S%>:
AN EXAMINATION
or
SIE WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY,
J. PETER MAYER LIBRARY
AN EXAMINATION
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY
AND or
THE PRINCIPAL PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS DISCUSSED IN HIS WRITINGS
JOHN STUAET MILL
FIFTH EDITION
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER.
1878
LONDON :
SATILIi^ XDVARD3 AND CO., PRINTERS, CUANDOS SXRKBI,
OOTENT OARDEN.
JUXUUAK I
UNIVEIIST V C F CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA
PREFACE
THE THIRD EDITION.
In former writings I have perhaps seemed to go in search of objectors, whom I might have disregarded, but who enabled me to bring out my opinions into greater clearness and relief. My present condition is far different; for a host of writers, whose mode of philosophic thought was either directly or indirectly implicated in the criticisms made by this volume on Sir W. Hamilton, have taken up arms against it, and fought -dspro aris et focis. Among these are included, not solely friends or followers of Sir W. Hamilton, who were under some obligation to say whatever could fairly be said in his defence, but many who stand almost as widely apart from him as I do, though mostly on the reverse side. To leave these attacks unanswered, would be to desert the principles which as a speculative thinker I have maintained all my life, and which the progress of my thoughts has constantly strengthened. The criticisms which have come under my notice (omitting the daily and weekly journals) are the following; there may be others :
Mr. Mansel : " The Philosophy of the Conditioned ; comprising some remarks on Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, and on Mr. J. S. Mill's Examination of that
VI PREFACE.
Philosophy." (First published in Nos. 1 and 2 of the Contemporary Review.)
" The Battle of the Two Philosophies ; by an In- quirer."
Dr. M'Cosh : " An Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill's Philosophy, being a Defence of Fundamental Truth."
Dr. Calderwood : " The Sensational Philosophy — Mr. J. S. Mill and Dr. M'Cosh;" in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review for April 1866.
Dr. Henry B. Smith : " Mill v. Hamilton/' in the American Presbyterian and Theological Review for January 1866.
Mr. H. F. O'Hanlon : " A Criticism of John Stuart Mill's Pure Idealism ; and an Attempt to show that, if logically carried out, it is Pure Nihilism."
Review of this work in Blackwood's Magazine lor January 1866.
(The two last mentioned are confined to the doctrine of Permanent Possibilities of Sensation).
Mr. J. P. Mahaffy, in the Introduction to his transla- tion of Professor Kuno Fischer's account of Kant's Kritik. (Confined to the doctrine of Permanent Possibilities, and the subject of Necessary Truths.)
Mr. Patrick Proctor Alexander : " An Examination of Mr. John Stuart Mill's Doctrine of Causation in Relation to Moral Freedom ;" forming the greater part of a volume entitled " Mill and Carlyle."
Reviews of this work in the Dublin Review for October 1865 (with the signature R. E. G.), and in the Edinburgh Review for July 1866.
And, earlier than all these, the able and interesting volume of my friend Professor Masson, entitled " Recent British Philosophy: a Review, with Criticisms; including some comments on Mr. Mill's Answer to Sir William Hamilton."
PREFACE. Vll
All these, in regard to such of the main questions as they severally discuss, are unqualifiedly hostile ; though some of the writers are, in a personal point of view, most courteous, and even over-complimentary ; and the last eminently friendly as well as flattering.
The following are only partially adverse:
Review of the present work in the North British Review for September 1865, attributed to Professor Fraser, and bearing the strongest internal marks of that origin. This able thinker, though he considers me to have often misunderstood Sir W. Hamilton, is, on the substantive philosophic doctrines principally concerned, a most valuable ally ; to whom I might almost have left the defence of our common opinions.
Mr. Herbert Spencer : " Mill v. Hamilton— The Test of Truth;" in the Fortnightly Review for July 15, 1865.
Review of the present work in the North American Review for July 1866.
The only important criticism, in all essentials favour- able, to which I am able to refer, is that in the West- minster Review for January 1866, by an illustrious his- torian and philosopher, who, of all men now living, is the one by whom I should most wish that any writing of mine, on a subject in speculative philosophy, should be approved. There have also been published since the first edition of the present work, two remarkable books, which, if they do not give me direct support, effect a powerful diversion in my favour. One is Mr. Bolton's " Inquisitio Philosophica ; an Examination of the Prin- ciples of Kant and Hamilton ;" which, along with much other valuable matter, contains a vigorous assault upon my most conspicuous assailant, Mr. Mansel. The other is Mr. Stirling's "Sir William Hamilton, being the Philosophy of Perception ; an Analysis :" an able and
VlU PREPACI!-
most ;»vere criticism on Sir "W. Hamilton's inconsis- tencies, and on his general character as a philosopher, taken from a different point of view from mine, and expressed with far greater asperity than I should myself think justifiable ; legitimated, no doubt, to the writer's mind by " a certain vein of disingenuousness" which he finds in Sir W. Hamilton, but which I have not found, and shall not believe until I see it proved.
I must have been quite incapable of profiting by cri- ticism, if I had learnt nothing from assailants so nume- rous, all of more or less, and some of very considerable, ability. They have detected not a few inadvertences of expression, as well as some of thought : and partly by their help, partly without it, I have discovered others. They have not shaken any statement or opinion of real moment] but I am sincerely indebted to them, both for the errors they have corrected, and for compelling me to strengthen my defences. The point in which it was to be expected that they would oftenest prevail, was in showing me to have erroneously interpreted Sir W. Hamilton. The difficulty to any thinker is so great, in these high regions of speculation, of placing himself com- pletely at the point of view of a different philosophy, and even of thoroughly understanding its language, that it would be very presumptuous in me to imagine that I had always overcome that difficulty ; and that too with the warning before me, of the absolute failure of able and accomplished minds on the other side in philosophy, to accomplish this in regard to the modes of thinking with which I am most familiar. I have been surprised, therefore, to find in how few instances, and those how little important, the defenders of Sir W. Hamilton have been able to show that I have misunderstood or incor- rectly stated his opinions or arguments. I cannot doubt that more such mistakes remain to be pointed out : and
PREFACE. IX
I regret that tlie greater part of the volume has not yet, in its relation to Sir W. Hamilton, had the benefit of a sufficiently minute scrutiny. Had the unsparing criti- cism of Mr. Mansel on the first few chapters been con- tinued to the remainder, he would doubtless have pointed out real mistakes ; he might perhaps have thrown light on some of the topics from his own thoughts ; and I should at least have had to thank him for additional confi- dence in the statements and opinions which had passed unharmed through the ordeal of his attacks.
Where criticism or reconsideration has convinced me that anything in the book was erroneous, or that any improvement was required in the mode of stating and setting forth the truth, I have made the requisite alterations. When the case seemed to require that I should call the reader's attention to the change, I have done so ; but I have not made this an invariable rule. Mere answers to objectors I have generally relegated to notes. With so many volumes to deal with, I could not take express notice of every criticism which they contained. When any of my critics finds that he, or some of his objections, are not individually referred to, let him be assured that it is from no disrespect, but either because I consider them to have been answered by the reply made to some one else, or because their best confutation is to remand the objector to the work itself, or because the edge of the objection has been turned by some, perhaps qoite unapparent, correction of the text. A slight modification in a sentence, or even in a phrase, which a person acquainted with the former editions might read without observing it, and of which, even if he observed it, he would most likely not perceive the purpose, has sometimes effaced many pages of hostile criticism.
PREFACE.
Of the assailants to whom I replied, two only have published a rejoinder; Dean Mansel, in the Contemporary Eeview for September 1867, and Dr.M'Cosh,in the British and Foreign Evangelical Eeview for April 1868. Neither of them appears to me to have added much of value to what he had previously advanced ; and so far as concerns Dean Mansel, his regretted death has put a final termination to the controversy between us. I am not, however, thereby exempted from taking notice, however briefly, of such points in his rejoinder as appear to require it. Dr. M'Cosh seems to think it a great triumph of his assaults upon me, that many of them were not noticed in my rej)lies to critics. It is a little unreasonable in Dr. M'Cosh to suppose that in a work, the subject of which is the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, I was bound to fight a pitched battle with Dr. M'Cosh on the whole line. His book was an attack directed against the whole of my philosophical opinions. I answered such parts of it as had reference to the present work, when they seemed to require an answer, and not to have received it sufficiently in what I had already written. And I have done the same, in the present edition, with his rejoinder.
Besides several unpublished criticisms which I owe to the kindness of correspondence, and which have helped me to correct or otherwise improve some of the details of the work; two more attacks have been made upon it subsequently to the third edition. Professor Veitch, in the Appendices to his interesting Memoir of Sir W. Hamilton, has commented sharply on what I have said respecting Sir W. Hamilton's mode of understanding the Eelativity of human knowledge, and respecting his failure to apprehend correctly the general character of Hume and Leibnitz as philosophers, as well as some par- ticular passages of Aristotle. On the first subject, that
PREFACE. XI
of Relativity, I find so much difficulty in reducing Pro- fessor Veitch's statement to distinct propositions, and, so far as I understand his meaning, it differs so little, and that little not to its advantage, from what I have already commented on in answering Mr. Mansel, that I do not think it necessary to burthen this volume with an express reply to him. With regard to Hum6 and Leibnitz I am content that they who have a competent knowledge of those philosophers should form their own opinion. As regards Sir W. Hamilton's interpretation of Aristotle, Professor Veitch has convicted me of a mistake in treat- ing a citation made by his editors as if it had been made by himself, and of an overstatement of one of Sir W. Hamilton's opinions which I only noticed incidentally. These errors I have corrected, in their places, and it will be found that they do not affect anything of importance in the criticism there made upon Sir W. Hamilton.
Professor Veitch* considers it unfair that 1 should press against Sir W. Hamilton anything contained in his Lectures, these having been hastily written under pressure from time, and not being the most matured expression of some of his opinions. But though thus written, it is admitted that they continued to be delivered by Sir W. Hamilton as long as he performed the duties of Professor ; which would not have been the case if he had no longer considered them as a fair repre- sentation of his philosophy. A complete representation I never pretended that they were; a correct representation I am bound to think them ; for it cannot be believed that he would have gone on delivering to his pupils matter which he judged to be inconsistent with the subsequent developments of his philosophy.
The other thinker who has taken the field against my psychological opinions is Dr. Ward, who, in the Dublin
* Memoir of Sir WiUiam Hamilton, pp. 212, 213.
Xll PREFACE.
Review for October 1871, has made an able attack on the views I have expressed in this and other writings on the subject of what is called Necessary Truth. Sorae of Dr. Ward's observations are more particularly directed against a portion of my System of Logic, and the fittest place for their discussion is in connexion with that treatise. But the greater part of his article principally regards the chapter of the present work which relates to Inseparable Association, and a reply to it will be found in a note which I have added at the end of that chapter.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
IHTRODUCTORY REMARKS 1
CHAPTER II.
THE RELATIVITT OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE 5
CHAPTER III.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE RELATIVITT OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, AS HELD
BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON 17
CHAPTER IV.
IN WHAT RESPECT SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON REALLY DIFFERS FROM
THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE ABSOLUTE 45
CHAPTER V.
WHAT IS REJECTED AS KNOWLEDGE BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON,
BROUGHT BACK UNDER THE NAME OF BELIEF 74
I
CHAPTER VI.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONDITIONED . 82
^
XIV CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VII.
TLBM THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONDITIONED, AS APPLIED BY MR. MANSEL
TO THE LIMITS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT Ill
CHAPTER VIII.
OF CONSCIOUSNESS, AS UNDERSTOOD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON . 136
CHAPTER IX. '
ON THE INTERPRETATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS 157
CHAPTER X. SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's view of the different theories
RESPECTmO the BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL WORLD .... 187
CHAPTER XL 3
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF THE BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL
WORLD 225
CHAPTER XII.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF THE BELIEF IN MATTER, HOW
FAR APPLICABLE TO MIND 240
APPENDIX TO THE TWO PRECEDING CHAPTERS ....... 250
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF THE PRIMARY QUALITIES OF
MATTER . 265
CHAPTER XIV. ^ H j
HOW SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AND MR. MANSEL DISPOSE OF THE
LAW OF INSEPARABLE ASSOCIATION 314
CONTENTS. XV
CHAPTER XV.
PA61
SIB WILLIAM Hamilton's doctrine of unconscious mental
MODIFICATIONS 341
CHAPTER XVI. SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's theory of causation 359
CHAPTER XVII. ** the doctrine of concepts, or general notions 380
CHAPTER XVIII. of judgment 414
CHAPTER XIX. OF reasoning 438
CHAPTER XX.
ON SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S CONCEPTION OF LOGIC AS A SCIENCE.
IS LOGIC THE SCIENCE OF THE LAWS OR FORMS OF THOUGHT? 446
CHAPTER XXI.
THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF THOUGHT ACCORDING TO SIR WILLIAM
HAMILTON 479
CHAPTER XXII. L-
OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S SUPPOSED IMPROVEMENTS IN FORMAL
LOGIC 496
CHAPTER XXni. '
of some minor peculiarities of doctrine in sir william
Hamilton's view of formal logic 521
XVI CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XXIV.
ri.ai OF SOME NATURAL PREJUDICES COUNTENANCED BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, AND SOME FALLACIES WHICH HE CONSIDERS IN- SOLUBLE 539
CHAPTER XXV. SIS WILLIAM Hamilton's theort of pleasure and pain . . . 553
CHAPTER XXVI.
ON THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 561
CHAPTER XXVII.
SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's opinions on the studt of mathe- matics 591
CHAPTER XXVIII. concluding remarks 617
AN EXAMINATION
or
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY.
CHAPTEE I.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
Among the philosophical writers of the present century in these islands, no one occupies a higher position than Sir William Hamilton. He alone, of our metaphysicians of this and the preceding generation, has acquired, merely as such, an European celebrity : while, in our own country, he has not only had power to produce a revival of interest in a study which had ceased to be popular, but has made himself, in some sense, the founder of a school of thought. The school, indeed, is not essentially new ; for its fundamental doctrines are those of the philo- sophy which has everywhere been in the ascendant since the setting in of the reaction against Locke and Hume, which dates from Reid among ourselves and from Kant for the rest of Europe. But that general scheme of philosophy is split into many divisions, and the Hamil- tonian form of it is distinguished by as marked pecu- liarities as belong to any other of its acknowledged varieties. From the later German and French develop- ments of the common doctrine, it is separated by dif- ferences great in reality, and still greater in appearance ; while it stands superior to the earlier Scottish and Eng- lish forms by the whole difference of level which has
\6
Z INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
been gained to philosophy through the powerful nega- tive criticism of Kant. It thus unites to the prestige of independent originality, the recommendation of a general harmony with the prevailing tone of thought. These advantages, combined with an intellect highly trained and in many respects highly fitted for the subject, and a knowledge probably never equalled in extent and accu- racy of whatever had been previously thought and written in his department, have caused Sir William Hamilton to be justly recognised as, in the province of abstract speculation, one of the important figures of the age.
