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 XXVIII

Concluding Remarks

in the examination which I have now concluded of Sir W. Hamilton’s philosophical achievements, I have unavoidably laid stress on points of difference from him rather than on those of agreement; the reason being, that I differ from almost everything in his philosophy on which he particularly valued himself, or which is specially his own. His merits, which, though I do not rate them so high, I feel and admire as sincerely as his most enthusiastic disciples, are rather diffused through his speculations generally, than concentrated on any particular point. They chiefly consist in his clear and distinct mode of bringing before the reader many of the fundamental questions of metaphysics; some good specimens of psychological analysis on a small scale; and the many detached logical and psychological truths which he has separately seized, and which are scattered through his writings, mostly applied to resolve some special difficulty and again lost sight of. I can hardly point to anything he has done towards helping the more thorough understanding of the greater mental phænomena, unless it be his theory of Attention (including Abstraction), which seems to me the most perfect we have^a .^*cThe facts and speculations on Sleep and Dreaming, in his Seventeenth Lecture on Metaphysics,^[*] have been credited to him as an acquisition to philosophy, and are a good specimen of inductive enquiry; but their principal merit, both in point of observation and of thought, is avowedly Jouffroy’s.^*c

With regard to the causes which prevented a thinker of such abundant acuteness, and more than abundant industry, from accomplishing the great things at which he aimed, it would ill become me to speak dogmatically. It would be a very unwarrantable assumption of superiority over a mind like Sir W. Hamilton’s, if I attempted to gauge and measure his faculties, or give a complete theory of his successes and failures. The utmost I venture on, is to suggest, as simple possibilities, some of the causes which may have partly contributed to his shortcomings as a philosopher. One of those causes is so common as to be the next thing to universal, but requires all the more to be signalized for its unfortunate consequences: over-anxiety to make safe a foregone conclusion. The whole philosophy of Sir W. Hamilton seems to have had its character determined by the requirements of the doctrine of Free-will; and to that doctrine he clung, because he had persuaded himself that it afforded the only premises from which human reason could deduce the doctrines of natural religion. I believe that in this persuasion he was thoroughly his own dupe, and that his speculations have weakened the philosophical foundation of religion fully as much as they have confirmed it.

A second cause which may help to account for his not having effected more in philosophy, is the enormous amount of time and mental vigour which he expended on mere philosophical erudition, leaving, it may be said, only the remains of his mind for the real business of thinking. While he seems to have known, almost by heart, the voluminous Greek commentators on Aristotle, and to have read all that the most obscure schoolman or fifth-rate German transcendentalist had written on the subjects with which he occupied himself; while, not content with a general knowledge of these authors, he could tell with the greatest precision what each of them thought on any given topic, and in what each differed from every other; while expending his time and energy on all this, he had not enough of them left to complete his Lectures. Those on Metaphysics, as already remarked, stopped short on the threshold of what was, especially in his own opinion, the most important part of it, and never reached even the threshold of the third and last of the parts into which, in an early lecture, he divided his subject.^* Those on Logic he left dependent, for most of the subordinate developments, on extracts strung together from German writers, chiefly Krug and Esser; often not destitute of merit, but generally so vague, as to make all those parts of his exposition in which they predominate, unsatisfactory;^† sometimes written from points of view different from Sir W. Hamilton’s own, but which he never found time or took the trouble to re-express in adaptation to his own mode of thought.^‡ In the whole circle of psychological and logical speculation, it is astonishing how few are the topics into which he has thrown any of the powers of his own intellect; and on how small a proportion even of these he has pushed his investigations beyond what seemed necessary for the purposes of some particular controversy. In consequence, philosophical doctrines are taken up, and again laid down, with perfect unconsciousness, and his philosophy seems made up of scraps from several conflicting metaphysical systems. The Relativity of human knowledge is made a great deal of in opposition to Schelling and Cousin, but drops out or dwindles into nothing in Sir W. Hamilton’s own psychology. The validity of our natural beliefs, and the doctrine that the incogitable is not therefore impossible, are strenuously asserted in this place and disregarded in that, according to the question in hand. On the subject of General Notions he is avowedly a Nominalist, but teaches the whole of Logic as if he had never heard of any doctrine but the Conceptualist; what he presents as a reconcilement of the two being never adverted to afterwards, and serving only as an excuse to himself for accepting the one doctrine and invariably using the language of the other. Arriving at his doctrines almost always under the stimulus of some special dispute, he never knows how far to press them: consequently there is a region of haze round the place where opinions of different origin meet. I formerly quoted from him a felicitous illustration drawn from the mechanical operation of tunnelling; that process affords another, justly applicable to himself. The reader must have heard of that gigantic enterprise of the Italian Government, the tunnel through Mont Cenis. This great work is carried on simultaneously from both ends, in well-grounded confidence (such is now the minute accuracy of engineering operations) that the two parties of workmen will correctly meet in the middle. Were they to disappoint this expectation, and work past one another in the dark, they would afford a likeness of Sir W. Hamilton’s mode of tunnelling the human mind.

This failure to think out subjects until they had been thoroughly mastered, or until consistency had been attained between the different views which the author took of them from different points of observation, may, like the unfinished state of the Lectures, be with great probability ascribed to the excessive absorption of his time and energies by the study of old writers. That absorption did worse; for it left him with neither leisure nor vigour for what was far more important in every sense, and an entirely indispensable qualification for a master in philosophy—the systematic study of the sciences. Except physiology, on some parts of which his mental powers were really employed, he may be said to have known nothing of any physical science. I do not mean that he was ignorant of familiar facts, or that he may not, in the course of his education, have gone through the curriculum. But it must have been as Gibbon did, who says, in his autobiography, “I was content to receive the passive impressions of my professor’s lectures, without any active exercise of my own powers.”^[*] For any trace the study had left in Sir W. Hamilton’s mind, he might as well never have heard of it.^*

