our subsequent consciousness, exactly as if we did not have them at all: we are incapable, by any self-examination, of being aware of them. We know that these lost sensations and ideas, for lost they appear to be, leave traces of having existed; they continue to be operative in introducing other ideas by association. Either, therefore, they have been consciously present long enough to call up associations, but not long enough to be remembered a few moments later; or they have been, as Sir W. Hamilton supposes, unconsciously present; or they have not been present at all, but something instead of them, capable of producing the same effects. I am myself inclined to agree with Sir W. Hamilton, and to admit his unconscious mental modifications, in the only shape in which I can attach any very distinct meaning to them, namely, unconscious modifications of the nerves. There are much stronger facts in support of this hypothesis than those to which Sir W. Hamilton appeals—facts which it is far more difficult to reconcile with the doctrine that the sensations are felt, but felt too momentarily to leave a recognisable impression in memory. In the case, for instance, of a soldier who receives a wound in battle, but in the excitement of the moment is not aware of the fact, it is difficult not to believe that if the wound had been accompanied by the usual sensation, so vivid a feeling would have forced itself to be attended to and remembered. The supposition which seems most probable is, that the nerves of the particular part were affected as they would have been by the same cause in any other circumstances, but that, the nervous centres being intensely occupied with other impressions, the affection of the local nerves did not reach them, and no sensation was excited. In like manner, if we admit (what physiology is rendering more and more probable) that our mental feelings, as well as our sensations, have for their physical antecedents particular states of the nerves; it may well be believed that the apparently suppressed links in a chain of association, those which Sir W. Hamilton considers as latent, really are so; that they are not, even momentarily, felt; the chain of causation being continued only physically, by one organic state of the nerves succeeding another so rapidly that the state of mental consciousness appropriate to each is not produced. We have only to suppose, either that a nervous modification of too short duration does not produce any sensation or mental feeling at all, or that the rapid succession of different nervous modifications makes the feelings produced by them interfere with each other, and become confounded in one mass. The former of these suppositions is extremely probable, while of the truth of the latter we have positive proof. An example of it is the experiment which Sir W. Hamilton quoted from Mr. Mill, and which had been noticed before either of them by Hartley.^[*] It is known that the seven prismatic colours, combined in certain proportions, produce the white light of the solar ray. Now, if the seven colours are painted on spaces bearing the same proportion to one another as in the solar spectrum, and the coloured surface so produced is passed rapidly before the eyes, as by the turning of a wheel, the whole is seen as white. The physiological explanation of this phænomenon may be deduced from another common experiment. If a lighted torch, or a bar heated to luminousness, is waved rapidly before the eye, the appearance produced is that of a ribbon of light; which is universally understood to prove that the visual sensation persists for a certain short time after its cause has ceased. Now, if this happens with a single colour, it will happen with a series of colours: and if the wheel on which the prismatic colours have been painted, is turned with the same rapidity with which the torch was waved, each of the seven sensations of colour will last long enough to be contemporaneous with all the others, and they will naturally produce by their combination the same colour as if they had, from the beginning, been excited simultaneously. If anything similar to this obtains in our consciousness generally (and that it obtains in many cases of consciousness there can be no doubt) it will follow that whenever the organic modifications of our nervous fibres succeed one another at an interval shorter than the duration of the sensations or other feelings corresponding to them, those sensations or feelings will, so to speak, overlap one another, and becoming simultaneous instead of successive, will blend into a state of feeling, probably as unlike the elements out of which it is engendered, as the colour white is unlike the prismatic colours. And this may be the source of many of those states of internal or mental feeling which we cannot distinctly refer to a prototype in experience, our experience only supplying the elements from which, by this kind of mental chemistry, they are composed. The elementary feelings may then be said to be latently present, or to be present but not in consciousness. The truth, however, is that the feelings themselves are not present, consciously or latently, but that the nervous modifications which are their usual antecedents have been present, while the consequents have been frustrated, and another consequent has been produced instead.^*

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 338.

[a-a]651, 652, 67 isolated expressions

[† ][72] “Every act of mind is an act of consciousness” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 277). Another statement to the same effect which I erroneously quoted in former editions (ibid., p. 73) does not belong to Sir W. Hamilton. [See 272b below.]