The acknowledged position of Sir W. Hamilton at the head, so far as regards this country, of the school of philosophy to which he belongs, has principally deter- mined me to connect with his nan\e and writings the speculations and criticisms contained in the present work. The justification of the work itself lies in the importance of the questions, to the discussion of which it is a contribution. England is often reproached by Continental thinkers, with indifference to the higher philosophy. But England did not always deserve this reproach, and is already showing, by no doubtful symp- toms, that she will not deserve it much longer. Her thinkers are again beginning to see, what they had only temporarily forgotten, that a true Psychology is the indispensable scientific basis of Morals, of Politics, of the science and art of Education ; that the difficulties of Metaphysics lie at the root of all science ; that those diffi- culties can only be quieted by being resolved, and that until they are resolved, positively whenever possible, but at any rate negatively, we are never assured that any human knowledge, even physical, stands on solid foun- dations.
My subject, therefore, is less Sir W. Hamilton, than the questions which Sir W. Hamilton discussed. It is, however, impossible to write on those questions in our own country and in our own time, without incessant reference, express or tacit, to his treatment of them. On
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 8
all the subjects on which he touched, he is either one of the most powerful allies of what I deem a sound philo- sophy, or (more frequently) by far its most formidable antagonist ; both because he came the latest, and wrote with a full knowledge of the flaws which had been de- tected in his predecessors, and because he was one of the ablest, the most far-sighted, and the most candid. Whenever any opinion which he deliberately expressed, is contended against, his form of the opinion, and his arguments for it, are those which especially require to be faced and carefully appreciated : and it being thus im- possible that any fit discussion of his topics should not involve an estimate of his doctrines, it seems worth while that the estimate should be rendered as complete as practicable, by being extended to all the subjects on which he has made, or on which he is believed to have made, any important contribution to thought.
In thus attempting to anticipate, as faras is yet possible, the judgment of posterity on Sir W. Hamilton's labours, I sincerely lament that on the many points on which I am at issue with him, I have the unfair advantage pos- sessed by one whose opponent is no longer in a condition to reply. Personally I might have had small cause to congratulate myself on the reply which I might have received, for though a strictly honourable, he was a most unsparing controversialist, and whoever assailed even the most unimportant of his opinions, might look for hard blows in return. But it would have been worth far more, even to myself, than any polemical success, to have known with certainty in what manner he would have met the objections raised in the present volume. T feel keenly, with Plato, how much more is to be learnt by discussing with a man, who can question and answer, than with a book, which cannot. But it was not possible to take a general review of Sir W. Hamilton's doctrines while they were only known to the world in the frag- mentary state in which they were published during his life. His Lectures, the fullest and the only consecutive exposition (as far as it goes) of his philosophy, are a
B 2
4 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
posthumous publication; while the latest and most matured expression of many of his opinions, the Disser- tations on Reid, left off, scarcely half finished, in the middle of a sentence ; and so long as he lived, his readers were still hoping for the remainder. The Lectures, it is true, have added less than might have been expected to the knowledge we already possessed of the author's doc- trines ; but it is something to know that we have now all that is to be had ; and though we should have been glad to have his opinions on more subjects, we could scarcely have known more thoroughly than we are now at last enabled to do, what his thoughts were on the points to which he attached the greatest importance, and which are most identified with his name and fame.
CHAPTEE II.
THE BELATIVITT OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
The doctrine which is thought to belong in the most especial manner to Sir W. Hamilton, and which was the ground of his opposition to the transcendentalism of the later French and German metaphysicians, is that which he and others have called the Relativity of Human Knowledge. It is the subject of the most generally known, and most impressive, of all his writings, the one which first revealed to the English metaphysical reader that a new power had arisen in philosophy ; and, together with its developments, it composes the " Philosophy of the Conditioned," which he opposed to the German and French philosophies of the Absolute, and which is re- garded by most of his admirers as the greatest of his titles to a permanent place in the history of metaphy- sical thought.
But the " relativity of human knowledge," like most other phrases into which the words relative or relation enter, is vague, and admits of a great variety of meanings. In one of its senses, it stands for a proposition respecting the nature and limits of our knowledge, in my judgment true, fundamental, and lull of important consequences in philosophy. From this amplitude of meaning its significance shades down through a number of gradations, successively more thin and unsubstantial, till it fades into a truism leading to no consequences, and hardly worth enunciating in words. When, therefore, a philo- sopher lays great stress upon the relativity of our know- ledge, it is necessary to cross-examine his writings, and compel them to disclose in which of its many degrees of meaning he understands the phrase.
THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
There is one oT its acceptations, whicli, for the pur- pose now in view, may be put aside, though in itself defensible, and though, when thus employed, it expresses a real and important law of our mental nature. This is, that we only know anything, by knowing it as distin- guished from something else ; that all consciousness is of difference ; that two objects are the smallest number required to constitute consciousness ; that a thing is only seen to be what it is, by contrast with what it is not. The employment of the proposition, that all human knowledge is relative, to express this meaning, is sanctioned by high authorities,* and I have no fault to find with that use of the phrase. But we are not concerned with it in the present case ; for it is not in this sense, that the expression is ordinarily or intentionally used by Sir W. Hamilton ; though he fully recognises the truth which, when thus used, it serves to express. In general, when he says that all our knowledge is relative, the relation he has in view is not between the thing known and other objects compared with it, but between the thing known and the mind knowing.
All language recognises a distinction between myself — the Ego — and a world, either material, or spiritual, or both, external to me, but of which I can, in some mode and measure, take cognizance. The most fundamental ques- tions in philosophy are those which seek to determine what we are able to know of these external objects, and by what evidence we know it.
In examining the different opinions which are or may be entertained on this subject, it will simplify the ex- position very much, if we at first limit ourselves to the case of physical, or what are commonly called material objects. These objects are of course known to us through the senses. By those channels and no otherwise do we learn whatever we do learn concerning them. Without the senses we should not know nor suspect that such things existed. We know no more of what they are, than the
* In particular by Mr. Bain, who habitually uses the phrase " relativity of knowledge" in this sense.
THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. 7
senses tell us, nor does nature afford us any means of knowing more. Tlius much, in the obvious meaning of the terms, is denied by no one, though there are thinkers who prefer to express the meaning in other language.
There are, however, conflicting opinions as to wJiat it is that the senses tell us concerning objects. About one part of the information they give, there is no dispute. They tell us our sensations. The objects excite, or awaken in us, certain states of feeling. A part, at least, of what we know of the objects, is the feelings to which they give rise. What we term the properties of an i object, are the powers it exerts of producing sensations in our consciousness. Take any familiar object, such as an orange. It is yellow ; that is, it affects us, through our sense of sight, with a particular sensation of colour. It is soft ; in other words it produces a sensation, through our muscular feelings, of resistance overcome by a slight effort. It is sweet; for it causes a peculiar kind of pleasurable sensation through our organ of taste. It i» of a globular figure, somewhat flattened at the ends : we affirm this on account of sensations that it causes in us, respecting which it is still in dispute among psycholo- gists whether they originally came to us solely through touch and the muscles, or also through the organ of sight. When it is cut open, we discover a certain ar- rangement of parts, distinguishable as being, in certain respects, unlike one another ; but of their unlikeness we have no measure or proof except that they give us dif- ferent sensations. The rind, the pulp, the juice, difl'er from one another in colour, in taste, in small, in degree of consistency (that is, of resistance to pressure) all of which are diflerences in our feelings. The parts are, moreover, outside one another, occupying difi'ereut por- tions of space : and even this distinction, it is maintained (though the doctrine is vehemently protested against by some) may be resolved into a diflerencein our sensations. When thus analysed, it is affirmed that all the attributes which we ascribe to objects, consist in their having the power of exciting one or another variety of seuijation in.
8
THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
» I
t\f^
>
our rnind ; that to ns the properties of an object have this and no other meaning ; that an object is to us no- thing else than that which affects our senses in a certain manner ; that we are incapable of attaching to the word object, any other meaning; that even an imaginary oV- ject is but a conception, such as we are able to form, of something which would affect our senses in some new way; so that our knowledge of objects,, and even our fancies about objects, consist of nothing but the sensa- tions which they excite, or which we imagine them ex- citing in ourselves.
This is the doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge to the knowing mind, in the simplest, purest, and, as I think, the most proper acceptation of the words. There are, however, two forms of this doctrine, which differ materially from one another.
According to one of the forms, the sensations which, in common parlance, we are said to receive from objects, are not only all that we can possibly know of the objects, but are all that we have any ground for believing to exist. What we term an object is but a complex con- ception made np by the laws of association, out of the ideas of various sensations which we are accustomed to receive simultaneously. There is nothing real in the process but these sensations. They do not, indeed, ac- company or succeed one another at random ; they are held together by a law, that is, they occur in fixed groups, and a fixed order of succession : but we have no evidence of anything which, not being itself a sensation, is a sub- stratum or hidden cause of sensations. The idea of sucli a substratum is a purely mental creation, to which we have no reason to think that there is any corresponding reality exterior to our minds. Those who hold this opinion are said to doubt or deny the existence of matter. They are sometimes called by the name Idealists, some- times by that of Sceptics, according to the other opinions which they hold. They include the followers of Berkeley and those of Hume. Among recent thinkers, the acute and accomplished Professor Ferrier, though by a circuitous
THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. 9
path, and expressing himself in a very different phrase- • ology, seems to have arrived at essentially the same point of view. These philosophers maintain the Rela- ' tivity of our knowledge in the most extreme form in which the doctrine can be understood, since they con- tend, not merely that all we can possibly know of any- | thing is the manner in which it aifects the human faculties, but that there is nothing else to be known ; that affections of human or of some other minds are all \ that we can know to exist.
This, however, is far from being the shape in which 't\^- the doctrine of the Relativity of our knowledge is usu- ally held. To most of those who hold it, the difference between the Ego and the Non-Ego is not one of lan- guage only, nor a formal distinction between two aspects of the same reality, but denotes two realities, each having a separate existence, and neither dependent on the other. In the phraseology borrowed from the School- men by the German Transcendentalists, they regard the ; Noumenon as in itself a different thing from the Phae- j nomenon, and equally real ; many of them would say, ! much more real, being the permanent Reality, of which the other is but the passing manifestation. They be- lieve that there is a real universe of " Things in Them- selves," and that whenever there is an impression on our senses, there is a " Thing in itself," which is behind the phaenomenon, and is the cause of it. But as to what this Thing is "in itsell," we, having no organs except our senses for communicating with it, can only know what our senses tell us ; and as they tell us nothing but the impression which the thing makes upon us, we do not know what it is in itself at all. We suppose (at least these philosophers suppose) that it must be some- thing " in itself," but all that we know it to be is merely relative to us, consisting in the power of affecting us in certain ways, or, as it is technically called, of producing Phsenomena. External things exist, and haye^ an in- ^ most nature, but their inmost nature is inaccessible to our faculties. We know it not, and can assert nothing
10 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
of it with a meaning, Of the ultimate Reahties, as such, we know the existence, and nothing more. But the impressions which these Realities make on us — ^he sensations thej excite, the similitudes, groupings, and successions of those sensations, or, to sum up all this in a common though improper expression, the represen- tations generated in our minds by the action ot the Things themselves — these we may know, and these are all that we can know respecting tliem. In some future state of existence it is conceivable that we may know more, and more may be known by intelligences superior to us. Yet even this can only be true in the same sense in which a person with the use of his eyes knows more than is known to one born blind, or in which we should know more than we do if we were endowed with two or three additional senses. We should have more sensa- tions ; phajnomena would exist to us of which we have at present no conception ; and we might know better than we now do, many of those wliicli are within our present experience; for if the new impressions were Imked with the old, as the old are with one anoiher, by uniformities of succession and coexistence, we should now have new marks indicating to us known phseno- mena in cases in which we should otherwise have been unaware of them. But all this additional knowledge would be, like that which we now possess, merely phae- nomenal. We should not, any more than at present, know things as they are in themselves, but merely an increased number of relations between them and us. And in the only meaning which we are able to attach to the term, aiijknowiedge, by however exalted an In- telligence, can only be relative to the knowing Mind. If Tnmgs have an inmost nature, apart not only trom ! the impressions which they produce, but from ail those j which they are fitted to produce, on any sentient being, ' this inmost nature is unknowable, inscrutable, and in- conceivable, not to us merely, but to every other crea- ture. To say that even the Creator could know it,, is \ to use language which to us has no meaning, because
-%
THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, 11
we have no faculties by which to apprehend that there I is any such thing for him to know. '
It is in this form that the doctrine of the Eelativity of Knowledge is held by the greater number of those who profess to hold it, attaching any definite idea to the term. These again are divided into several distinct schools of thinkers, by some of whom the doctrine is held with a modification of considerable importance.