It is much to be regretted that Sir W. Hamilton did not write the history of philosophy, instead of choosing, as the direct object of his intellectual exertions, philosophy itself. He possessed a knowledge of the materials such as no one, probably, for many generations, will take the trouble of acquiring again; and the erudition of philosophy is emphatically one of the things which it is good that a few should acquire for the benefit of the rest. Independently of the great interest and value attaching to a knowledge of the historical development of speculation, there is much in the old writers on philosophy, even those of the middle ages, really worth preserving for its scientific value.^* But this should be extracted, and rendered into the phraseology of modern thought, by persons as familiar with that as with the ancient, and possessing a command of its language; a combination never yet so perfectly realized as in Sir W. Hamilton. It is waste of time for a mere student of philosophy, to have to learn the familiar use of fifty philosophic phraseologies, all greatly inferior to that of his own time; and if this were required from all thinkers, there would be very little time left for thought. A man who had done it so thoroughly as Sir W. Hamilton, should have made his cotemporaries and successors, once for all, partakers of the benefit; and rendered it unnecessary for any one to do it again, except for verifying and correcting his representations. This, which no one but himself could have done, he has left undone; and has given us, instead, a contribution to mental philosophy which has been more than equalled by many not superior to him in powers, and wholly destitute of erudition. Of all persons, in modern times, entitled to the name of philosophers, the two, probably, whose reading on their own subjects was the scantiest, in proportion to their intellectual capacity, were Dr. Thomas Brown and Archbishop Whately: accordingly they are the only two of whom Sir W. Hamilton, though acknowledging their abilities, habitually speaks with a certain tinge of superciliousness. It cannot be denied that both Dr. Brown and Archbishop Whately would have thought and written better than they did, if they had been better read in the writings of previous thinkers: but I am not afraid that posterity will contradict me when I say, that either of them has done^h greater service to the world, in the origination and diffusion of important thought, than Sir W. Hamilton with all his learning: because, though indolent readers, they were, both of them, active and fertile thinkers.^*

It is not that Sir W. Hamilton’s erudition is not frequently of real use to him on particular questions of philosophy. It does him one valuable service: it enables him to know all the various opinions which can be held on the questions he discusses, and to conceive and express them clearly, leaving none of them out. This it does, though even this not always; but it does little else, even of what might be expected from erudition when enlightened by philosophy. He knew, with extraordinary accuracy, the ὅτι of every philosopher’s doctrine, but gave himself little trouble about the διότι.^[*] With one exception, I find no remarks bearing upon that point in any part of his writings.^* I imagine he would have been much at a loss if he had been required to draw up a philosophical estimate of the mind of any great thinker. He ⁱrarelyⁱ seems to look at any opinion of a philosopher in connexion with the same philosopher’s other opinions. Accordingly, he is weak as to the mutual relations of philosophical doctrines. He seldom knows any of the corollaries from a thinker’s opinions, unless the thinker has himself drawn them; and even then he knows them, not as corollaries, but only as opinions. One of the most striking examples he affords of this inability is in the case of Leibnitz; and it is worth while to analyse this instance, because nothing can more conclusively show, how little capable he was of entering into the spirit of a system unlike his own.

If there ever was a thinker whose system of thought could without difficulty be conceived as a connected whole, it was Leibnitz. Hardly any philosopher has taken so much pains to display the filiation of all his main conceptions, in a manner at once satisfactory to his own mind and intelligible to the world. And there is hardly any one in whom the filiation is more complete, these various conceptions being all applications of one common principle. Yet Sir W. Hamilton understands them so ill, as to be able to say, after giving an account of the Pre-established Harmony, that “its author himself probably regarded it more as a specimen of ingenuity than as a serious doctrine.”^* And again: “It is a disputed point whether Leibnitz was serious in his monadology and pre-established harmony.”^† To say nothing of the injustice done, by this surmise, to the deep sincerity and high philosophic earnestness of that most eminent man; it is obvious to those who study opinions in their relation to the mind entertaining them, that a person, who could thus think concerning the Pre-established Harmony and the Monadology,^[*] however correctly he may have seized many particular opinions of Leibnitz, had never taken into his mind a conception of Leibnitz himself as a philosopher. These theories were necessitated by Leibnitz’s other opinions. They were the only outlet from the difficulties of the fundamental doctrine of his philosophy, the Principle of Sufficient Reason.^[†]

All who know anything of Leibnitz, are aware that he affirmed it to be a principle of the universe, that nothing exists which has not an antecedent ground in reason, and cognisable by reason; a ground which, when known, gives all the properties of the thing by natural and necessary consequence. This Sufficient Reason might be some abstract property of the thing, serving as the pattern on which it was constructed, and being the key to all its other attributes. Such, for example, is the property by which mathematicians define the circle or the triangle, and from which, by mere reasoning, the remaining properties of those figures are deducible. In other cases, the Sufficient Reason of a phænomenon is found in its physical cause. But the mere existence of the cause as an invariable antecedent, does not constitute it the Sufficient Reason of the effect. There must be something in the nature of the cause itself, something capable of being detected in it, which, once known, accounts for its being followed by that particular effect; something which explains the character of the effect, and, had it been known beforehand, would have enabled us to foretel the precise effect that would be produced. To so great a length did Leibnitz carry this doctrine, as to affirm that God (saving actual miracle, which as a highly exceptional fact he was willing to admit)^[‡] could not, in the exercise of his ordinary providence, conduct the government of the world except par la nature des créatures; through second causes, each containing, in its own properties, wherewithal to furnish a complete explanation of the phænomena to which it gives rise.^[§]