[b]651, 652, 67 The following is one: “Every act of mind is an act of consciousness.”† [footnote:] †Ibid., Vol. II, p. 277. [text:] Here is another:‡ [footnote:] ‡Ibid., p. 73. [text:] “We must say of all our states of mind, whatever they may be, that it” (a state of mind) “can be nothing else than it is felt to be. Its very essence consists in being felt; and when it is not felt, it is not.”

[* ]Ibid., Vol. I, p. 339.

[† ]Sir W. Hamilton deliberately rejects this obvious distinction, and in his Lecture on Memory (Lect. xxx) maintains that all the knowledge we possess, whether we are thinking of it or not, is at all times present to us, though unconsciously. “This is certainly,” (he says) “an hypothesis, because whatever is out of consciousness can only be assumed; but it is an hypothesis which we are not only warranted, but necessitated by the phænomena, to establish.” (Ibid., Vol. II, p. 209.) This confident assertion is supported only by a passage from an author of whom the reader has already heard something, H. Schmid (Versuch einer Metaphysik); by whom, however, the conclusion is not elicited from “the phænomena,” but drawn, à priori, from the assertion that the act of knowledge is “an energy of the self-active powers of a subject one and indivisible; consequently a part of the ego must be detached or annihilated if a cognition once existent be again extinguished.” [Ibid., pp. 211-12.] This palpable begging of the whole point in dispute (which Schmid makes no scruple of propping up by half-a-dozen other arbitrary assumptions) of course makes it necessary to explain how anything can be forgotten; which Schmid resolves by declaring that nothing ever is; it merely passes into latency. Of all this, not a shadow of evidence is exhibited; anything being set down as fact, which can be educed from the idea of the Ego evolved by Schmid out of the depths of his moral consciousness. His style of philosophizing may be judged from the following specimen: “Every mental activity belongs to the one vital activity of mind in general; it is, therefore, indivisibly bound up with it, and can neither be torn from, nor abolished in it.” [Ibid., p. 213.] Therefore he has only to call every impression in memory a “mental activity” to prove that when we have once had it, we can never more get rid of it. If he had but happened to call it a mental act, it would have been all over with his argument; for there may surely be passing acts of one permanent activity. Schmid further argues, from the same premises, that feelings, volitions, and desires, are retained in the mind without the medium of memory, that is, we retain the states themselves, not the notions or remembrances of them: from which it follows, that I am at this moment desiring and willing to rise from my bed yesterday morning, and every previous morning since I began to have a will. Schmid has an easy answer to all attempts at explaining mental phænomena by physiological hypotheses, viz., that “Mind, howbeit conditioned by bodily relations, still ever preserves its self-activity and independence.” [Ibid., p. 218.] As if to determine whether it does so or not, was not the very point in dispute between him and the physiological hypotheses. These reasonings are quite worthy of Schmid; but it is extremely unworthy of Sir W. Hamilton to accept and endorse them.

[* ]Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 339-40.

[* ]Ibid., pp. 347, 348, 349.

[† ]Ibid., p. 350.

[‡ ]Ibid., p. 351.

[* ]“In the internal perception of a series of mental operations, a certain time, a certain duration, is necessary for the smallest section of continuous energy to which consciousness is competent. Some minimum of time must be admitted as the condition of consciousness.” (Ibid., p. 369.) And again: “It cannot certainly be said, that the minimum of sensation infers the maximum of perception; for perception always supposes a certain quantum of sensation.” (Ibid., Vol. II, p. 102.)

[* ]Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 352-3.

[* ]Ibid., p. 355.

[c-c]651, 652 may

[[*] ]See Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Vol. I, pp. 103-31.

[[†] ]See David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations, 2 pts. (Bath: Leake and Frederick; London: Hitch and Austen, 1749), Vol. I, pp. 108-9.

[d-d]651, 652, 67 it is not certain that Hartley meant anything at variance with Stewart’s theory

[† ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 354.

[‡ ]Ibid., p. 355.

[* ]Ibid., p. 368-9.

[e-e]651 the

[f-f]651, 652 at all

[g-g]+652, 67, 72

[* ]Ibid., p. 360.

[† ]Ibid., pp. 238-54.

[[*] ]Ibid., p. 360.

[* ]Ibid., p. 254.

[[*] ]Jean-Jacques Séverin de Cardaillac, Etudes élémentaires de philosophie, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1830), Vol. II, pp. 137-8.

[† ]Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 250-8. From this long exposition I shall only extract a single passage, but I recommend the whole of it to the attentive consideration of readers.