Agreeing in the opinion that what we know of Nou- inena, or Things in themselves, is but their bare exis- tence, all our other knowledge of Things being but a knowledge of something in ourselves which derives its origin from them ; there is a class of thinkers who hold that our mere sensations, and an outward cause which produces them, do not compose the whole of this relative knowledge. The Attributes which we ascribe to out- ward things, or such at least as are inseparable from them in thought, contain, it is affirmed, other elements, over and above sensations plus an unknowable cause. These additional elements are still only relative, for they are not in the objects themselves, nor have we evidence of anything in the objects that answers to them. They are added by the mind itself, and belong, not to the Things, but to our perceptions and conceptions of them. Such properties as the objects can be conceived divested of, such as sweetness or sourness, hardness or softness, hotness or coldness, whiteness, redness, or blackness — these, it is sometimes admitted, exist in our sensations only. But the attributes of filling space, and occupying i a portion of time, are not properties of our sensations \ in their crude state, neither, again, are they properties of the objects, nor is there in the objects any prototype of them. They r^ult irom the nature and structure of the Mind itself : which is so constituted that it cannot take any impressions from objects except in those par- ticular modes. We see a thing in a place, not because the Noumenon, the Thing in itself, is in any place, but because it is the law of our perceptive faculty that we must see as in some place, whatever we see at ail. Place
^
12 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
'is not a property of the Thing, but a mode in which the mind is compelled to represent it. Time and Space are
I only modes of our perceptions, not modes of existence, and higher Intelligences are possibly not bound by them. Things, in themselves, are neither in time nor in space, though we cannot represent them to ourselves except under that twofold condition. Again, when we predicate of a thing that it is one or many, a whole or a part of a whole, a Substance possessing Accidents, or an Accident inhering in a Substance — when we think of it as producing Efiects, or as produced by a Cause, (I omit
1 other attributes not necessary to be here enumerated,) we are ascribing to it properties which do not exist in the Thing itself, but with which it is clothed by the laws of our conceptive faculty — properties not of the ' Things, but of our mode of conceiving them. We are compelled by our nature to construe things to ourselves under these forms, but they are not forms of the Things. The attributes exist only in relation to us, and as in- herent laws of the human faculties ; but diti'er from Succession and Duration in being laws of our intel- lectual, not our sensitive faculty; technically termed Categories of the Understanding. This is the doctrine of the Kelativity of our knowledge as held by Kant, who has been followed in it by many subsequent thinkers, Grerman, English, and French.
By the side of this there is another philosophy, older in date, which, though temporarily eclipsed and often m\jffContemptuously treated by it, is, according to present Jj^'> , appearances, likely to survive it. Taking the same view ^ with Kant of the unknowableness of Things in them-
selves, and also agreeing with him that we mentally invest the objects of our perceptions with attributes which do not all point, like whiteness and sweetness, to specific sensations, but are in some cases constructed by the mind's own laws ; this philosophy, however, does not think it necessary to ascribe to the mind certain innate forms, in which the objects are (as it were) moulded into these appearances, but holds that Place, Extension, Substance, Cause, and the rest, are conceptions
AVp^^%<V^E RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. 13
^(^ put together out of ideas of sensation by the known J;,;P*>,^laws of association. This, the doctrine of Hartley, of ^^ James Mill, of Professor Bain, and other eminent thinkers, and which is compatible with either the acceptance or the rejection of the Berkeleian theory, is the extreme form of one mode of the doctrine of Relati- vity, as Kant's is of another. Both schemes accept the J^i doctrine in its widest sense — the entire inaccessibility ^' I to our faculties of any other knowledge of Things than ) that of the impressions which they produce in our mental 1 consciousness.
Between these there are many intermediate systems, according as different thinkers have assigned more or less to the original furniture of the mind on the one hand, or to the associations generated by experience on the other. Brown, for example, regards our notion of Space or Extension as a product of association, while many of our intellectual ideas are regarded by him as ' ultimate and undecomposable facts. But he accepts, in its full extent, the doctrine of the Relativity of our knowledge, being of opinion that though we are assured of the objective existence of a world external to the mind, our knowledge of that world is absolutely limited to the modes in which we are affected by it. The same doctrine is very impressively taught by one of the acutest metaphysicians of recent times, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, in his " First Principles," insists with equal force upon the certainty of the existence of Things in Themselves, and upon their absolute and eternal relegation to the region of the Unknowable.* This is also, apparently, the doctrine of Auguste Comte : though while maintaining with great emphasis the unknow- ableness of Noumena by our faculties, his aversion to metaphysics prevented him from giving any definite opinion as to their real existence, which, however, his language always by implication assumes.
It is obvious that what has been said respecting the unknowableness of Things " in themselves," forms no
* See, kowever, below, a note near the end of chap, ix.
14 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
obstacle to our ascribing attributes or properties to them, provided these are always conceived as relative to us. If a thing produces effects of which our sight, hearing, or touch can take cognizance, it follows, and indeed is but the same statement in other words, that the thing [hdiS^i/^er to produce those effects. These various_powers are its properties, and of such, an indefinite multitude is open to our knowledge. But this knowledge is merely pha3nomenal. The object is known to us only in one special relation, namely, as that which produces, or is capa- ble of producing, certain impressions on our senses ; and all that we really know is these impressions. This nega- tive meaning is all that should be understood by the assertion, that we cannot know the Thing in itself; that we cannot know its inmost nature or essence. The in^ most nature or essence of a Thing is apt to be regarded as something unknown, which, if we knew it, would ex- . plain and account for all the phsenomena which the thing jLt;d^<'f exhibits to us. But tjiis unknown something is a sup- position without evidence. We have no ground for supposing that there is anything which if known to us would afford to our intellect this satisfaction ; would sum up, as it were, the knowable attributes of the object in a single sentence. Moreover, if there were such a central property, it would not answer to the idea of an " inmost nature ;" for if knowable by any intelligence, it must, like other properties, be relative to the intelligence which knows it, that is, it must solely consist in pro- ducing in that intelligence some specifically definite state of consciousness ; for this is the only idea we have of knowing; the only sense in which the verb "to know" means anything.
It would, no doubt, be absurd to assume that our words exhaust the possibilities of Being. There may be innumerable modes of it which are inaccessible to our faculties, and which consequently we are unable to name. But we ought not to speak of these modes of Being by any of the names we possess. These are all inapplicable, because they all stand for known modes of Being. We might invent new names for such unknown modes ; but
-(t>H'
»*
THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. 15
the new names would have no more meaning than the X, y, z, of Algebra. The only name we can give them which really expresses an attribute, is the word Unknow- able.
The doctrine of the Eolativity of our knowledge, in the sense which has now been explained, is one of great weight and significance, which impresses a character on the whole mode of philosophical thinking of whoever receives it, and is the key-stone of one of the only two possible systems of Metaphj'sics and Psychology. But the doctrine is capable of being, and is, understood in at least two other senses. In one of them, instead of a definite and important tenet, it means something quite insignificant, which no one ever did or could call in question. Suppose a philosopher to maintain that cer- tain properties of objects are in the Thing, and not in our senses ; in the thing itself, not as whiteness may be said to be_in the thing (namely, that there is in the thing a power whereby it produces in us the sensation of white), but in quite another manner ; and are known to us not indirectly, as the inferred causes of our sensa- tions, but by direct perception of them in the. outward object. Suppose the same philosopher nevertheless to affirm strenuously that all our knowledge is merely phaenomenal, and relative to ourselves; that we do not and cannot know anything of outward objects, except relatively to our own faculties. I think our first feeling respecting a thinker who professed both these doctrines, would be to wonder what he could possibly mean by the latter of them. It would seem that he must mean one of two trivialities ; either that we can only know what we have the power of knowing, or else that all our know- ledge is relative to us inasmuch as it is we that know it.
There is another mode of understanding the doctrine of Relativity, intermediate between these insignificant truisms and the substantial doctrine previously ex- pounded. The position taken may be, that perception I of Things as they are in themselves is not entirely denied to us, but is so mixed and confounded with ! impressions derived from their action on us, as to '
16 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
^ive a relative character to the wLole aggregate. Our absolute knowledge may be vitiated and disguised by the presence of a relative element. Our faculty (it may be said) of perceiving tilings as they are in themselves, though real, has its own laws, its own conditions, and necessary mode of operation : our cognitions subse- quently depend, not solely on the nature of the things to be known, but also on that of the knowing faculty, as our sight depends not solely upon the object seen, but upon that together with the structure of the eye. If the eye were not achromatic, we should see all visible objects with colours derived from the organ, as well as with those truly emanating from the object. Supposing, there- fore, that Things in themselves are the natural and proper object of our knowing faculty, and that this faculty carries to the mind a report of what is in the Thing itself, apart from its effects on us, there would still be a portion of uncertainty in these reports, inasmuch as we could not be sure that the eye of our mind is achromatic, and that the message it brings from the Noumenon does not arrive tinged and falsified, in an unknown degree, through an influence arising from the necessary conditions of the mind's action. We may, in short, be looking at Things in themselves, but through imperfect glasses : w4iat we see niay be the very Thing, but the colours and forms which the glass conveys to us may be partly an optical illusion. This is a possible opinion : and one who, holding this opinion, should speak of the Eelativity of our knowledge, would not use the term wholly without meaning. But he could not, con- sistently, assert that all our knowledge is relative ; since his opinion would be that we have a capacity of Absolute knowledge, but that we are liable to mistake relative knowledge for it.
In which, if in any, of these various meanings, was the doctrine of Relativity held by Sir W. Hamilton ? To this question, a more puzzling one than might have been expected, we shall endeavour in the succeeding chapter to find an answer.
17
CHAPTER III.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOVVLEDGj^, AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON.
It is hardly possible to affirm more strongly or more ex- plicity than Sir W. Hamilton has done, that Things in themselves are to us altogether unknowable, and that all we can know of anything is its relation to us, composed of, and limited to, the Phaenomena which it exhibits to our organs. Let me cite a passage from one of the Appendices to the " Discussions."*
" Our whole knowledge of kind and of matter is re- " lative, conditioned — relatively conditioned. Of things " absolutely or in themselves, be they external, be they " internal, we know nothing, or know them only as in- '' cognisable; and become aware of their incomprehensible " existence, only as this is indirectly and accidentally re- " vealed to us, through certain qualities related to our " faculties of knowledge, and which qualities, again, we " cannot think as unconditioned, irrelative, existent in " and of themselves. All that we know is therefore " phaenomenal, — phsenornenal of the unknown .... " Nor is this denied; for it has been commonly confessed, " that, as substances, we know not what is Matter, and " are ignoraut of wliat is Mind."
This passage might be matched by many others, equally emphatic, and in appearance equally decisive ; several of which I shall have occasion to quote. Yet in the sense which the author's phrases seem to convey — in the only important meaning capable of being attached to them — the doctrine they assert was certaiul}" not held
* " Discussions on Philosophy," p. 643. C
18 THE RELATIVITY OP HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
by Sir W. Hamilton. He by no means admits that we know nothing of objects except their existence, and the impressions produced by them upon the human mind. Be affirms this in regard to what have been called by metaphysicians the Secondary Qualities of Matter, but denies it of the Primary.
On this point his declarations are very explicit. One of the most elaborate of his Dissertations on Reid is devoted to expounding the distinction. The Disserta- tion begins thus :*
" The developed doctrine of Real Presentationism, the " basis of Natural Realism" (the doctrine of the author himself) " asserts the consciousness or immediate per- " ception of certain essential attributes of Matter ob- "jectively existing ; while it admits that other properties " of body are unknown in themselves, and only inferred " as causes to account for certain subjective affections of " which we are cognizant in ourselves. This discrimina- " tion, which to other systems is contingent, superficial, " extraneous, but to Natural Realism necessary, radical, " intrinsic, coincides with what since the time of Locke •' has been generally known as the distinction of the " Qualities of Matter or Body, using these terms as con- '' vertible, into Primary and Secondary."
Further on,t he states, in additional development of so-called Natural Realism, " that we have not merely a " notion, a conception, an imagination, a subjective re- " presentation — of Extension, for example — called up or " suggested in some incomprehensible manner to the " mind, on occasion of an extended object being pre- " sented to the sense ; but that in the perception of such " an object we really have, as by nature we believe we " have, an immediate knowledge of that external object " as extended."
" If I we are not percipient of any extended reality, " we are not percipient of body as existing ; for body
* Dissertations appended to Sir W. Hamilton's Edition of Eeid's Works, p. 825.
f Dissertations, p. 842. J Ibid.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 19
*' exists, and can only be known immediately, and in '^\ x. *' itself, as extended. The material world, on this sup- .,^oi»^ \ ** position, sinks into something unknown and proble- -uk^ *' matical ; and its existence, if not denied, can, at least, be \ -^ " only precariously affirmed, as the occult cause, or in- oc**"^^ " comprehensible occasion, of certain subjective affections ^yJ^ " we experience in the form either of a sensation of the yyj^* " secondary quality or of a perception of the primary." ^^^ ^
Not only, in Sir W. Hamilton's opinion, do we know, !^v^ « by direct consciousness or perception, certain properties \^ff^ of Things as they exist in the Things themselves, but - y^'''^ we may also know those properties as in the Things, by demonstration a priori. " The notion* of body being " given, every primary quality is to be evolved out of " that notion, as necessarily involved in it, independently *' altogether of any experience of sense." " Thef Pri- " mary Qualities may be deduced a priori, the bare notion " of matter being given ; they being, in fact, only evo- " lutions of the conditions which that notion necessarily " implies." He goes so far as to say, that our belief of the Primary Qualities is, not merely necessary as in- volved in a fact of which we have a direct perception, but necessary in itself, by our mental constitution. Hej speaks I of " that absolute or insuperable resistance which I " we are compelled, independently of experience, to think " that every part of matter would oppose to any attempt , " to deprive it of its space, by compressing it into an in- 1 " extended."
The following is still more specific. § " The Primary" Qualities " are apprehended as they are in bodies ; the Secondary, as they are in us: the Secundo-priraary" (a third class created by himself, comprising the me- ^e«*vA chanical as distinguished from the geometrical properties of Body) " as they are in bodies and as they are in us. . . . " We know the Primary qualities immediately as objects *' of perception ; the Secundo -primary both immediately " as objects of perception and mediately as causes of sen- ,
* Dissertations, p. 844. t Ibid. p. 846. X Ibid, p. 848. § Ibid. pp. 857, 858.
c2
.,itr^-'
20 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
" sation ; the Secondary onl}'- mediately as causes of seii- " sation. In other words : The Primary are known im- " mediately in themselves ; the Secundo-primary, both " immediately in themselves and mediately in their effects " on us ; the Secondary, only mediately in tlieir effects on
"us We are conscious, as objects, in the
" Primary Qualities, of the modes of a not-self; in the " Secondary, of tlie modes of self; in the Secundo-pri- " mary, of the modes of self and of a not-self at once."