Setting out with this à priori conception of the order of the universe, Leibnitz found Mind apparently acting upon Matter and Matter upon Mind, and was utterly unable to discover in the nature and attributes of either, any Sufficient Reason for this action. The two substances seemed wholly disparate: there was nothing in them from which action of any kind upon one another could have been presumed to be so much as possible. He saw in this one case, what is true, though he did not see it, in all cases whatever—that there is no nexus, no natural link, between agent and patient, between cause and effect, and that all we know or can know of their relation is, that the one always follows the other. But to accept the mere fact as ultimate, without craving for a demonstration, could not enter into Leibnitz’s geometrical mind; and was positively forbidden by his Principle of Sufficient Reason. Here was a dilemma! Happily, however, the difficulty of admitting that Mind could act upon Matter, disappeared in the case of an Infinite Mind. In the Omnipotence of the Deity there lay a Sufficient Reason for the possibility of anything which the Deity might be pleased to do. It must be God, therefore, and no subordinate agency, that directly produces the effects on Matter which seem owing to Mind, and the effects on Mind which seem owing to Matter. This being admitted, there were only two possible theories to choose from. Either God, from the beginning, wound up Mind and Matter to go together like two clocks, though without any connexion with one another; and I see an object, not because the object is before my eyes, but because it was prearranged from eternity that the presence of the object and the fact of my seeing should occur at the same instant; or else, at the moment when the object appears, God intervenes, and gives me the perception of sight, exactly as if the object had caused it. The former theory is the Pre-established Harmony; the latter is the doctrine of Occasional Causes, to which, as rather the less grotesque supposition of the two, the Cartesians had been driven by the pressure of the same difficulty. But this hypothesis, as it supposed nothing less than a standing miracle, was wholly inadmissible by Leibnitz. It was inconsistent with the idea which he had formed to himself of the perfections of the Deity. He considered it as assimilating Providence to a bad workman, whose engines will not work unless he himself stands by, and gives them a helping hand; “a watchmaker, who, having constructed a timepiece, would still be obliged himself to turn the hands, to make it mark the hours.”^* Leibnitz could not find, in the idea of God, any Sufficient Reason why so roundabout a mode of governing the universe should have been chosen by him. He was thus thrown upon the hypothesis of a Pre-established Harmony, as his only refuge; and there can be no doubt that he accepted it, with the full conviction of an intellect accustomed to pursue given premises to their consequences with all the rigour of geometrical demonstration.

The doctrine of Monads was as necessary a corollary from Leibnitz’s first principle as the Pre-established Harmony. Everything, whether physical or spiritual, which has an individual existence, is a compound of innumerable attributes, between many of which we cannot seize any connexion, but on Leibnitz’s theory it was not admissible to suppose that no connexion exists. There must be something, somewhere, which contains in its own nature the complete theory and explanation of the combination of attributes, and is the reason of its being that combination and no other: and what could this be unless a sort of kernel of the entire Being—the Soul in the case of a spiritual being, a kind of Essence of the Individual in that of a merely physical object? The Monads of Leibnitz do not really differ from the imaginary Essences of the schoolmen, except in not being abstractions, but objective realities in the completest meaning of the word; which, indeed, the Substantiæ Secundæ of the Realists already were, only that they were essences of classes, and were conceived as inhering simultaneously in numerous individuals, while the Monads of Leibnitz were lively little beings, the principles of animation and activity, each of them the real agent or Force at the bottom of one individual. All this may seem poor stuff, and a melancholy exhibition of a great intellect. But as there is nothing in experience which directly disproves these theories, they are not really more absurd than many a one which has not so quaint an appearance: and it is the strength, not the weakness of a systematic intellect, that it does not shrink from conclusions because they have an absurd look, when they are necessary corollaries from premises which the thinker, and probably most of those who criticise him, have not ceased to regard as true. Leibnitz was led to the Monads and the Pre-established Harmony by the same logical necessity, which made Descartes, far more absurdly, affirm the automatism of animals;^[*] and we might as reasonably doubt the seriousness of the latter opinion, as of the former. The same logical consistency made him a Necessitarian, and an Optimist; since the doctrine of Sufficient Reason made God the author of all that happens, consequently of all human actions; and God’s attributes could not be a Sufficient Reason for any world but the best possible.

Other examples may be given, though none greater than this, of Sir W. Hamilton’s inability to enter into the very mind of another thinker. Is it not, for instance, a surprising thing, that one who knew Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle so well, should attribute^* to all of them his own opinion that ^j(at least in the case of speculative knowledge)^j not truth but the search for truth is the important matter, and that the pursuit of it is not for the sake of the attainment, but of the mental activity and energy developed in the search?^* If there have been three men since speculation began who would have vehemently rejected such a doctrine, they are the three who are here placed at the head of the authorities in its support. Our author arrives at this strange misunderstanding, by giving a meaning to single expressions, derived from his own mode of thought and not from theirs. In Aristotle’s case the assertion rests on a mistake of the meaning of the Aristotelian word ἐνέργεια, which did not signify energy, but fact as opposed to possibility, actus to potentia.^† One hardly knows what to say to a writer who understands Τέλος οὐ γνῶσις ἀλλὰ πρᾶξις,^[*] to mean, “The intellect is perfected not by knowledge but by activity.”^‡

We see, from such instances, how much even Sir W. Hamilton’s erudition wanted of what we have a right to expect from erudition in a superior mind—that it should enter into the general spirit of the things it knows, not know them merely in their details. Sir W. Hamilton studied the eminent thinkers of old, only from the outside. He did not throw his own mind into their manner of thought; he did not survey the field of philosophic speculation from their standing point, and see each object as it would be seen with their lights, and with their modes of looking. The opinion of an author stands an isolated fact in Sir W. Hamilton’s pages, without foundation in the author’s individuality, or connexion with his other doctrines. For want of this elucidation one by another, even the opinions themselves are, as in the case last cited, very liable to be misunderstood. ^lA history of philosophy from his hand, unless proposing to himself a new object had altered his point of view, could not have been final; it would not have been a philosophical history of philosophy; but it would have stood in the same relation to such a work, in which accurate and complete annals stand to political history: it would have been an invaluable protection against the mistakes of subsequent historians, and would have prodigiously abridged their labours. Such, therefore,^l as his expositions of the opinions of philosophers are, it is greatly to be regretted that we have not more of them; and that his unrivalled knowledge of all the antecedents of Philosophy has enriched the world with nothing but a few selections of passages on topics on which circumstances had led Sir W. Hamilton to write. He is known to have left copious common-place books, without which indeed it would have been hardly possible that such stores of knowledge could be kept within easy reference. Let us hope that they are carefully preserved; that they will, in some form or other, be made accessible to students, and will yet do good service to the future historian of philosophy. Should this hope be fulfilled, future ages will have greater cause than, I think, Sir W. Hamilton’s published philosophical speculations will ever give them, to rejoice in the fruits of his labours, and to celebrate his name.^m