“Thus, if we appreciate correctly the phænomena of Reproduction or Reminiscence, we shall recognise, as an incontestable fact, that our thoughts suggest each other not one by one successively, as the order to which language is astricted might lead us to infer; but that the complement of circumstances under which we at every moment exist, awakens simultaneously a great number of thoughts; these it calls into the presence of the mind, either to place them at our disposal, if we find it requisite to employ them, or to make them co-operate in our deliberations, by giving them, according to our nature and our habits, an influence, more or less active, on our judgments and consequent acts.” (P. 258.)

[‡ ]Ibid., Vol. I, p. 237.

[[†] ]Ibid., p. 360.

[[‡] ]See Plutarch, Life of Cæsar, in Lives (Greek and English), trans. Bernadotte Perrin, 11 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1919), Vol. VII, p. 484 (XVII, §4).

[* ]Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Vol. I, p. 33.

[[*] ]Hamilton, Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 147-9; James Mill, Analysis, Vol. I, p. 68; Hartley, Observations on Man, Vol. I, p. 9.

[* ][67] These considerations may serve as an answer to Dr. M‘Cosh, when he maintains, with many other of the intuitive philosophers, that association cannot generate a mental state specifically distinct from the elements out of which it is composed; which amounts to a denial of the possibility of mental chemistry. [Examination, pp. 182-4.] I had thought that such an experiment as that of the wheel with the seven colours, in which seven sensations, following one another very rapidly, become, or at least generate, one sensation, and that one totally different from any of the seven, sufficiently proved the possibility of what Dr. M‘Cosh denies; but he writes as if he had never heard of that experiment. “I can discover,” he says, “no evidence that two sensations succeeding one another will ever be anything else than two sensations.” (Ibid., p. 185.) The analogous facts in the case of ideas cannot be appealed to, for they are the very matter disputed; but there is abundance of similar instances in sensation. Dropping succession of colours, let Dr. M‘Cosh look at an ordinary wheel revolving with the rapidity which is often seen in machinery, and he will have a sensation which is not one of rotatory motion at all, but a dizzy spectrum apparently stationary, with the exception of a slight degree of tremulous movement.

hDr. M‘Cosh, in his reply, says he was perfectly aware of the experiments of the luminous ring and the wheel with the seven colours. He does not seem to have known of the other fact which I mentioned, that a wheel may be in such rapid rotation as to seem stationary; for he offers instead of it “a wheel in rapid motion appearing stationary when made visible by instantaneous electric light,” of which he gives the true explanation that, seeing the wheel only for the instant, we do not really see it move. [“Mill’s Reply,” p. 354.] The wheel in my example is rotating in broad daylight.

But these examples of mental chemistry, being taken from sensation, are (says Dr. M‘Cosh) merely organic. He requires me to produce examples from purely mental affections. And how do we know that our mental affections are not also organic, having for their immediate antecedents states of the nerves and brain? This is not only possible, but the progress of science has rendered it almost certain, even to those who are far from being Materialists in the ordinary sense of the term. There are, however, abundant proofs that association can generate new mental affections. Let us take, as one of the obvious examples, the love of money. Does any one think that money has intrinsically, by its own nature, any more value to us than the first shining pebbles we pick up, except for the things it will purchase? Yet its association with these things not only makes it desired for itself, but creates in many minds a passionate love of it, far surpassing the desire they feel for any of the uses to which it can be put. Not only the love of money, but the love of acquisition, of possession, of accumulation, is a feeling created by association. What is desired for itself is the use and enjoyment of individual objects: the possession of a store of them is at first desired as a means to that; but after it has been long pursued as a means, it becomes itself an end—the object of the passion of appropriation, or property, a passion sui generis, and (as life has hitherto been carried on) one of the principal moving powers in human affairs. These, Dr. M‘Cosh may say, are feelings, and what I want is intellectual states; I desiderate examples of “the power of association to generate new ideas, and to produce belief.” [Ibid., p. 353.] As an example, then, of new ideas, take the idea of infinity. Infinity is not a fact of intuition, nor of consciousness. We do not perceive space (for example) to be infinite. But every object we see or touch, and every portion of space that we cognise, is cognised along with something beyond it. We hence become incapable of conceiving any object or space without something beyond; that is, we conceive space as infinite. And along with this new idea a belief is generated; for it has been, and is, the general belief of mankind, without any other evidence of it, that space is actually infinite. As a further example of a belief generated by association, take the acquired perceptions of sight. On the lowest estimate of these which is made by any psychologist, we spontaneously believe that we see much which we only infer: the ideas of the inferred facts are so blended by the power of association with the sensations which suggest them, that the ideas are confounded with sensations, and believed to be direct perceptions of sight.h