There is nothing wonderful in Sir W. Hamilton's entertaining these opinions ; they are held by perhaps a majority of metaph3^sicians. But it is surprising that, entertaining them, he should have believed himself, and been believed by others, to maintain the Relativity of all our knowledge. What he deems to be relative, in any sense of the term that is not insignificant, is only our knowledge of the Secondary Qualities of objects. Exten- sion and the other Primary Qualities be positively asserts that we have an immediate intuition of^ " as they are in bodies" — "as modes of a not-self ;" in express contra- distinction to being known merely as causes of certain impressions on our senses or on our minds. As there cannot have been, in his own thoughts, a flat contradic- tion between what he would have admitted to be the two cardinal doctrines of his philosophy, the only question that can arise is, which of the two is to be taken in a non-natural sense. Is it the doctrine that we know certain properties as they are in the Things ? Were we to judge from a foot-note to the same Dissertation, we might suppose so. He there observes* — " In saying " that a thing is known in itself, I do not mean that thi^ ' " object is known in its absolute existence, that is, out " of relation to us. This is impossible : for our know- • " ledge is only of the relative. To know a thing in itself ; " or immediately, is an expression I use merely in con- I " trast to the knowledge of a thing in a representation, j " or mediately :" in other words, he merely means that we perceive objects directly, and not through the species
* P. 866.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 21
sensibiles of Lucretius, the Ideas of Locke, or the Mental Modifications of Brown. Let us suppose this granted, and that the knowledge we have of objects is gained by direct perception. Still, the question has to &iV^ be answered whether the knowledge so acquired is of i^^\ the objects as they are in themselves, or only as they ^5 ^Vj^- are relatively to us. Now what, according to Sir W. i^ ^ ^ Hamilton, is this knowledge ? Is it a knowledge of the VCl!^* Thing, merely in its effects on us, or is it a knowledge of < *1 j.Jl^V* ' somewhat in the Thing, ulterior to any effect on us ? '■"^^'^ He asserts in the plainest terms that it is the latter. ,;i.«^^ Then it is not a knowledge wholly relative to us. If i;.>»'''^t what we perceive in the Thing is something of which we a*»»^. *. are only aware as existing, and as causing impressions on \-*^'^»V us, our knowledge of the Thing is only relative. But j^^-^ if what we perceive and cognise is not merely a cause of o'^^ *^^ our subjective impressions, but a Thing possessing, in its ©^"i^*^ own nature and essence, a long list of properties. Extension, ^' '^^ ^y \* V/^ Impenetrability, Number, Magnitude, Figure, Mobihty, ^v^-"*]^ Position, all perceived as " essential attributes " of the ^^"^ Thing as " objectively existing" — all as " Modes of a Not-Self" and by no means as an occult cause or causes of any Modes of Self — (and that such is the case Sir W. Hamilton asserts in every form of language, leaving no stone unturned to make us apprehend ttie breadth of the distinction) then I am willing to believe that in affirming this knowledge to be entirely relative to Self, such a thinker as Sir W. Hamilton had a meaning, but I have no small difficulty in discovering what it is.
The place where we should expect to find this difficulty cleared up, is the formal exposition of the Belativity of Human Knowledge, in the first volume of the Lectures.
He declares his intention* of " now stating and ex- •' plaining the great axiom that all human knowledge, " consequently that all human philosophy, is only of the " relative or phsenomenal. In this proposition, the term *' relative is opposed to the term absolute ; and therefore, " in saying that we know only the relative, 1 virtually * Lectures, L 1U6-8.
22 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
" assert that we know nothing absolute, — nothing" exist- " ing absolutely, that is, in and for itself, and without rela- " tion to us and our faculties. I shall illustrate this by " its application. Our knowledge is either of matter or " of raind. Now, what is matter? What do we know " of matter ^ Matter, or body, is to us the name either " of something known, or of something unknown. In so "far as matter is a name for something known, it means " that which appears to us under the forms of extension, " solidity, divisibility, figure, motion, roughness, smooth- " ness, colour, heat, cold, &c. ; in short, it is a common " name for a certain series, or aggregate, or complement " of appearances or phsenomena manifested in coexistence.
" But as these phaenomena appear only in conjunction, ." we are compelled by the constitution of our nature to " think them conjoined in and by something ; and as they " are phsenomena, we cannot think them the phsenomena " of nothing, but must regard them as the properties or " qualities of something that is extended, solid, figured, " &c. But this something, absolutely and in itself, " i.e. considered apart from its phsenomena — is to us as " zero. It is only in its qualities, only in its effects, in " its relative or phsenomenal existence, that it is cogniz- " able or conceivable ; and it is only by a law of thought " which compels us to think something absolute and un- " known, as the basis or condition of the relative and " known, that this something obtains a kind of incom- " prehensible reality to us. Now, that which manifests " its qualities — in other words, that in which the appear- "ing causes inhere, that to which they belong, — is called " their subject, or substance, or substratum. To this sub- " ject of the phsenomena of extension, solidity, &c., the " term matter or material substance is commonly given ; " and therefore, as contradistinguished Irom these quali- " ties, it is the name of something unknown and incon- " ceivable.
" The same is true in regard to the term mind. In so " far as mind is the common name for the states of " knowing, willing, feeling, desiring, &c., of which I am
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 23
* conscious, it is only the name for a certain series of ' connected phjenomena or qualities, and, consequently,
* expresses only what is known. But in so far as it
* denotes that subject or substance in which the phseno- ' mena of knowing, willing, &c., inhere — something be-
* hind or under these phaenomena — it expresses what, ' in itself or in its absolute existence, is unknown.
" Thus, mind and matter, as known or knowable, are ' only two different series of phaenomena or qualities ; ' mind and matter, as unknown and unknowable, are ' the two substances, in which these two different series
* of phsenomena or qualities are supposed to inhere. \y ' The existence of an unknown substance is only an in- "^^ ' ference we are compelled to make from the existence ' of known phsenomena ; and the distinction of two sub- ' stances is only inferred from the seeming incompati-
* bility of the two series of phsenomena to coinhere in 'one.
" Our whole knowledge of mind and matter is thus, ' as we have said, only relative ; of existence, absolutely
* and in itself, we know nothing : and we may say of ' man what Virgil said of jEneas, contemplating in the ' prophetic sculpture of his shield the future glories of ' E,ome —
" Rerumque ignams, imagine gaudet,"
Here is an exposition of the nature and limits of our knowledge, which would have satisfied Hartley, Brown, and even Comte. It cannot be more explicitly laid down, that Matter, as known to us, is but the incom- prehensible and incognisable basis or substratum of a bundle of sensible qualities, appearances, phsenomena; that we know it " only in its effects ;" that its very existence is "only an inference we are compelled to make " from those sensible appearances. On the subject of Mind, again, could it have been more explicitly affirmed, that all we know of Mind is its successive states " of knowing, willing, feeling, desiring, «&c.," and that Mind, considered as " somethmg behind or under these phaenomena," is to us unknowable ?
24 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
Subsequently he says, that not only all the know- ledge we have of anything, but all which we could have if we were a thousandfold better endowed than we are, would still be only knowledge of the mode in which the thing would affect us. Had we as many senses (the illustration is his own) as the inhabitants of Sirius, in the " Micromegas" of Voltaire ; were there, as there may well be, a thousand modes of real existence as definitely distinguished from one another as are t^ose ^<vK. which manifest themselves to our present senses, and ^^^ ' " had we,* for each of these thousand modes, a separate ^<^ ■' " organ competent to make it known to us, — still would ^r^/' "our whole knowledge be, as it is afc present, only of \yM^- "the relative. Of existence, absolutely and in itself, we " should then be as ignorant as we are now. We should " still apprehend existence only in certain special modes — , " only in certain relations to our faculties of knowledge." Nothing can be truer or more clearly stated than all . this : but the clearer it is, the more irreconcileable does . . jV* it appear with our author's doctrine of the direct cog- ^*'\^ noscibility of the Primary Qualities, If it be true that ^^ Extension, Figure, and the other qualities enumerated, ^ are known "immediately in themselves," and not, like
Secondary qualities, " in their eifects on us ;" if the former are " apprehended as they are in bodies," and not, like the Secondary, " as they are in us ;" if it is these last exclusively that are *' unknown in themselves, and only " inferred as causes to account for certain subjective " affections in ourselves :" while, of the former, we are immediately conscious as " attributes of matter objec- tively existing;" and if it is not to be endured that matter should "sink into something unknown and problematical," whose existence "can be only precari- " ouslv affirmed as the occult cause or incomprehensible " occasion of certain subjective affections we experience " in the form either of a sensation of the secondary qua- " lity or of a perception of the primary" (being pre- cisely what Sir W. Hamilton, in the preceding quota- ♦ Lectures, i. 153.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 25
tions, appeared to say that it is) ; if these things be so, our faculties, as far as the Primary QuaHties are con- cerned, do cognise and know Matter as it is in itself, and not merely as an unknowable and incomprehensible substratum ; they do cognise and know it as it exists absolutely, and not merely in relation to us ; it is known to us directly, and not as a mere '* inference " from Phajnomena.
Will it be said that the attributes of extension, figure, number, magnitude, and the rest, though known as in the Things themselves, are yet known only relatively to us, because it is by our faculties that we know them, and because appropriate faculties are the necessary con- dition of knowledge ? If so, the " great axiom " of Kelativity is reduced to this, that we can know things as they arej^n themselves, but can know no more of them than our faculties are competent to inform us of If 3<v^^>**" such be the meaning of Relativity, our author might well maintain* that it is a truth "harmoniously re- echoed by every philosopher of every school ;" nor need he have added " with the exception of a few late Ab- solute theorizers in Germany i" for certainly neither Schelling nor Hegel claims for us any other knowledge than such as our faculties are, in their opinion, compe- tent to give.
Is it possible, that by knowledge of qualities " as they are in Bodies," no more was meant than knowing that the Body must have qualities whereby it produces the aii'ection of which we are conscious in ourselves ? But this is the very knowledge which our author pre- dicates of Secondary Qualities, as contradistinguished from the Primary. Secondary he frankly acknowledges to be occult qualities : we really, in his opinion, have no knowledge, and no conception, what that is in an object, by virtue of which it has its specific smell or taste. But Primary qualities, according to him, we know all about : there is nothing occult or mysterious to us in these; we perceive and conceive them as they are in
* Discussions, Appendix, p. 644.
26 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
themselves, and as they are in the body they belong to. They are manifested to us, not, like the Secondary quahties, only in their effects, in the sensations they excite in us, but in their own nature and essence.
Perhaps it may be surmised, that in calling knowledge of this sort by the epithet Relative, Sir W. Hamilton meant that though we know those qualities as they are in themselves, we only discover them through their re- lation to certain effects in us ; that in order that there may be Perception there must also be Sensation ; and we thus know the Primary Qualities, in their effects on us and also in themselves. But neither will this ex- planation serve. This theory of Primary Qualities does not clash with the Secondary, but it runs against the Secundo-primary. It is this third class, which, as he told us, are known " both immediately in thera.selves and mediately in their effects on us." The Primary are only known " immediately in themselves." He has thus with his own hands deliberate!}'" extruded from our knowledge of the Primary qualities the element of rela- tivity to us :- — except, to be sure,' in the acceptation in which knowing is itself a relation, inasmuch as it implies a knower ; whereby instead of the doctrine that Things in themselves are not possible objects of knowledge, we obtain the "great axiom" that they cannot be known unless there is somebody to know them.
Can any light be derived from the statement that we do not know any qualities of things except those which are in connextion with our faculties, or, as our author expresses it (surely by a very strained use of language), which are " analogous to our faculties ?"* If, by " our faculties," is to be understood our knowing faculty, this proposition is but the trivial one already noticed, tliat we can know only what we can know. And this is what the author actually seems to mean ; for in a sentence immediately ibllowmg,! he paraphrases the expression " analogous to our faculties," by the phrase that we must " possess faculties accommodated to their apprehension." * Lectures, i. 141, 163. f P. 153.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 27
To be able to see, we must have a faculty accommodated to seeing. Is this what we are intended to understand by the " great axiom ?" But if " our faculties " does not here mean our knowing faculty, it must mean our sensitive faculties ; and the statement is, that, to be known by us, a quality must be " analogous " (meaning, I suppose, related) to our senses. But what is meant by being related to our senses ? That it must be fitted to give us sensations. We thus return as before to an identical proposition.
There is still another possible supposition ; that, in calling our knowledge relative in contradistinction to absolute. Sir W. Hamilton was not thinking of our knowledge of qualities, but of substances — of Matter and Mind ; and meant that qualities might be cognised absolutely, or as they are in themselves, but that, since substances are only known tlirough their qualities, the knowledge of substances is not knowledge of them as they are in themselves, but is merely relative. Accord- ing to this interpretation, the relativity which Sir W. Hamilton ascribes to our knowledge of substances is re- lativity not to us, but to their attributes : we " become " aware of their incomprehensible existence only as this " is revealed to us through certain qualities." And when he adds, " which qualities, again, we cannot think " as unconditioned, irrelative, existent in and of them- " selves," thus predicating relativity of attributes also (considered as known or conceived by us), he means rela- tivity to a substance. We can only know a substance through its qualities, but also, we can only know quali- ties as inhering in a substance. Substance and attri- bute are correlative, and can only be thought together : the knowledge of each, therefore, is relative to the other ; but need not be, and indeed is not, relative to us. For we know attributes as they are in themselves, and our knowledge of them is only relative inasmuch as attri- butes have only a relative existence. It is relative knowledge in a sense not contradictory to absolute. It is an absolute knowledge, though of things which only
28 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE ,
exist in a necessary relation to another thing called a substance.*
1 am not disposed to deny that this interpretation of Sir W. Hamilton's doctrine is, to a certain point, correct. He did draw a distinction between our manner of know- ing attributes and our manner of knowing substances ; and did regard certain attributes (the primary qualities) as objects of direct and immediate knowledge ; whjch, in his opinion, substances are not, but are merely as- sumed or inferred from phsenomena, by a law of our nature which compels us to think phsenomena as attributes of something beyond themselves. I do not doubt that when he said that our knowledge of attributes is relative, the necessity of thinking every attribute as an attribute of a substance was present to his mind, and formed a part of his meaning. There is, however, abundant evi- dence that the relativity which Sir W. Hamilton ascribed to our knowledge of attributes was not merely relativity to their substances, but also relativity to us. He affirms of attributes as positively as of substances, that all our knowledge of them is relative to us. The passages already quoted apply as much to attributes as to sub- stances. " In saying that we know only the relative, I " virtually assert that we know nothing absolute — nothing " existing absolutely, that is, in and for itself, '.mdiwitliuut " relation to us and our faculties."'\ " In saying that a " thing is known in itself, I do not mean that this object " is known in its absolute existence, that is, out of rela- " tion to us. This is impossible, for our knowledge is only " of the relative." \ In the following passages he is speaking solely of attributes. " By the expression what " theg are in themselves, in reference to the primary *' qualities, and of relative notion in reference to the *' secondary, Keid cannot mean that the former are " known to us absolutely and in themselves, that is, out
* This is essentially the interpretation put on Sir W. Hamilton's meaning by the ingenious reviewer of the present work in the Edinburgh Heview.
t Lectures, i. 137. J Dissertations, p. 866.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 29
" of relation to our cognitive faculties ; for he elsewhere " admits that all our knowledge is relative."* " We " can know, we can conceive, only what is relative. " Our knowledge of qualities or phaenomena is neces- " sarily relative ; for these exist onl}^ as they exist in " relation to our faculties. "f The distinction, therefore, which Sir W. Hamilton recognises between our know- ledge of substances and that of attributes, though authentically a part of his philosophy, is quite irrelevant here. He affinns without reservation, that certain at- tributes (extension, figure, &c.) are known to us as they really exist out of ourselves; and also that aU our knowledge of them is relative to us. And these two assertions are only reconcileable, if relativity to us is understood in the altogether trivial sense, that we know them only so far as our faculties permit. J
The conclusion I cannot help drawing from this col- lation of passages is, that Sir W. Hamilton either never held, or when he wrote the Dissertations had ceased to hold (for his theory respecting knowledge of the Primarv Qualities does not occur in the Lectures) the doctrine for which he has been so often praised and nearly as often attacked — the Relativity of Human Knowledge. He certainl}^ did sincerely believe that he held it. But he repudiated it in every sense which makes it other than a barren truism. In the only meaning in which he really maintained it, there is nothing to maintain. It is an identical proposition, and nothing more.