[a]651, 652 : but the subject, though a highly important, is a comparatively simple one

[* ]Even on this subject he has not been able to avoid some fallacies in reasoning. Thus, in maintaining against Stewart and Brown that we can attend to more than one object at once, he defends this true doctrine by some very bad arguments. He says, that if the mind could “attend to, or be conscious of, only a single object at a time,” the conclusion would be involved, “that all comparison and discrimination are impossible.” (Lectures, Vol. I, p. 252.) This assumes that we cannot compare and discriminate any impressions but those which are exactly simultaneous. May not the condition of discrimination be consciousness not at the same, but at immediately successive instants? May not discrimination depend on change of consciousness; the transition from one state to another? This is a tenable opinion; it was actually maintained by the philosophers against whom our author was arguing; and if he thought it erroneous, he should have disproved it. Unless he did, he was not entitled to treat a doctrine shown to involve this consequence, as reduced to absurdity. Another of his proofs of our ability to attend to a plurality of things at once, is our perception of harmony between sounds. He argues that to perceive a relation between two sounds implies a comparison, and that if this comparison is not between the sounds themselves, simultaneously attended to, it must be a comparison of “past sound as retained in memory, with the present as actually perceived;” which still implies attending to two objects at once (ibid., p. 244). His opponents however might say, that if there be a comparison, it is not between two simultaneous impressions, either sensations or memories, but between two successive sounds in the instant of transition. They might add, that the perception of harmony does not necessarily involve comparison. When a number of sounds in perfect harmony strike the ear simultaneously, we have but a single impression; we perceive but one mass of sound. Analysing this into its component parts is an act of intelligence, not of direct perception, and is performed by fixing our attention first on the whole, and then on the separate elements, not all at once, but one after another.b These objections to his doctrine our author seems not to have thought of, because those of Stewart, whom as an opponent he principally had in view, were different (ibid., Vol. II, p. 145). But they ought to have occurred to him without prompting, being in complete unison with his doctrine that consciousness of wholes usually precedes that of their parts; that “instead of commencing with minima, perception commences with masses.” (Ibid., p. 327, and many similar passages.)

Sir W. Hamilton is also inconsistent in affirming that attention is “an act of will or desire,” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 237,) and afterwards that it is in some cases automatic, “a mere vital and irresistible act.” (Ibid., p. 248.) This, however, is only a verbal inaccuracy. He doubtless meant that attention is generally voluntary, but occasionally automatic.

[b]651, 652 The perception of the parts is so far from being distinctly present in our feeling of the harmony, that in proportion as we consciously realize it we injure the general effect.

[[*] ]Ibid., pp. 310-37.

[* ][67] [See ibid., pp. 324-34, where Hamilton quotes from Théodore Jouffroy, “Du sommeil,” Mélanges philosophiques, 2nd ed. (Paris: Ladrange, 1838), pp. 290-302.] I see with regret that what I have said above, or rather perhaps what I have omitted to say, has given an impression even to friendly critics that I think considerably less highly of Sir W. Hamilton’s intellectual calibre, and of his general services to mankind, than I do. My business in this work was to estimate not the man, but the permanent additions made by him to the sum of speculative philosophy. These I cannot rate very high, but I join sincerely and heartily in the tribute to his merits, so justly paid by Mr. Grote in the Westminster Review (pp. 2-3).

“He kept up the idea of philosophy as a subject to be studied from its own points of view: a dignity which in earlier times it enjoyed, perhaps to mischievous excess, but from which in recent times it has far too much receded, especially in England. He performed the great service of labouring strenuously to piece together the past traditions of philosophy, to rediscover those which had been allowed to drop into oblivion, and to make out the genealogy of opinions as far as negligent predecessors had still left the possibility of doing so. We recognise also in Sir W. Hamilton an amount of intellectual independence which seldom accompanies such vast erudition. He recites many different opinions, but he judges them all for himself; and, what is of still greater moment, he constantly gives the reasons for his judgments. To us these reasons are always of more or less value, whether we admit them to be valid or not. . . . To those who dissent from him, as well as to those who agree with him, his reasonings are highly instructive: while the full citations from so many other writers contribute materially not only to elucidate the points directly approached, but also to enlarge our knowledge of philosophy generally.”

And in the emphatic words of Professor Masson: “Try him even in respect of the importance of his effects on the national thought. Whether from his learning or by reason of his independent thinkings, was it not he that hurled into the midst of us the very questions of metaphysics, and the very forms of those questions, that have become the academic theses everywhere in this British age for real metaphysical discussion? . . . Let it be said of Sir W. Hamilton that, simply and by whatever means, he did more than any other man to reinstate the worship of Difficulty in the higher mind of Great Britain.” ([Recent British Philosophy,] pp. 308-9.)

Moreover, as Mr. Grote [p. 2] further observes, “in a subject so abstract, obscure, and generally unpalatable, as Logic and Metaphysics, the difficulty which the teacher finds in inspiring interest is extreme. That Sir W. Hamilton overcame such difficulty with remarkable success is the affirmation of his two editors,” and is proved by the profound impression left by the teacher and his teaching on the intellects and feelings of his pupils. The “Inquirer” charges me with ignoring “that which formed the greater part of his work—the living teaching he gave to living men—whereby he has raised up for our age and nation that which we most needed, a school of men who can and do think.” (P. 6.) It would be very unworthy to ignore so important an item in his services to mankind. I acknowledge it with a feeling, in which I am surpassed by none, of the inestimable worth of all such services. But if I had been attempting a summary of the benefits which the world owes to Sir W. Hamilton, neither could I have ignored his articles on Education, and especially those on the English Universities, to which it is impossible not to attribute a great influence in shaming those bodies out of their long-continued selfish betrayal of their national trust, and putting the new life into them which they have since manifested and are manifesting, with so much advantage to the spirit of the time and to the national culture.