[* ][67] These considerations may serve as an answer to Dr. M‘Cosh, when he maintains, with many other of the intuitive philosophers, that association cannot generate a mental state specifically distinct from the elements out of which it is composed; which amounts to a denial of the possibility of mental chemistry. [Examination, pp. 182-4.] I had thought that such an experiment as that of the wheel with the seven colours, in which seven sensations, following one another very rapidly, become, or at least generate, one sensation, and that one totally different from any of the seven, sufficiently proved the possibility of what Dr. M‘Cosh denies; but he writes as if he had never heard of that experiment. “I can discover,” he says, “no evidence that two sensations succeeding one another will ever be anything else than two sensations.” (Ibid., p. 185.) The analogous facts in the case of ideas cannot be appealed to, for they are the very matter disputed; but there is abundance of similar instances in sensation. Dropping succession of colours, let Dr. M‘Cosh look at an ordinary wheel revolving with the rapidity which is often seen in machinery, and he will have a sensation which is not one of rotatory motion at all, but a dizzy spectrum apparently stationary, with the exception of a slight degree of tremulous movement.

hDr. M‘Cosh, in his reply, says he was perfectly aware of the experiments of the luminous ring and the wheel with the seven colours. He does not seem to have known of the other fact which I mentioned, that a wheel may be in such rapid rotation as to seem stationary; for he offers instead of it “a wheel in rapid motion appearing stationary when made visible by instantaneous electric light,” of which he gives the true explanation that, seeing the wheel only for the instant, we do not really see it move. [“Mill’s Reply,” p. 354.] The wheel in my example is rotating in broad daylight.

But these examples of mental chemistry, being taken from sensation, are (says Dr. M‘Cosh) merely organic. He requires me to produce examples from purely mental affections. And how do we know that our mental affections are not also organic, having for their immediate antecedents states of the nerves and brain? This is not only possible, but the progress of science has rendered it almost certain, even to those who are far from being Materialists in the ordinary sense of the term. There are, however, abundant proofs that association can generate new mental affections. Let us take, as one of the obvious examples, the love of money. Does any one think that money has intrinsically, by its own nature, any more value to us than the first shining pebbles we pick up, except for the things it will purchase? Yet its association with these things not only makes it desired for itself, but creates in many minds a passionate love of it, far surpassing the desire they feel for any of the uses to which it can be put. Not only the love of money, but the love of acquisition, of possession, of accumulation, is a feeling created by association. What is desired for itself is the use and enjoyment of individual objects: the possession of a store of them is at first desired as a means to that; but after it has been long pursued as a means, it becomes itself an end—the object of the passion of appropriation, or property, a passion sui generis, and (as life has hitherto been carried on) one of the principal moving powers in human affairs. These, Dr. M‘Cosh may say, are feelings, and what I want is intellectual states; I desiderate examples of “the power of association to generate new ideas, and to produce belief.” [Ibid., p. 353.] As an example, then, of new ideas, take the idea of infinity. Infinity is not a fact of intuition, nor of consciousness. We do not perceive space (for example) to be infinite. But every object we see or touch, and every portion of space that we cognise, is cognised along with something beyond it. We hence become incapable of conceiving any object or space without something beyond; that is, we conceive space as infinite. And along with this new idea a belief is generated; for it has been, and is, the general belief of mankind, without any other evidence of it, that space is actually infinite. As a further example of a belief generated by association, take the acquired perceptions of sight. On the lowest estimate of these which is made by any psychologist, we spontaneously believe that we see much which we only infer: the ideas of the inferred facts are so blended by the power of association with the sensations which suggest them, that the ideas are confounded with sensations, and believed to be direct perceptions of sight.h

[hDr. M‘Cosh, in his reply, says he was perfectly aware of the experiments of the luminous ring and the wheel with the seven colours. He does not seem to have known of the other fact which I mentioned, that a wheel may be in such rapid rotation as to seem stationary; for he offers instead of it “a wheel in rapid motion appearing stationary when made visible by instantaneous electric light,” of which he gives the true explanation that, seeing the wheel only for the instant, we do not really see it move. [“Mill’s Reply,” p. 354.] The wheel in my example is rotating in broad daylight.]+72