And to this, or something next to this, he reduces it in the first portion of the summary with which he con- cludes its exposition. " From what has been said," he
* Footnote to Reid, p. 313.
t lb. p. 320. I am indebted to Mr. Mansel (Philosophy of the Con- ditioned, p. 79) for reminding me of the last two passages. I should not have failed to quote them in the first edition, if I had kept references to them.
J I may add that even the Edinburgh Reviewer's supposition does not save either the relativity of human knowledge to us, or its relativity in the sense in which relative is opposed to absolute, as doctrines of Sir W. Hamilton : for by the Reviewer's interpretation our knowledge of attributes would be relative only to their substances ; absolute in their cognition by us.
30 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
observes,* "you will be able, I hope, to understand " what is meant by the proposition, that all our know- " ledge is only relative. It is relative, 1st. Because ex- " istence is not cognisable absolutely in itself, but only " in special modes ; 2nd. Because these modes can be " known only if they stand in a certain relation to our " faculties." Whoever can find anything more in these two statements, than that we do not know all about a Thing, but only as much about it as we are capable of knowing, is more ingenious or more fortunate than myself
He adds, however, to these reasons why our know- ledge is only relative, a third reason. " 3rd. Because the " modes, thus relative to our faculties, are assented to, and " known by, the mind only under modifications deter- " mined by those faculties themselves." Of this addition to the theory we took notice near the conclusion of the preceding chapter. It shall have the advantage of a fuller explanation in Sir W. Hamilton's words.
" Inf the perception of an external object, the mind " does not know it in immediate relation to itself, but " mediately, in relation to the material organs of sense. " If, therefore, we were to throw these organs out of " consideration, and did not take into account what they *• contribute to, and how they modify, our knowledge of " that object, it is evident that our conclusion in regard " to the nature of external perception would be erroneous. ^ *' Again, an object of perception may not even stand in *' immediate relation to the organ of sense, but may " make its impression on that organ through an inter- " vening medium. Now, if this medium be thrown out " of account, and if it be not considered that the real *' external object is the sum of all that externallj'^ con- " tributes to affect the sense, we shall, in like manner, " run into error. For example, I see a book — I see that " book through an external medium (what that medium " is, we do not now inquire) and I see it through my " organ of sight, the eye. Now, as the full object pre- * Lectures, i. 148. f Ibid. pp. 146-148.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 31
" seated to ttie mind (observe that T sa}'- the tniud) in " perception, is an object compounded of the external " object emitting or reflecting light, i.e., modifying the " external medium — of this external medium — and of " the living organ of sense, in their mutual relation, " let us suppose, in the example I have taken, that the " full or adequate object perceived is equal to twelve, and " that this amount is made up of three several parts ; of " four, contributed by the book, — of four, contributed by " all that intervenes between the book and the organ, — " and of four, contributed by the living organ itself. I " use this illustration to show that the phienomenon of " the external object is not presented immediately to " the mind, but is known by it only as modified " throuofh certain intermediate ao^encies : and to show. " that sense itself may be a source of error, if we do " not analyze and distinguish what elements, in an act " of perception, belong to the outward reality, what to " the outward medium, and what to t\\d action of sense " itself. But this source of error is not limited to our " perceptions ; and we are liable to be deceived, not " merely by not distinguishing in an act of knowledge " what is contributed by sense, but by not distinguishing " what is contributed by the mind itself. This is the " most difficult and important function of philosophy ; " and the greater number of its higher problems arise in " the attempt to determine the shares to which the " knowing subject, and the object known, may pretend " in the total act of cognition. For according as we " attribute a larger or a smaller proportion to each, we " either run into the extremes of Idealism and Mate- *' rialism, or maintain an equilibrium between the two." The proposition, that our cognitions of objects are only in part dependent on the objects themselves, and in part on elements superadded by our organs or by our minds, is not identical, nor prima facie absurd. It can- not, however, warrant the assertion that all our know- ledge, but only that the part so added, is relative. If our author had gone as far as Kant, and had said that all
32 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
the primary qualities which we think we perceive in bodies, are put in by the mind itself, he would have really held, in one of its forms, the doctrine of the Relativity of our knowledge. But what he does say, far from implying that the whole of our knowledge is relative, distinctly imports that all of it which is real and authentic is the reverse. If any part of what we fancy that we perceive in the objects themselves, origi- nates in the perceiving organs or in the cognising mind, thus much is purely relative ; but since, by supposition, it does not all so originate, the part that does not, is as much absolute as if it were not liable to be mixed up with these delusive subjective impressions. The ad- mixture of the relative element not only does not take away the absolute character of the remainder, but does not even (if our author is right) prevent us from recog- nising it. The confusion, according to him, is not in- extricable. It is for us to " analyze and distinguish what elements" in an " act of knowledge" are contributed by the object, and what by our organs, or by the mind. "We may neglect to do this, and as far as the mind's share is concerned, can only do it by the help of philo- sophy ; but it is a task to which in his opinion philosophy is equal. By thus stripping off such of the elements in our apparent cognitions of Things as are but "cognitions of something in us, and consequently relative, we may succeed in uncovering the pure nucleus, the direct in- tuitions of Things in themselves ; as we correct the observed positions of the heavenly bodies by allowing for the error due to the refracting influence of the atmospheric medium, an influence which does not alter the facts, but only our perception of them.
This last doctrine, however, — that the mind's own con- stitution contributes along with the outward object, to make up what is called our knowledge of the object, — is what Mr. Mansel maintains Sir W. Hamilton to have meant by the assertion that our whole knowledge of the object is relative. And this is the foundation of all tliat Mr. Mansel presents as a refutation of the present chapter.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 33
If it be true (to use Mr. Hansel's words)* that, in the constitution of our knowledge, the mind " reacts on the ' " objects affecting it, so as to produce a result different \ " from that which would be produced, were it merely a *' passive recipient," this modifying action of the mind must consist, as is affirmed by Kant and by all others who profess the doctrine, in making us ascribe to the object, and apprehend as in the object, properties which are not really in the object, but are merely lent to it by the constitution of our mental nature. Now, if the attri- butes which we perceive, or think we perceive, in objects, are partly given by the mind, but not wholly, being also partly given by the nature of the object itself (which is admitted to be Sir W. Hamilton's opinion) ; this joint agency of the object and of the mind's own laws in gene- rating what we call our knowledge of the object, may be conceived in two ways. ..
First : The two factors may be jointly operative in every I <^ part of the effect. Every attribute with which we per- '' ^ ceive the thing as invested, may be a joint product of the thing itself and of the modifying action of the mind. If this be the case, we do not really know any property as it is in the object : we have no reason to think that the object as we apprehend it, and as we figure to our- selves that we perceive and know it, agrees in any respect with the object that exists without us ; but only that it depends upon that outward object, as one of its joint causes. Such was the opinion of Kant ; and whoever is of this opinion, holds, in one of its forms, as I have ex- pressly admitted, the genuine doctrine of the Relativity of our knowledge. For all must agree with Mr. Mansei when he says, that an object of thought, into which the mind puts a positive element of its own, thereby making it different from what it otherwise would be, is that which it is, only relatively to the mind. This seems to be Mr. Mansel's own mode of representing to himself the com- bined action of the mind and the object in perception.
* Mansei, p. 64. D
>
>
34 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
For he compares it* to the action of an acid and an alkali in forming a neutral salt ; andf to a chemical fusion together of two elements, in contradistinction to a mere mechanical juxtaposition. Tf we had never seen, and could not get at, the acid or the alkali except as united in the salt, Mr. Mansel could not think that our knowledge of the salt gave us any knowledge of the acid or the alkali them- selves.
But, secondly : There is another mode in which the co-operation of the object and the mind's own properties in producing our cognition of the object, may be con- ceived as taking place. Instead of there being joint agents in producing our cognitions of all the attributes with which we mentally clothe the object, some of the attributes as cognised by us may come from the object only, and some from the mind only, or from both. Now it is not open to a holder of this second opinion, as it is to one of the first, to affirm that all the attributes are only known relatively to us. Such of them, indeed, as are made to be that which they are by what the mind puts into them, are, on this theory, only known relatively to the mind : they have even no existence except rela- tively to the mind. But those into which no positive element is introduced by the mind's laws (I say no posi- tive element, because a mere negative limitation by the mind's capacities is nothing to the purpose), these, as their cognition contains nothing but what is presented in the external object, must be held to be known not rela- tively, but absolutely. The doubt how much of what we apprehend in them is due to our own constitution, and how much to the external world, has no place here : they are, by supposition, wholly perceptions of something in the external world.
Now, this second view of the joint action of the mind and the outward thing, as the two factors in our cog- nition of the thing, is Sir W. Hamilton's. The pas- sages in which he characterizes our knowledge of the
♦ Mansel, p. 71. t Ibid. p. 76.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 35
Primary Qualities place this beyond question. He affirms \ clearly and consistently that extension, figure, and the other Primary Qualities are known by us " as they are in bodies," and not " as they are in us ;" that they are known as " essential attributes of matter objectively existing ;" as " modes of a not-self," not even combined, as in the Secundo-primary, with any " modes of self;" so that no element originating in our subjective constitution in- i terferes with the purity of the apperception. In this respect the physical phenomena which Mr. Mansel calls in as illustrations afford no parallel. No one would say that the acid in a neutral salt is perceived and known by us in the salt as what it is as an acid. Indeed, the discrimination which Sir W. Hamilton | thinks it possible for philosophy to make, between that ! in our knowledge which the object contributes and that | which the mind contributes, almost requires as its con- dition that some attributes should be wholly contributed by the one and some by the other : for if every attribute was the joint product of both, it is difficult to see what means the case could afford of making the discrimination, any more than of discriminating between the acid and the alkali in Mr. Hansel's salt. The question, how much of" the salt is due to the acid and how much to the alkali, is not merely unresolvable, but intrinsically absurd.*
* Sir W. Hamilton has the appearance of disclaiming the opinion here attributed to him, and professing the alternative opinion that every attri- bute is a joint product of the object and the mind, in the following foot- note to Reid (p. 313) : — Pk
" The distinctions of perception and sensation, and of primary and » K/^ cP
' to one higher principle. Knowledge ^V^-"^^
" secondary qualities, may be reduced
" is partly objective, partly subjective ; both these elements are essential
" to every cognition, but in every cognition they are always in the inverse
" ratio of each other. Now, in^perception and the primary qualities, the
" objective element preponderates ; whereas the subjective element pre-
"poSerates in sensation and the secondary qualities. See Notes D
"andD*."
But a reference to the Notes in question will shew, that in admitting a subjective element in the Primary Qualities, he only meant that a sub- jective element accompanies our apprehension of them ; that whenever we perceive the primary qualities we are conscious of a sensation also. " Sensation proper," he says, " is the conditio sine quanonoi a Perception
d2
>
36 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
Mr. Mansel's mode of reconciling Sir W. Hamilton's emphatic declaration, that we know the Primary Qualities as they are in objects, with his assertion of the entire incognosoibility of Things in themselves, is by saying* that " obiects" are not identical with " thinsrs in them-
selves." " Objective existence," he says.f " does not mean " existence per se ; and a phenomenon does not mean a " mere mode of mind. Objective existence is existence as " an object, in perception, and therefore in relation ; and " a phenomenon may be material, as well as mental. The " thing per se may be only the unknown cause of what " we directly know ; but what we directly know is some- " thing more than our own sensations. In other words, " the phenomenal effect is material as well as the cause, " and is, indeed, that from which our primary conceptions " of matter are derived."
Now, this is a possible opinion ; it was really the opinion of Kant. That philosopher did recognise a direct object of our perceptions, different from the thing itself, and intermediate between it and the perceiving mind. And it was open to Kant to do so ; because he held what Sir W. Hamilton calls a representative theory of perception. He maintained that tlie object of our perception, and of our knowledge, is a representation in our own minds. In his philosophy, both object and sub- ject are accommodated within the mind itself — the object within the subject. The mind has no perception of the external thing, nor comes into any contact with it in the
" proper of the Primary qualities." And again, " Every Perception proper " h.as a Sensation proper as its condition." " The fact of Sensation proper " and the fact of Perception proper imply each other :" they always co- exist, though " in the degree or intensity of their existence they are always " found in an inverse ratio to one another" (Reid, p. 886). This co- existence does not prevent the two from being entirely distinct. " The " apprehensions of the Primary" qualities " are perceptions, not sensa- " tions ; of the Secondary, sensations, not perceptions ; of the Secundo- " primary, perceptions and sensations together" (p. 858). Perceptions, the apprehensions of the Primary qualities, are themselves wholly objective.
* Mansel, p. 79. f Ibid. p. 82.