Even in the character of a speculative thinker, my estimate of Sir W. Hamilton is prodigiously misjudged by those who have made themselves, as they had good right to do, the champions of his philosophic reputation. I cannot sufficiently protest against such assertions as that of Mr. Mansel, to which there are several equivalent dbyd the “Inquirer,” [pp. 5-8,] that, if all is true which I have alleged, “Sir W. Hamilton, instead of being a great philosopher, is the veriest blunderer that ever put pen to paper.” ([Mansel, Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 181.) Such exaggerations are intelligible in those by whose own estimate he stands almost at the summit of existing philosophy, and who having climbed, as they think, by his assistance, to the same pinnacle, think an inferior eminence unworthy to be counted for anything at all. But some of the most conspicuous figures in the history of philosophy, distinguished no less by the power of their eintellecte than by the greatness of their influence on subsequent thought, have not, at least in my judgment, left behind them even so much of positive addition to philosophic truth as Sir W. Hamilton. Kant, for example, of whose mental powers no one who is not a disciple probably forms a higher estimate than I do, and who holds so essential a place in the development of philosophic thought, that until somebody had done what Kant did, metaphysics according to our present conception of it could not have been constituted—Kant, probably, will be finally judged to have left no noticeable contribution to philosophy which was both new and true, except some of his refutations of predecessors. Kant, it is true, was a more consecutive, and therefore a more consistent thinker than Sir W. Hamilton, and it is chiefly by that quality that he has become one of the turning points in the history of philosophy, which Sir W. Hamilton has no claim to be: but in ability to discern psychological truths uncoloured by a theory, he seems to me inferior to Sir W. Hamilton. Perhaps, though of a very different character of mind, the nearest parallel in philosophic merit to Sir W. Hamilton (apart from erudition, in which he has probably no parallel among philosophers), was Professor Dugald Stewart. Neither of them can be numbered among the great original thinkers who have carried philosophy into one of its indispensable phases, as did Locke, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and with all his shortcomings, even Reid. Neither of them saw into the heart of great psychological questions which had never been fathomed before, like Berkeley, Hartley, Brown, or James Mill. Both of them have thrown considerable light on minor questions: both have gathered, and more or less perfectly assimilated, truths from very opposite quarters: both have committed great oversights, though Sir W. Hamilton, coming last, and having the benefit of the Kantian movement, stood on a considerably higher platform of metaphysical thought. Both had some, though but moderate, powers of analysis; their philosophic style, though extremely unlike, was, in both, excellent: both gave an important stimulus to the national intellect by their extraordinary power as public teachers; and both will be remembered as meritoriously handing on the torch of philosophy, but neither of them, I venture to say, as among those who have much brightened or fed its flame.

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 123-5. This third part is “Ontology, or Metaphysics Proper;” “the science conversant about inferences of unknown being from its known manifestations;” [ibid., p. 125,] things not manifested in consciousness, but legitimately inferrible from those which are.

[† ]This is strikingly the case, among many others, with the Lectures on Definition and Division. [Lectures, Vol. IV, pp. 1-36 (Lectures xxiv and xxv.)] On those subjects our author lets Krug and Esser think for him. Those authors stand to him instead, not merely of finding a fit expression for his thoughts, but apparently of having any thoughts at all.

[‡ ]fI have already given an example of this from the Lectures, Vol. III, pp. 159-62. Hisf own idea of Clearness as a property of concepts, is that “a concept is said to be clear when the degree of consciousness is such as to enable us to distinguish it” (the concept) “as a whole from others” [ibid., p. 158]: but this idea is expounded by a passage from Esser [ibid., pp. 160-2], in which it is not the concept, but the objects thought through the concept, which, if sufficiently distinguished from all others, constitute the gconceptg a clear one. I confess that Esser has here greatly the advantage over Sir W. Hamilton, who might have usefully corrected his own theory from the borrowed commentary on it.

[[*] ]Edward Gibbon, “Memoirs of My Life and Writings,” in Miscellaneous Works, ed. John Baker Holroyd, Lord Sheffield, 2 vols. (London: Strahan, Cadell and Davies, 1796), Vol. I, p. 66.

[* ]The signs of Sir W. Hamilton’s want of familiarity with the physical sciences meet us in every corner of his works. One, which I have not hitherto found a convenient place for noticing, is the singular view he takes of analysis and synthesis. He imagines that synthesis always presupposes analysis, and that unless grounded on a previous analysis, synthesis can afford no knowledge. “Synthesis without a previous analysis is baseless; for synthesis receives from analysis the elements which it recomposes” (Lectures, Vol. I, p. 98). “Synthesis without analysis is a false knowledge, that is, no knowledge at all. . . . A synthesis without a previous analysis is radically and ab initio null.” (Ibid., 99.) This affirmation is the more surprising, as the example he himself selects to illustrate analysis and synthesis is a case of chemical composition; a neutral salt, compounded of an acid and an alkali. Did he suppose that when a chemist succeeds in forming a salt by synthesis merely, putting together two substances never actually found in combination, he does not make exactly the same addition to chemical science as if he had met with the compound first, and analysed it into its elements afterwards? Did Sir W. Hamilton ever read a memoir by a chemist on a newly-discovered elementary substance? If so, did he not find that the discoverer invariably proceeds to ascertain by synthesis what combinations the new element will form with all other elements for which it has any affinity? Sir W. Hamilton, though he drew his example from physics, forgot all that related to the example, and thought only of psychological investigation, in which it does commonly happen that the compound fact is presented to us first, and we have to begin by analysing it; our synthesis, if practicable at all, taking place afterwards, and serving only to verify the analysis. Therefore, in spite of his own example, Sir W. Hamilton defines synthesis as being always a recomposition and “reconstruction” (ibid., p. 98). Could any one who had the smallest familiarity with physical science have committed this strange oversight?