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTOX. 37
act of perception.* Was this Sir W. Hamilton's opinion? On the contrary, if there be a doctrine of his philosophy which he has laboured at beyond any other, against, as he affirms, nearly all philosophers, it is, that the thing we perceive is the real thing which exists outside us, and that the perceiving mind is in direct contact with it, without any intermediate link whatever. We never hear from Sir W. Hamilton of three elements in our cognition of the outward world, but of two only, the mind, and the real object ; which he sometimes calls the external object, sometimes Body, sometimes Matter, some- I times a Non-ego. Yet, according to Mr. Mansel, he ' must have believed that this object, which he so strenu- ously contended to be the very thing itself, is not the very thing ifi itself, but that behind it there is another Thing in itself, the unknown cause of it. I can discover no trace in Sir W. Hamilton's writings of any such entity. The outward things which he believed to exist, he believed that we perceive and know : not, indeed, " absolutely or in themselves," because only in such of their attributes as we have senses to reveal to us ; but yet as they really are. He did not believe in, or recognise, a i Thing joer se, itself unknowable, but engendering another material object called a phsenomenon, which is knowable. ! The only distinction he recognised between a phainome- j non and a Thing jyer se, was that between attributes and | a substance. But he believed the primary attributes to be known by us as they exist in the substance, and not . in some intermediate object.f
* Such, at least, is the doctrine of Kant in the first edition of the Kritik, though, in the so-called Eefutation of IdeaHsm introduced into the second, he is sometimes supposed to have intended to explain it away; but Mr. Mahaffy (Introd. part iv. and notes to Appendix C) seems to have expla,ined away the explanation ; and Mr. Stirling, who holds (p. 30) " the second edition of the Kritik of Pure Reason to supersede the first," still credits Kant with this doctrine, interpreting in a sense consistent with it, the externality which Kant ascribes to objects in space. Kant's external and internal were both internal to the mind. Nothing but the noumenon was external to it.
t If any doubt could remain that Mr. Mansel defends Sir W. Hamil- ton by ascribing to him an opinion he never held, the following passage
38 THE RELATIVITY OP HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
The mark by which Mr. Mansel distinguishes between the object and the Thing in itself, is that the object is in space and time, but the Thing out of space and time ; space and time having merely a subjective existence, in us, not in external nature. This is Kantism, but it is not Hamiltonism, I do not believe that the expression " out of space and time" is to be found once in all Sir
would dispel it. " If, indeed," says Mr. Mansell (p. 83) " Hamilton had " said with Locke, that the primary qualities are in the bodies themselves, " whether we perceive them or no, he would have laid himself oi:>en to " Mr. Mill's criticism. But he expressly rejects this statement, and con- " trasts it with the more cautious language of Descartes, ' ut sunt, vel " saltem esse possunt.' " Sir W. Hamilton may never have said, totidem verbis, that the Primaiy Qualities are in the bodies even when we do not perceive them : but can any one who has read his writings doubt that this was his opinion ? The passage which Mr. Mansel refers to as "reject- ing" it (Dissertations, p. 839) runs as follows : — " On the doctrine of " both philosophers" (Locke and Descartes) " we know nothing of material "existence in itself: we know it only as represented, or in idea. When " Locke, therefore, is asked, how he became aware that the known idea *' truly represents the unknown reality, he can make no answer. On the " first principles of his philosophy, he is wholly and necessarily ignorant " whether the idea does or does not represent to his mind the attributes " of matter, as they exist in nature. His assertion is, therefore, con- " fessedly without a warrant ; it transcends, ex hypothesi, the sphere of " possible knowledge. Descartes is more cautious. He only says, that " our ideas of the qualities in question represent those qualities as they " are, or as they may exist ; ' ut sunt, vel saltem esse possunt.' The " Oosmothetic Idealist can only assert to them a problematical reality."
Mr. Mansel actually thinks this an adoption of Descartes' opinion ; and does not see that Sir W. Hamilton merely pronounces Descartes to be right and Locke wrong from their own point of view, that of Oosmothetic Idealism. As Oosmothetic Idealists, they have, he says, no evidence that the qualities we perceive are in the object itself, and are as we perceive them. Not admitting that we directly perceive the qualities in the object, they cannot do more than assert problematically that the qualities are in the object ; and this Descartes saw, and Locke, more inconsistently, did not see. But what they as Oosmothetic Idealists could not aiErm, Sir W. Hamilton, as a Natural Eealist, could ; because, as a Natural Realist, he held that we directly perceive the qualities in the object. Mr. Mansel mistakes one of the thousand statements by Sir W. Hamilton of lijs difference with the Oosmothetic IdeaUsts, for an adhesion to them. (Mr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, admits and withdraws this error.) Sir W. Hamilton, as Professor Fraser observes (p. 22), believed that " the '■ solid and extended percepts which our sensations reveal to us, exist, " whether we are conscious or not." He believed that bodies exist whether we perceive them or not, and that they always carry their "essential attributes," the Primary Qualities, with them : if, therefore, he had thought that the Primary Qualities only exist while we perceive them, he must have thought so of the bodies likewise, and must have believed that we create the bodies in the act of perceiving them; which Kant, who
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 39
W. Hamilton's writings. It belongs to the Kantian, not to the Hamiltonian philosophy. Sir W. Hamilton does indeed hold with Kant, and on Kant's shewing, that space and time are a priori forms of the mind, but he believes that thej are also external realities, known empirically.* And it is worth notice, that he grounds the outward reality of Space, not on his favourite evi- dence, that of our Natural Beliefs, but on the specific reason, that (Extension being only another name for Space), if Space was not an outward thing cognizable
deemed the body we perceive to be really in tlie mind, did believe ; but if Sir W. Hamilton did, his whole philosophy of perception is without a meaning.
In the essay in his " Discussions," headed " Philosophy of Perception," Sir W. Hamilton speaks of the knowledge of external objects claimed by a Natural Realist, ipsissimis verbis, as knowledge of " things in them- selves." (Discussions, p. 57, in the statement of the opinion of Hypo- thetical Realists.)
For a critical examination of the doctrine ascribed to Sir W. Hamilton by Mr. Mansel, that of an external object cognizable by us, and an un- cognizable Noumenon besides, I may refer to Mr. Bolton's able work, pp. 218 et seqq.
Mr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, though he does not give up the theory of the tertium quid, does not further insist on it ; but attempts to shew that when Sir W. Hamilton speaks of knowing the Primary qualities as they are in themselves, and as they are in the body, he means knowing them ia immediate relation to the mind, in contradistinction to knowing them mediately through a mental representation, or merely inferring them as the hypothetical cause of a mental state. I admit, and have already admitted, that Sir W. Hamilton did mean this, and did say that he meant it. But the " immediate relation to the mind" which Sir W. Hamilton thus distingiiished from the different modes of mediate relation, is no other than that between perceiver and perceived : and to say that all our knowledge is relative, meaning only this relation, is but to say, that we know of external things only what we perceive of them, and that in order that we may know an object of sense it must be presented to our senses. The knowledge, when we do get it, according to Sir W. Hamilton, is not (in the case of Primary qualities) knowledge of an impression made on our own sensitive faculty, which would be really relative knowledge ; it is knowledge of the Thing as it exists in itself, independently of our per- ceptions. It is this which, as I have pointed out, reduces the pretended Relativity to a name.
It is a great confirmation of the unmeaningness of the Relativity Doc- trine in Sir W. Hamilton's hands, that those who have most studied his philosophy. Dean Mansel and Professor Veitch, are reduced to such straits in the attempt to find a meaning for it, and do not always find the same meaning.
* See Lectures, ii. 113, 114 ; Discussions, p. 16; Dissertations, p. 882 ; and, in further illustration, foot note to Reid, p. 126 ; passages strangely overlooked by Mr. Mansel (p. 138;.
40 THE RELATlVlTt Of HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
a posteriori, we could not, as he affirms that we do, cognize Extension as an external reality. He must therefore have thought, not that Space is a mere form in which our perceptions of objects are clothed by the laws of our perceiving faculty, but that we perceive real things in real space.*
Mr. Mansel is not the only one of my critics who has interpreted Sir W. Hamilton's doctrine of our direct knowledge of outward objects, as if those outward objects were a tertium quid, between the mind and the real out- ward, or if the expression may be permitted, the outer outward object. For, irreconcilable as this supposition is with the evidence of his writings, it is the only one which can be thought of to give a substantial meaning to his doctrine of Kelativity, consistent with the external reality of the Primary Qualities. Professor Mason con- sequently had already taken refuge in the same inter- pretation as Mr. Mansel ; but propounded it in the modest form of an hypothesis, not a dogmatical asser- tion. The North American Eeviewer in like manner saysf : " An existence non-ego may be immediately cog- " nizable consistently with the doctrine of the relativity " of knowledge, provided this non-ego be phenomenal, " that is, necessarily dependent on some other incogniz-
" able existence among the real causes of things
" If the meaning of the word phenomenon which we " have attributed to Hamilton be a valid one, his philo- " sophy escapes from this criticism by affirming that the " primary qualities of matter, that is, the having exten- " sion, figure, &c., though not cognized as the effects of
* When Sir W. Hamilton says (Dissertations, p. 841) that although 8pace is a native, necessary, a priori form of imagination, we yet have an immediate perception of a really objective extended world, Mr. Mansel imagines that Sir W. Hamilton is maintaining at once the subjectivity of Space, and the objectivity of bodies as occupying space. But Sir W. Hamilton himself declares unequivocally that these two opinions contra- dict one another, unless reconciled by the suppositiou that Space is objective and external to us as well as subjective : not, therefore, properly a form of our mind, but an outward reality which has a form of our iiiind corresponding to it» See the whole of the passages referred to in the last note>
t Pp. 252, 253.
AS HELD BY SIR WILIJAM HAMILTON. 41
" matter on us, are yet modes of existence implying an " unknown substance, and are hence phenomenal in " Hamilton's meaning of the word." This explanation might pass, if Sir W. Hamilton's assertion of the rela- tivity of our knowledge to our mind were all contained in the word phsenomenal, and could be explained away by supposing that word to mean relativity not to us, but to an unknown cause. But I need not requote his declaration that our knowledge of Qualities is all relative to us, nor his assertion that nevertheless certain qualities are in the object, and are perceived and known in the object, and that the object perceived and known is no other than the real Thing itself. Nowhere in his works do I find any recognition of another real Thing, which is not the Thing perceived by us through its attributes. He does not tell us of a Body perceived, and an unper- ceived Substance in the background : the Body is the Substance. He does indeed say that the Substance is only an inference from the Attributes ; but he also says that certain attributes are perceived as in the real exter- nal Thing ; and he never drops the smallest hint of any real external thing in which the attributes can be, except the Substance itself, which he expressly defines as " that which manifests its qualities," that in which " the phaenomena or qualities are supposed to in- " here."
Professor Fraser, in the (in many respects) profound Essay of which he has done this work the honour of making it the occasion, vindicates at once the consistency of Sir W. Hamilton, and the substantial significance of his doctrine of Kelativity, by ascribing to him, in oppo- sition to his incessant declarations, Mr. Eraser's own far clearer views of the subject. Mr. Fraser, like myself, believes the Primary Qualities to have no more existence out of our own or other minds, than the Secondary **" "^ Qualities have, or than our pains and pleasures have ; "^y^ ^^ and he asks,* " Where does he " (Sir W. Hamilton) " say ^^^'^
* Fraser, p. 16.
■^ w\* ^y^j-^
42 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
" that we have an absolute knowledge of the primary
" qualities of matter, in any other sense than that in
" which he says that we have a like knowledge of a feel-
" ing of pain or pleasure in our minds while it is being
" felt, or of an act of consciousness while it is being
" acted?" To this "where," I answer, in every place
where he says that we know the Primary Qualities not
as they are in us, but as they are in the 13ody. That is
asserting an absolute knowledge of tiiem, as distinguished
from relativity to us : and he would not have made a
similar assertion of our pains and pleasures, or of our
acts of internal consciousness. Again, asks Mr. Fraser,*
" How does the assertion that we are percipient directly,
, " and not through a medium, of phenomena of solidity .
" and extension, contradict the principle that all our
" knowledge is relative, when the assertion that we are
" percipient, directly and not through a medium, of the
*' phenomena of sensation or emotion or intelligence
^^n^ " does not ?"' Because the phajnomena of sensation or
.^ v^' emotion or intelligence are admitted to be perceived or
'^ • ' ' ■ felt as facts that have no reality out of us, and the facts
being only relative to us, the knowledge of the facts
i^(u>"^^- ■ partakes of the same relativity : but the phaenomena of
^*-' solidity and extension are alleged by Sir W. Hamilton
.^A*'' , T to be perceived as facts whose reality is out of our
^t^^- p-jijj(j^y^ ajj(j j^ ^}-jg material object : which is indeed know-
^' ft\o^ I ijig them relatively to the outward object, but is the
^~. ' diametrical opposite of knowing them relatively to us.f
It has now been shown, by accumulated proof, that
* Eraser, p. 15. f Mr. Fraser affirms (p. 20) with me, and contrary to Mr. Mansel and the North American Reviewer, that in Sir W. Hamilton's opinion '' there " is nothing behind the proper objects of sense-consciousnessj, these being " the very things or realities themselves which we call material, external, " extended, solid." Instead of recognizing three elements, a Nouraenal real thing, a Phaenomenal real thing, and the perceiving mind, the middle one of the three being that which the mind cognizes, Mr. Fraser sees that Sir W. Hamilton recognised but one real Thing, the very Thing which we perceive ; unknown to us in its essence, but perceived and known through its attributes ; and by means of those attributes, actually brought into what Sir W. Hamilton calls our consciousness. This Mr. Fraser regards as " a distinct and important contribution by Sir W. Hamilton to the
^\yX^
- • JU.'
AS HELD BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 43
Sir W. Hamilton did not hold any opinion in virtue of which it could rationally be asserted that all human knowledge is relative ; but did hold, as one of the main ; elements of his philosophical creed, the opposite doctrine, j of the cognoscibility of external Things, in certain of | their aspects, as they are in themselves, absolutely. '
But if this be true, what becomes of his dispute with .
" theory of matter previously common in this country," because bringing matter into our consciousness is part of the way towards making it (what Mr. Fraser believes it to be) wholly a phaenomenon of mind. But Sir W, Hamilton did not intend his doctrine to lead to this ; he admits Matter into our consciousness because, contrary to the general opinion of philo- sophers, he thinks (see below, chap, viii.) that we can be conscious of / what is outside our mind. Sir W. Hamilton, in short, was not a Berkeleian, ^ asTSTr.Traser is, and as that philosopher almost admits (p. 26) that the intei-pretation which he would like to put on Sir W. Hamilton's doctrine would make Sir W. Hamilton.
Mr. Fraser seems to me, throughout his defence of Sir W. Hamilton, to have yielded to the natural tendency of a consistent thinker when standing up for an inconsistent one, to interpret ambiguous utterances which face two ways, as if they looked, only one way ; though the part of their author's philosophy towards which those expressions face on their other side, is thereby set at nought and abolished.
Since the publication of the third edition of this work, my attention has been drawn to a passage (unfortunately left unfinished) in the post- humous continuation of Sir W. Hamilton's Dissertations on Reid, which strikingly confirms the opinion I have expressed, that the relativity of human knowledge, as understood by him, is a mere identical proposition.
" That all knowledge consists in a certain relation of the object known " to the subject knowing, is self-evident. What is the nature of this " relation, and what are its conditions, is not, and never can be, known to " us ; because we know only the qualities of our own faculties of know- " ledge, as relations to their objects, and we only know the qualities of " their objects, as relations to our minds. All qualities both of mind and " of matter are therefore only known to us as relations ; we know nothing " in itseh. We know not the cause of this relation, we know nothing of " its conditions, the fact is all. The relation is the relation of knowledge. " We know nothing consequently of the kind of the relation ; we have no " consciousness and no possible knowledge whether the relation of know- " ledge has any analogy to the relations of similarity, contrariety, identity, " difference — we have no consciousness that it is like any other, or any " modification of any other : these are all relations of a different kind "between object and object; this between subject and object: we can '• institute no point of comparison" (Reid, p. 965).
That is to say, we know nothing except in relation to us, but that relation is simply the relation of being known by us, and this is the only relation cognizable by us which exists l^tween the knower and the known. Our knowledge is relative, but only in the sense that knowing is itself a relation. Would Cousin, or Hegel, or Schelling, have had the shghtest objection to admit that our knowledge even of the Absolute is relative, in the sense that it is we that know it P
44 THE RELATIVITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
Cousin, and with Cousin's German predecessors and teachers ? That celebrated controversy surely meant something. Where there was so much smoke there must have been some fire. Some difference of opinion must really have existed between Sir W. Hamilton and his antagonists.
Assuredly there was a difference, and one of great im- portance from the point of view of either disputant ; not unimportant in the view of those who dissent from them both. In the sacceedmg chapter I shall endeavour to point out what the difference was.
45
CHAPTER IV.
IN WHAT RESPECT SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON REALLY DIFFERS FROM THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE ABSOLUTE.
The question really at issue in Sir W. Hamilton's cele- brated and striking review of Cousin's philosophy, is this : Have we, or have we not, an immediate intuition of God. The name of God is veiled under two ex- tremely abstract phrases, " The Infinite" and " The Absolute," perhaps from a reverential feeling : such, at least, is the reason given by Sir W. Hamilton's disciple, Mr. Mansel,* for preferring the more vague expressions. But it is one of the most unquestionable of all logical maxims, that the meaning of the abstract must be sought for in the concrete, and not conversely; and we shall see, both in the case of Sir W. Hamilton and of Mr. Mansel, that the process cannot be reversed with im- punity, f
* Bampton Lectures. (The Limits of Religious Thought.) Fourth edition, p. 42.
t Mr. Mansel (pp. 90 — 98) denies the correctness of the representations made in this paragraph ; and at least seems to assert, that the question between M. Cousin and Sir W. Hamilton did not relate to the possibility of knowing the Infinite Being, but to a " pseudo-concept of the Infinite," which Sir W. Hamilton believed to be not a proper predicate of God, but a representation of a non-entity. And Mr. Mansel affirms (p. 92) that to substitute the name of God in the place of the Infinite and the Absolute, is exactly to reverse Sir W. Hamilton's argument. We have here a direct issue of fact, of wbich every one is a judge who will take the trouble to read Sir W. Hamilton's Essay. I maintain that what M. Cousin affirms and Sir W. Hamilton denies, is the cognoscibility not of an Infinite and Absolute which is not God, but of the Infinite and Absolute which is God. I might refer to almost any page of the Essay ; I will only quote the application which Sir W. Hamilton himself makes of his own doctrine (Disc. p. 15, note). " True, therefore, are the declarations of a pious phi- " losophy :— ' A God understood would be no God at all.' ' To think that " God is, as we can think him to be, is blasphemy.' The Divinity, in a
46 SIR AVII.LTAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
I proceed to state, chiefly in the words of Sir W. Hamilton, the opinions of the two parties to the con- troversy. Both undertake to decide what are the facts which (in their own phraseology) are given in Conscious- ness ; or, as others say, of which we have intuitive knowledge. According to Couiifin, there are, in every act of consciousness, three elements ; three things of which we are intuitively aware. Tliere is a finite ele- ment; an element of plurality, compounded of a Self or Ego, and something different from Self, or Non-ego. There is also an infinite element ; a consciousness of something infinite. " At* the same instant when we are
" certain sense, is revealed ; in a certain sense, is concealed : he is at once " known and nnknowji. But the last and highest consecration of all true "religion, must be an altar 'Ayvaa-Tm Ofw — ' '^I'o the unknown and nnknow- " able Grod.' " When this is what the author of the Essay presents as its practical result, it is too much to tell us that the Essay is not con- cerned about God but about a " Pseudo-Infinite," and that we are not entitled, when we find in it an assertion about the Infinite, to hold the author to the assertion as applicable to God. We shall next be told that Mr. Mansel himself, in his Bampton Lectures, is not treating the question of our knowledge of God. It is very true that the only Infinite about which either Sir W. Hamilton or Mr. Mansel proves anything, is a Pseudo-Infinite ; but they are not in the least aware of this ; they fancy that this Pseudo- Infinite is the real Infinite, and that in proving it to be unknowable by us, they prove the same thing of God.
The reader who desires further elucidation of this point, may consult the sixth chapter of Mr. Bolton's Inquisitio Philosophica. That acute thinker also points out various inconsistencies and other logical errors in Mr. Mansel's work, with which I am not here concerned, my object in answering him not being recrimination, but to maintain my original assertions against his denial.
Mr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, quotes from his Bampton Lectures some passages in which he says, and others in which he implies, that " our " human conception of the Infinite is not the true one," and that " the " infinite of philosophy is not the true Infinite :" and thinks it very unfair that, with these passages before me, I should accuse him of mistaking a pseudo-infinite for the real Infinite. But the mistake from which he clears himself is not that which I charged him with. I maintained, that the abstraction " The Infinite," in whatever manner understood, as dis- tinguished from some particular attribute possessed in an infinite degree, has QO existence, and is a pseudo-infinite. Mr. Mansel, on the contrary, affirmed throughout, and affirms in the very passages which he quotes, that "The Infinite" has a real existence, and is God: though when we attempt to conceive what it is, we only reach a mass of contradictions, which is a pseudo-infinite. Mr. Mansel did not suppose his pseudo-infinite to be the true Infinite ; but my assertion, which stands unrefuted, is, that his " true Infinite" is a pseudo-infinite ; and that in proving it to be un- knowable by us, he mistakenly fancied that he had proved this of God. * Discussions, p. 9.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 47
" conscious of these [finite] existences, plural, relative, " and contingent, we are conscious likewise of a superior " unity in which they are contained, and by which they " are explained ; a unity absolute as they are conditioned, " substantive as they are phsenomenal, and an infinite " cause as they are finite causes. This unity is God." The first two elements being the Finite and God, the third element is the relation between the Finite and God, which is that of cause and effect. These three things are immediately given in every act of consciousness, and are, therefore, apprehended as real existences by direct intuition.
Of these alleged elements of Consciousness, Sir VV. Hamilt(m only admits the first ; the Finite element, com- pounded of Self and a Not-self, " limiting: and condition- ing one another." He denies that God is given in immediate consciousness — is apprehended by direct intui- tion. It is in no such way as this that God, according to him, is known to us : and as an Infinite and Absolute Being he is not, and cannot be, known to us at all ; for we have no faculties capable of apprehending the Infinite or the Absolute. The second of M. Cousin's elements being thus excluded, the third (the Relation between the first and second) falls with it; and Consciousness remains limited to the finite element, compounded of an Ego and a Non-ego.
In this contest it is almost superfluous for me to say, that I am entirely with Sir W. Hamilton. The doctrine, that we have an immediate or intuitive knowledge of God, I consider to be bad metaphysics, involving a false conception of the nature and limits of the human facul- ties, and grounded on a superficial and erroneous psycho- logy. Whatever relates to God I hold to be matter of inference ; I would add, of inference a posteriori. And in so far as Sir W. Hamilton has contributed, which he has done very materially, towards discrediting the oppo- site doctrine, he has rendered, in my estimation, a valuable service to philosophy. But thougli I assent to his con- clusion, his arguments seem to me very far from inex-
48 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
pug^nable : a sufficient answer, T conceive, might without difficulty be given to most of them, though I do not say- that it was always competent to M. Cousin to give it. And the arguments, in the present case, are of as much importance as the conclusion : not only because they are quite as essential a part of Sir W, Hamilton's philosophy, but because they afford the premises from which some of his follow^ers, if not himself, have drawn inferences which I venture to think extremely mischievous. While, therefore, I sincerely applaud the scope and purpose of this celebrated piece of philosophical criticism, I think it important to sift with some minuteness the reasonings it employs, and the general mode of thought which it exemplifies.
The question is, as already remarked, whether we have a direct intuition of " 1he Infinite" and " the Absolute :" M. Cousin maintaining that we have — Sir W. Hamilton that we have not ; that the Infinite and the Absolute are inconceivable to us, and, by consequence, unknowable.
It is proper to explain to any reader not familiar with these controversies, the meaning of the terms. Infinite requires no explanation. It is universally understood to signify that, to the magnitude of which there is no limit. If we speak of infinite duration, or infinite space, we are supposed to mean duration which never ceases, and extension which nowhere comes to an end. Absolute is much more obscure, being a word of several meanings ; but, in the sense in which it stands related to Infinite, it means (conformably to its etymology) that which is finished or completed. There are some things of which the utmost ideal amount is a liiiiited quantity, though a quantity never actually reached. In this sense, the relation between the Absolute and the Infinite is (as Bentham would have said) a tolerably close one, namely a relation of contrariety. For example, to assert an absolute minimum of matter, is to deny its infinite divisibility. Again, we may speak of absolutely, but not of infinitely, pure water. The purity of water is not a fact of which, whatever degree we suppose attained, there re-
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 49
mains a greater beyond. It has an absolute limit : it is capable of being finished or complete, in thought, if not in reality. The extraneous substances existing in any vessel of" water cannot be of more than finite amount, and if we suppose them all withdrawn, the purity of the water cannot, even in idea, admit of further increase.
The idea of Absolute, in this sense of the term, being thus contrasted with that of Infinite, they cannot, both of them, be truly predicated of God; or, if truly, not in respect of the same attributes. But the word Absolute, without losing the signification of perfect or complete, may drop that of limited. It may continue to mean the whole of that to which it is applied ; but without requiring that this whole should be finite. Granted (for instance) a being of infinite power, that Being's know- ledge, if supposed perfect, must be infinite ; and may therefore, in an admissible sense of the term, be said to be both absolute and infinite.* In this acceptation there is no inconsistency or incongruity in predicating both these words of God.
* In the first, edition of this work it was maintained, that though Power admits of being regarded as Infinite, Knowledge does not ; because " the " highest degree of knowledge that can be spoken of with a meaning, only " amounts to knowing all that there is to be known." But Mr. Mansel and the " Inquirer" (author of "The Battle of the Two Philosophies'") have justly remarked, that on the supposition of an Infinite Being, "all that there is to be known" includes all which a Being of infinite power can think or create; consequently, the power being infinite, the know- ledge, if supposed complete, must be infinite too. In regard to the moral attributes, it was said in the first edition, that Absolute is the proper word for them, and not Infinite, since those attributes "cannot be more " than perfect. There are not infinite degrees of right. The will is " either entirely right, or wrong in difierent degrees." In this I did not properly distinguish between moral rightness or justice as predicated of acts or mental states, and the same regarded as attributes of a person. Conformity to the standard of right has a po;iitive limit, which can only be reached, not surpassed ; but persons, though all exactly conforming to the standard, may differ in the strength of their adherence to it : in- fluences (temptations for example) might detach one of them from it, which would have no effect upon another. There are thus, consistently with complete observance of the rule of right, innumerable gradations of the attribute considered as in a person. But, on the other hanil, there is an extreme limit to these gradations — the idea of a Person whom no influences or causes, either in or out of himself, can deflect iu the minutest degree from the law of right. This I apprehend to be a conception of absolute, not of infinite, righteousness. The doctrine, therefore, of the first edition,
E
50 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
The word Absolute, however, has other meanings, which have nothing to do with perfection or complete- ness, though often mixed and confounded with it ; the more readily as they are all habitually predicated of the Deity. By Absolute is often meant the opposite of Re- lative ; and this is rather many meanings than one ; for llelative also is a term used very indefinitely, and wherever it is employed, the word Absolute alwaj's accompanies it as its negative. In another of its senses, Absolute means that which is independent of anything else : which exists, and is what it is, by its own nature, and not because of any other thing. In this fourth sense as in the third, Absolute stands for the nei^ation of a relation ; not now of Relation in general, but of the specific relation expressed b}^ the term Effect. In this signification it is S3'nonymous with uncaused, and is therefore most naturally identified with the First Cause. The meaning of a First Cause is, that all other things exist, and are what they are, by reason of it and of its properties, but that it is not itself made to exist, nor to be what it is, by anything else. It does not depend, for its existence or attributes, on other things : there is nothing upon the existence of which its own is con- ditional : it exists absolutely.
In which of these meanings is the term used in the polemic with M. Cousin ? M. Cousin makes no dis- tinction at all between the Infinite and the Absolute. Sir W. Hamilton distinguishes them as two species of a higher genus, the Unconditioned ; and defines the Infi- nite as "the unconditionally unlimited," the Absolute as "the unconditionally limited/'* Here is a new word introduced, the word " unconditionally ;" of which we look in vain for any direct explanation, but which needs it as much as either of the words which it is em- ployed to explain. In the Essay itself, this is the only
that an Infinite Being may have attributes which are absolute, but not infinite, still appears to me maintainable. But as it is immaterial to my argument, and was only the illustration nearest at hand of the meanin'j- of the terms, I withdraw it from the discussion. * Discussions, p. 13.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 51
attempt made to define the Absolute : but in the reprint Sir W, Hamilton appends the following note:*
" The term Absolute is of a twofold (if not threefold) " ambiguity, corresponding to the double (or treble) sig- " nification of the word in Latin." The third applica- tion he, with reason, dismisses, as here irrelevant. The other two are as follows :
" 1. Absolutum means what is freed or loosed : in " which sense the Absolute will be what is aloof from " relation, comparison, limitation, condition, dependence, " &c., and thus is tantamount to to tnroXvrov of the lower " Greeks. In this meaning the Absolute is not opposed " to the Infinite." This is an amplification of my third meanintj.