Another example, to which I shall content myself with referring, is the incapacity of understanding an argument respecting a principle of Mechanics, shown in his controversy with Dr. Whewell respecting the law that the pressure of a lever on the fulcrum, when the weights balance one another, is equal to the sum of the two weights (Discussions, pp. 338-9). [See also William Whewell, An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, Vol. I (Cambridge: Deighton; London: Whittaker, 1819), p. 19.]

[* ][67]“We set particular value upon this preservation of the traditions of philosophy, and upon this maintenance of a known perpetual succession among the speculative minds of humanity, with proper comparisons and contrasts. We have found among the names quoted by Sir W. Hamilton, and thanks to his care, several authors hardly at all known to us, and opinions cited from them not less instructive than curious. He deserves the more gratitude, because he departs herein from received usage since Bacon and Descartes. The example set by these great men was admirable, so far as it went to throw off the authority of predecessors; but pernicious so far as it banished those predecessors out of knowledge, like mere magazines of immaturity and error. Throughout the eighteenth century, all study of the earlier modes of philosophizing was, for the most part, neglected. Of such neglect, remarkable instances are pointed out by Sir W. Hamilton.” (Mr. Grote, in Westminster Review, pp. 3-4.)

[h]651, 652 far

[* ][67] Mr. Grote, agreeing with me as to Brown, demurs to this judgment as regards Archbishop Whately; of which latter comparison Professor Masson, still more naturally, complains. [See Grote, pp. 37-8; Masson, Recent British Philosophy, p. 303.] Our difference, I suspect, is not that I value Sir W. Hamilton less, but Archbishop Whately more. The result of my reading of many of his multifarious writings is a much higher estimation than Mr. Grote’s seems to be, both of his originality and of his services to thought. As a metaphysician proper, no one would compare him with Sir W. Hamilton: but I am speaking of him in the more general character of a thinker, and in respect of the number of true and valuable thoughts on many various subjects, metaphysics being one, which he brought into the general stock, and threw into circulation.

Let me add that in speaking of Brown and Whately as active and fertile thinkers, I had no idea that I should be considered as refusing those attributes to Sir W. Hamilton.

[[*] ]See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Vol. I, p. 6 (I, i, 981a29); see also Hamilton, Lectures, Vol. I, Lecture iii, p. 58.

[* ]This solitary exception relates to Hume. Respecting the general scope and purpose, the pervading spirit, of Hume’s speculations, Sir W. Hamilton does give an opinion, and, I venture to think, a wrong one. He regards Hume’s philosophy as scepticism in its legitimate sense. Hume’s object, he thinks, was to prove the uncertainty of all knowledge. With this intent he represents him as reasoning from premises “not established by himself,” but “accepted only as principles universally conceded in the previous schools of philosophy.” These premises Hume showed (according to Sir W. Hamilton) to lead to conclusions which contradicted the evidence of consciousness; thus proving, not that consciousness deceives, but that the premises generally accepted on the authority of philosophers, and leading to these conclusions, must be false. (Discussions, pp. 87-8, and elsewhere.)

This is certainly the use which has been made of Hume’s arguments, by Reid and many other of his opponents. Admitting their validity as arguments, Reid considered them, not as proving Hume’s conclusions, but as a reductio ad absurdum of his premises. [See On the Intellectured Powers, pp. 484-9.] That Hume however had any foresight of their being put to this use, either for a dogmatical or a purely sceptical purpose, appears to me supremely improbable. If we form our opinion by reading the series of Hume’s metaphysical essays straight through, instead of judging from a few detached expressions in a single essay (that “on the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy,”) I think our judgment will be that Hume sincerely accepted both the premises and the conclusions. It would be difficult, no doubt, to prove this by conclusive evidence, nor would I venture absolutely to affirm it. In the case of the freethinking philosophers of the last century, it is often impossible to be quite certain what their opinions really were; how far the reservations they made, expressed real convictions, or were concessions to supposed necessities of position. Hume, it is certain, made such concessions largely: insincere they can hardly be called, being so evidently intended to be φωνήεντα, at least συνετοῖσι. [Pindar, Olympian Odes, in The Odes of Pindar Including Principal Fragments (Greek and English), trans. John Sandys (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 26 (II, 85).] I have a strong impression that Hume’s scepticism, or rather his professed admiration of scepticism, was a disguise of this description, intended rather to avoid offence than to conceal his opinion; that he preferred to be called a sceptic, rather than by a more odious name; and having to promulgate conclusions which he knew would be regarded as contradicting, on one hand the evidence of common sense, on the other the doctrines of religion, did not like to declare them as positive convictions, but thought it more judicious to exhibit them as the results we might come to, if we put complete confidence in the trustworthiness of our rational faculty. I have little doubt that he himself did feel this confidence, and wished it to be felt by his readers. There is certainly no trace of a different feeling in his speculations on any of the other important subjects treated in his works: and even on this subject, the general tenor of what he wrote pointing one way, and only single passages the other, it is most reasonable to interpret the latter in the mode which will least contradict the expression of his habitual state of mind in the former.

I cannot but believe, therefore, that Sir W. Hamilton has misunderstood the essential character of Hume’s mind: but his hearty admiration and honest vindication of him as a thinker are highly honourable to Sir W. Hamilton, both as a philosopher and as a man.

[i-i]651, 652, 67 never

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 304. [See Théodicée, pp. 174-6 (§§61, 62).]

[† ]Foot-note to Reid, p. 309n.

[[*] ]See Leibniz, Monadologie, in Opera Philosophica, pp. 705-12.

[[†] ]See p. 372 above.

[[‡] ]See Théodicée, pp. 382-3 (II, §§207-8), and pp. 428-30 (III, §§248-9).

[[§] ]Ibid., pp. 347-8 (II, §181).

[* ]Quoted from Leibnitz by Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures, Vol. I, p. 303. [See Leibniz, Troisième Éclaircissement, in Opera, p. 135.]

[[*] ]See Dissertatio de Methodo, pp. 23ff. (V).

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 11-12.

[j-j]+72

[* ][72] “Speculative truth is only pursued and held of value for the sake of intellectual activity” (ibid., p. 10), and again (at p. 13) “speculative truth” is said to be “only valuable as a mean of intellectual activity.”

[† ]The very passage quoted from Aristotle kby the editorsk in support of this representation of him, shows that he was using the word in his own and not in Sir W. Hamilton’s sense. Τέλος δ’ ἡ ἐνέργεια, καὶ τούτου χάριν ἡ δύναμις λαμβάνεται . . . καὶ τὴν θεωρητικὴν (ἔχουσιν) ἵνα θεωρῶσιν· αλλ’ οὐ θεωρῶσιν ἵνα θεωρητικὴν ἔχωσιν. [Ibid., p. 12n.] [See Metaphysics, Vol. I, p. 458 (IX, viii, 1050a9-14).]

[[*] ]Nichomachean Ethics, p. 8 (I, iii, 1095a6-7).

[‡ ][72] [Ibid., p. 12 and n.] Professor Veitch, in the third Appendix to his Memoir of Sir W. Hamilton [p. 447], points out that in this last sentence I have done Sir W. Hamilton an injustice. The passage, Τέλος οὐ γνῶσις ἀλλὰ πρᾶξις, was not quoted by himself, but by his editors [see Lectures, Vol. I, p. 12n], as the nearest they had found to a justification of the statement that Aristotle held the opinion attributed to him in the text. They would have done more wisely by making no reference, than one which so totally fails to support the inference drawn from it.

[l-l]651, 652 Yet, such [a manuscript fragment of the 67 version exists; see Appendix A below]

[m]652 ADDENDUM. / Note to p. 150. [here appears a version of the note that is given above at p. 143 (the equivalent of p. 150 in 652)]

[* ]Even on this subject he has not been able to avoid some fallacies in reasoning. Thus, in maintaining against Stewart and Brown that we can attend to more than one object at once, he defends this true doctrine by some very bad arguments. He says, that if the mind could “attend to, or be conscious of, only a single object at a time,” the conclusion would be involved, “that all comparison and discrimination are impossible.” (Lectures, Vol. I, p. 252.) This assumes that we cannot compare and discriminate any impressions but those which are exactly simultaneous. May not the condition of discrimination be consciousness not at the same, but at immediately successive instants? May not discrimination depend on change of consciousness; the transition from one state to another? This is a tenable opinion; it was actually maintained by the philosophers against whom our author was arguing; and if he thought it erroneous, he should have disproved it. Unless he did, he was not entitled to treat a doctrine shown to involve this consequence, as reduced to absurdity. Another of his proofs of our ability to attend to a plurality of things at once, is our perception of harmony between sounds. He argues that to perceive a relation between two sounds implies a comparison, and that if this comparison is not between the sounds themselves, simultaneously attended to, it must be a comparison of “past sound as retained in memory, with the present as actually perceived;” which still implies attending to two objects at once (ibid., p. 244). His opponents however might say, that if there be a comparison, it is not between two simultaneous impressions, either sensations or memories, but between two successive sounds in the instant of transition. They might add, that the perception of harmony does not necessarily involve comparison. When a number of sounds in perfect harmony strike the ear simultaneously, we have but a single impression; we perceive but one mass of sound. Analysing this into its component parts is an act of intelligence, not of direct perception, and is performed by fixing our attention first on the whole, and then on the separate elements, not all at once, but one after another.b These objections to his doctrine our author seems not to have thought of, because those of Stewart, whom as an opponent he principally had in view, were different (ibid., Vol. II, p. 145). But they ought to have occurred to him without prompting, being in complete unison with his doctrine that consciousness of wholes usually precedes that of their parts; that “instead of commencing with minima, perception commences with masses.” (Ibid., p. 327, and many similar passages.)

Sir W. Hamilton is also inconsistent in affirming that attention is “an act of will or desire,” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 237,) and afterwards that it is in some cases automatic, “a mere vital and irresistible act.” (Ibid., p. 248.) This, however, is only a verbal inaccuracy. He doubtless meant that attention is generally voluntary, but occasionally automatic.

[* ][67] [See ibid., pp. 324-34, where Hamilton quotes from Théodore Jouffroy, “Du sommeil,” Mélanges philosophiques, 2nd ed. (Paris: Ladrange, 1838), pp. 290-302.] I see with regret that what I have said above, or rather perhaps what I have omitted to say, has given an impression even to friendly critics that I think considerably less highly of Sir W. Hamilton’s intellectual calibre, and of his general services to mankind, than I do. My business in this work was to estimate not the man, but the permanent additions made by him to the sum of speculative philosophy. These I cannot rate very high, but I join sincerely and heartily in the tribute to his merits, so justly paid by Mr. Grote in the Westminster Review (pp. 2-3).

“He kept up the idea of philosophy as a subject to be studied from its own points of view: a dignity which in earlier times it enjoyed, perhaps to mischievous excess, but from which in recent times it has far too much receded, especially in England. He performed the great service of labouring strenuously to piece together the past traditions of philosophy, to rediscover those which had been allowed to drop into oblivion, and to make out the genealogy of opinions as far as negligent predecessors had still left the possibility of doing so. We recognise also in Sir W. Hamilton an amount of intellectual independence which seldom accompanies such vast erudition. He recites many different opinions, but he judges them all for himself; and, what is of still greater moment, he constantly gives the reasons for his judgments. To us these reasons are always of more or less value, whether we admit them to be valid or not. . . . To those who dissent from him, as well as to those who agree with him, his reasonings are highly instructive: while the full citations from so many other writers contribute materially not only to elucidate the points directly approached, but also to enlarge our knowledge of philosophy generally.”

And in the emphatic words of Professor Masson: “Try him even in respect of the importance of his effects on the national thought. Whether from his learning or by reason of his independent thinkings, was it not he that hurled into the midst of us the very questions of metaphysics, and the very forms of those questions, that have become the academic theses everywhere in this British age for real metaphysical discussion? . . . Let it be said of Sir W. Hamilton that, simply and by whatever means, he did more than any other man to reinstate the worship of Difficulty in the higher mind of Great Britain.” ([Recent British Philosophy,] pp. 308-9.)

Moreover, as Mr. Grote [p. 2] further observes, “in a subject so abstract, obscure, and generally unpalatable, as Logic and Metaphysics, the difficulty which the teacher finds in inspiring interest is extreme. That Sir W. Hamilton overcame such difficulty with remarkable success is the affirmation of his two editors,” and is proved by the profound impression left by the teacher and his teaching on the intellects and feelings of his pupils. The “Inquirer” charges me with ignoring “that which formed the greater part of his work—the living teaching he gave to living men—whereby he has raised up for our age and nation that which we most needed, a school of men who can and do think.” (P. 6.) It would be very unworthy to ignore so important an item in his services to mankind. I acknowledge it with a feeling, in which I am surpassed by none, of the inestimable worth of all such services. But if I had been attempting a summary of the benefits which the world owes to Sir W. Hamilton, neither could I have ignored his articles on Education, and especially those on the English Universities, to which it is impossible not to attribute a great influence in shaming those bodies out of their long-continued selfish betrayal of their national trust, and putting the new life into them which they have since manifested and are manifesting, with so much advantage to the spirit of the time and to the national culture.

Even in the character of a speculative thinker, my estimate of Sir W. Hamilton is prodigiously misjudged by those who have made themselves, as they had good right to do, the champions of his philosophic reputation. I cannot sufficiently protest against such assertions as that of Mr. Mansel, to which there are several equivalent dbyd the “Inquirer,” [pp. 5-8,] that, if all is true which I have alleged, “Sir W. Hamilton, instead of being a great philosopher, is the veriest blunderer that ever put pen to paper.” ([Mansel, Philosophy of the Conditioned,] p. 181.) Such exaggerations are intelligible in those by whose own estimate he stands almost at the summit of existing philosophy, and who having climbed, as they think, by his assistance, to the same pinnacle, think an inferior eminence unworthy to be counted for anything at all. But some of the most conspicuous figures in the history of philosophy, distinguished no less by the power of their eintellecte than by the greatness of their influence on subsequent thought, have not, at least in my judgment, left behind them even so much of positive addition to philosophic truth as Sir W. Hamilton. Kant, for example, of whose mental powers no one who is not a disciple probably forms a higher estimate than I do, and who holds so essential a place in the development of philosophic thought, that until somebody had done what Kant did, metaphysics according to our present conception of it could not have been constituted—Kant, probably, will be finally judged to have left no noticeable contribution to philosophy which was both new and true, except some of his refutations of predecessors. Kant, it is true, was a more consecutive, and therefore a more consistent thinker than Sir W. Hamilton, and it is chiefly by that quality that he has become one of the turning points in the history of philosophy, which Sir W. Hamilton has no claim to be: but in ability to discern psychological truths uncoloured by a theory, he seems to me inferior to Sir W. Hamilton. Perhaps, though of a very different character of mind, the nearest parallel in philosophic merit to Sir W. Hamilton (apart from erudition, in which he has probably no parallel among philosophers), was Professor Dugald Stewart. Neither of them can be numbered among the great original thinkers who have carried philosophy into one of its indispensable phases, as did Locke, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and with all his shortcomings, even Reid. Neither of them saw into the heart of great psychological questions which had never been fathomed before, like Berkeley, Hartley, Brown, or James Mill. Both of them have thrown considerable light on minor questions: both have gathered, and more or less perfectly assimilated, truths from very opposite quarters: both have committed great oversights, though Sir W. Hamilton, coming last, and having the benefit of the Kantian movement, stood on a considerably higher platform of metaphysical thought. Both had some, though but moderate, powers of analysis; their philosophic style, though extremely unlike, was, in both, excellent: both gave an important stimulus to the national intellect by their extraordinary power as public teachers; and both will be remembered as meritoriously handing on the torch of philosophy, but neither of them, I venture to say, as among those who have much brightened or fed its flame.

[‡ ]fI have already given an example of this from the Lectures, Vol. III, pp. 159-62. Hisf own idea of Clearness as a property of concepts, is that “a concept is said to be clear when the degree of consciousness is such as to enable us to distinguish it” (the concept) “as a whole from others” [ibid., p. 158]: but this idea is expounded by a passage from Esser [ibid., pp. 160-2], in which it is not the concept, but the objects thought through the concept, which, if sufficiently distinguished from all others, constitute the gconceptg a clear one. I confess that Esser has here greatly the advantage over Sir W. Hamilton, who might have usefully corrected his own theory from the borrowed commentary on it.

[† ]The very passage quoted from Aristotle kby the editorsk in support of this representation of him, shows that he was using the word in his own and not in Sir W. Hamilton’s sense. Τέλος δ’ ἡ ἐνέργεια, καὶ τούτου χάριν ἡ δύναμις λαμβάνεται . . . καὶ τὴν θεωρητικὴν (ἔχουσιν) ἵνα θεωρῶσιν· αλλ’ οὐ θεωρῶσιν ἵνα θεωρητικὴν ἔχωσιν. [Ibid., p. 12n.] [See Metaphysics, Vol. I, p. 458 (IX, viii, 1050a9-14).]

[b]651, 652 The perception of the parts is so far from being distinctly present in our feeling of the harmony, that in proportion as we consciously realize it we injure the general effect.

[dbyd]67 in

[eintellecte]67 intellects

[fI have already given an example of this from the Lectures, Vol. III, pp. 159-62. Hisf]651, 652 For example, (Lectures, Vol. III, pp. 159-62) his

[gconceptg]651, 652, 67 conception

[kby the editorsk]+72