" 2. Absolutum vae^ins, finished, perfected, completed; in " which sense the Absolute will be what is out oi " relation, &c. as finished, perfect, complete, total, and " thus corresponds to to o\ov and to teXhov of Aristotle. " In this acceptation — and it is that in which for myself " I exclusively use it, — the Absolute is diametrically " opposed to, is contradictory of, the Infinite." This second meaning of Sir W. Hamilton, which I, in the first edition, by a blameable inadvertence, confounded with my own first meaning,! must be reckoned as a fifth, compounded of the first and third — of the idea of finished or completed, and the idea of being out of rela- tion. How to make an intelligible meaning out of the two combined, is the question. One can, with some diflBculty, find a meaning in being " aloof from relation, " comparison, limitation, condition, dependence ;" but what is meant by being all this " as finishpd, perfect, " complete, total ?" Does it mean, being dot/i out of rela- tion and also complete ? and must the Absolute in Sir
* Discussions, p. 14, note, f And, in conseqnence, erroneously charged Sir W, Hamilton with having, in one of his arguments against Cousin, departed from his own meaning of the term. I have freed the text from everything which de- pended on this error, the only serious misrepresention of Sir W. Hamil- ton which has been established against me.
£ 2
52 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
W. Hamilton's second sense be also Absolute in his first, and be out of all relation whatever ? or does the particle "«<?" signify tliat it is out of relation only in in respect of its completeness, which (I suppose) means that it does not depend for its completeness on anything but itself? Mr. Hansel's comment, which otherwise does not help us much, decides for the latter. " Out of " relation as completed" means (he says*) " self-existent " in its completeness, and not implying the existence of " anything else."t Without further attempt to clear up the obscurity, let it suffice that Sir W. Hamilton's Absolute, though not synonymous with a " finished, perfected, completed," but limited, whole, includes that idea, and is therefore incompatible with Infinite. J
Having premised these verbal explanations, I proceed to state, as far as possible in Sir W. Hamilton's own words, the heads of his argumentation to prove that the Absolute and Infinite are unknowable. His first summary statement of the doctrine is as follows :§ —
" The unconditionally unlimited, or the Infinite, the "unconditionally limited, or the Absolute, cannot posi- " tively be construed to the mind : they can be conceived " only by a thinking away from, or abstraction of, those " very conditions under which thought itself is realized ; " consequently, the notion of the Unconditioned is only " negative ; negative of the conceivable itself. For " example : On the one hand, we can positively conceive
* Mansel, p. 104
■f" But the assimilation with rd o\ov and to reXeiov again throws us out ; for TO okov, with all Greek thinkers, meant either the completed aggregate of all that exists, or an abstract entity which they conceived as the Prin- ciple of Wholeness — in virtue of which, and by participation in which, that universal aggregate and all other wholes are wholes. Either of these would be an additional meaning for the word Absolute, different from all which have yet been mentioned.
X I demur, however, to Sir W. Hamilton's assertion, that for himself he exclusively uses the term in this meaning. In the whole of the discussion respectingtherelativityof our knowledge, Absolute, with Sir W. Hamilton, is simply the opposite of relative, and contains no implication of " finished, perfected, completed." Moreover, in this very Essay, when arguing against M. Cousin, who uses Absolute in a sense compatible with Infinite, Sir W. Hamilton continually falls into M. Cousin's sense. § Discussions, p. lo.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 53
" neither an absolute whole, that is, a whole so great " that we cannot also conceive it as a relative part of a " still greater whole ; nor an absolute part, that is, a part " so small that we cannot also conceive it as a relative " whole divisible into smaller parts. On the other hand, " we cannot positively represent, or realize, or construe " to the mind (as here Understanding and Imagination " coincide) an infinite whole, for this could only be done " by the infinite synthesis in thought of finite wholes, " which would itself require an infinite time for its "accomplishment; nor, for the same reason, can we " follow out in thought an infinite divisibility of parts. " The result is the same, whether we apply the process " to limitation in space, in time, or in degree. The un- " conditional negation, and the unconditional afl&rmation " of limitation ; in other words, the Infinite and the " Absolute properly so called, are thus equally incon- " ceivable to us."
This argument, that the Infinite and the Absolute are unknowable by us because the only conceptions we are able to form of them are negative, is stated still more emphatically a few pages later.* " Kant has clearly " shown, that the Idea of the Unconditioned can have " no objective realit}', — that it conveys no knowledge, — " and that it involves the most insoluble contradictions. " But he ought to have shown that the Unconditioned " had no objective application, because it had, in fact, no " subjective affirmation ; that it afibrded no real know- " ledge, because it contained nothing even conceivable ; " and that it is self-contradictory, because it is not a " notion, either simple or positive, but only a fasciculus of " negations — negations of the Conditioned in its opposite " extremes, and bound together merely by the aid of " language, and their common character of iucompre- * hensibility."
Let us note, then, as the first and most fundamental of Sir VV. Hamilton's arguments, that our ideas of the Infinite and the Absolute are purely negative, and the
* Discussions, p. 17.
54 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
Unconditioned which combines the two, " a fasciculus of negations." I reserve consideration of the validity of this and every other part of the argumentation^ until we have the whole before us. He proceeds :* —
" As the conditionally limited (which we may briefly " call the Conditioned) is thus the only possible object of " knowledge and of positive thought, — thought neces- " sarily supposes condition. To iJdnk is to condition ; and " conditional limitation is the fundamental law of the " possibility of thought. For, as the greyhound cannot " outstrip his shadow, nor (by a more appropriate simile) " the eagle outsoar the atmosphere in which he floats, " and by which alone he is supported ; so the mind " cannot transcend that sphere of limitation, within and " through which exclusively the possibility of thought " is realized. Thought is only of the conditioned ; be- " cause, as we have said, to think is simply to condition^ " The Absolute is conceived merely by a negation of con- " ceivability ; and all that we know, is known as —
" Won from the cold and formless Infinite."
" How, indeed, it could ever be doubted that thought " is only of the conditioned, may well be deemed a " matter of the profoundest admiration. Thought cannot " transcend consciousness ; consciousness is only possible " under the antithesis of a subject and object of thought " known only in correlation, and mutually limiting each " other ; while, independently of this, all that we know " either of subject or object, either of mind or matter, " is only a knowledge in each of the particular, of the " plural, of the ditterent, of the modified, of the pha^no- " menal. We admit that the consequence of this doc- " trine is — that philosophy, if viewed as more than a " science of the conditioned, is impossible. Departing " from the particular, we admit that we can never, in " our highest generalizations, rise above the Finite ; that " our knowledge, whether of mind or matter, can be " nothing more than a knowledge of the relative mani-
* Discussions, p. 13.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 55
" festations of an existence which in itself it is our " highest wisdom to recognise as beyond the reach of " philosophy. This is what, in the language of St. " Austin, Cognoscendo ignoratur, et ignoratione cognoscitur.'^
The dictum that "to think is to condition" (the meaning of which will be examined hereafter) may be noted as our author's second argument. And here ends the positive part of his argumentation. There remains his refutation of opponents. After an examination of Schelling's opinion, into which 1 need not follow him, he grapples with M. Cousin, against whom he undertakes to show,* that " his argument to prove the correality of his " three Ideas proves directly the reverse ;" " that the " conditions under which alone he allows intelligence to " be possible, necessarily exclude the possibility of a " knowledge, not to say a conception, of the Absolute ;" and "that the Absolute, as defined by him, is only a re- " lative and a conditioned." Of this argument in three parts, if we pass over (or, as our author would say, dis- count) as much as is only ad hominem, what is of general application is as follows : —
JFirst : M. Cousin and our author are agreed that there can be no knowledge except " where there exists a plurality of terms ;" there are at least a perceived and a perceiver, a knower and a known. But this necessity of " difference and plurality" as a condition of know- ledge, is inconsistent with the meaning of the Absolute, which " as absolutely universal, is absolutely one. Ab- " solute unity is convertible with the absolute negation
" of plurality and difference The condition
" of the Absolute as existing, and under which it must " be known, and the condition of intelligence, as capable " of knowing, are incompatible. For, if we suppose the " Absolute cognizable : it must be identified either— -1°, " with the subject knowing : or, 2°, with the object " known ; or, 3°, with the indifference of both. The " first hypothesis, and the second, are contradictory of " the Absolute. For in these the Absolute is supposed
* Discussions, p. 25.
56 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON' AGAINST COUSIN.
" to be known, either as contradistinguished from the " knowing subject, or as contradistinguished from the *' object known : in other words, the Absolute is asserted " to be known as absolute unity, i.e., as the negation of " all plurality, while the very act by which it is known, " affirms plurality as the condition of its own possibility, " The third hypothesis, on the other hand, is contradic- " tory of the plurality of intelligence ; for if the subject " and the object of consciousness be known as one, a " pluralit}^ of terms is not the necessary condition of ~ " intelligence. The alternative is therefore necessary : " either the Absolute cannot be known or conceived at " all; or our author is wrong in subjecting thought to " the conditions of plurality and difference."*
Secondly : Jn order to make the Absolute knowable by us, M. Cousin, says the author, is obliged to present it in the light of an absolute cause : now causation is a relation ; therefore M. Cousin's Absolute is but a relative. Moreover, " what exists merely as a cause, exists merely " for the sake of something else — is not final in itself, " but simply a mean towards an end. . , . Abstractly " considered, the effect is therefore superior to the cause." Hence an absolute cause " is dependent on the effect for " its perfection ;" and, indeed, " even for its reality. For " to what extent a thing exists necessarily as a cause, to " that extent it is not all-suf&cient to itself; since to that " extent it is dependent on the effect, as on the condition " through wliicii it realizes its existence ; and what " exists absolutely as a cause, exists therefore in abso- " lute dependence on the effect for the reality of its " existence. An absolute cause, in truth, only exists in its " effects : it never is, it always becomes : for it is an exis- " tence in potentia, and not an existence in actu, except " through and by its effects. The Absolute is thus, at " best, something merely inchoative and imperfect."!
* Discussions, pp. 32, 33. t Discussions, pp. 34, 33. In the first edition three points of our author's argument were discussed, instead of two only : but I now perceive that the remaining argument is ad hominem merely, and has reference to M. Cousin's confusion of the Absolute with the Infinite.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 57
Let me ask, en passant, why M. Cousin is under an obligation to think that if the Absolute, or, to speak plainly, if God, is only known to us in the character of a cause, he must therefore " exist merely as a cause," and be merely " a mean towards an end ?" It is surely possible to maintain that the Deity is known to us only as he who feeds the ravens, without supposing that the Divine IntelHgence exists solely in order that the ravens may be fed.*
* A passage follows, which being only directed against a special doctrine of M. Cousin, (that God is determined to create by the necessity of his own nature — that an absolute creative force cannot but pass into creative activity) — I should have left unmentioned, were it not worth notice as a specimen of the kind of arguments which Sir W. Hamilton can sometimes use. On M. Cousin's hypothesis, says our author, (p. 36) — " One of two " alternatives must be admitted. God, as necessarily determined to pass " from absolute essence to relative manifestation, is determined to pass " either from the better to the worse, or from the worse to the better. A " third possibility, that both states are equal, as contradictory in itself and '■ as contradicted by our author, it is not necessary to consider. The jirst " supposition must be rejected. The necessity in this case determines " God to pass from the better to the worse, that is, operates to his partial " annihilation. The power which compels this must be external and hostile, " for nothing operates willingly to its own deLerioration ; and as superior " to the pretended God, is either itseli: the real deity, if an intelligent and " free cause, or a negation of all deity, if a blind force or fate. The second " is equally inadmissible : that God, passing into the universe, passes from " a state of comparative imperfection into a state of comparative perfection. " The divine nature is identical with the most perfect nature, and is also " identical with the first cause. If the first cause be not identical with " the most perfect nature, there is no God, for the two essential conditions *' of his existence are not in combination. N ow, on the present supposition, " the most perfect nature is the derived ; nay, the universe, the creation, " the yivofievov, is, in relation to its cause, the actual, the ovraa ov. It would " also be the divine, but that divinity supposes also the notion of cause, '' while the universe, ex hypothesi, is only an effect."
This curious subtlety, that creation must be either passing from the better to the worse or from the worse to the better (which, if true, would
Erove that God cannot have created anything unless from all eternity) can e likened to nothing but the Eleatic argument that motion is impossible, because if a body moves it must either move where it is or where it is not ; an argument, by the way, for which Sir W. Hamilton often expresses high respect ; and of which he has here produced a very successful imita- tion. It it were worth whUe expending serious argument upon such a curiosity of dialectics, one might say it assumes that whatever is now worse must always have been worse, and that whatever is now better must always have been better. For, on the opposite supposition, perfect wisdom would have begun to wiU the new state at the precise moment when it began to be better than the old. We may add that our author's argument, though never so irrefragable, in no way avails him against M. Cousin ; for (as he has himself said, only a sentence before) on M. Cousin's theory the uni-
58 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
fn reviewing the series of arguments adduced by Sir W. Hamilton for the incognoscibility and inconceivability of the Absolute, the first remark that occurs is, that most of them lose their application by simply substituting for the metaphysical abstraction " The Absolute," the more intelligible concrete expression "Something Absolute.' If the first phrase has any meaning, it must be capable of being expressed in terms of the other. W hen we are told of an " Absolute" in the abstract, or of an Abso- lute Being, even though called God, we are entitled, and if we would know what we are talking about, are bound to ask, absolute in what? Do you mean, for ex- ample, absolute in goodness, or absolute in knowledge ? or do you, perchance, mean absolute in ignorance, or absolute in wickedness ? lor any one of these is as much an Ab- solute as any other. And when you talk of something in the abstract which is called the Absolute, does it mean one, or more than one, of these? or does it, peradventure, mean all of them ? When (descending to a less lofty height of abstraction) we speak ot The Horse, we UiCan to include every object of which the name horse can be predicated. Or, to take our examples from the same region of thought to which the controversy belongs —
verse can never have had. a beginning, and God, therefore, never was in the dilemma supposed.
[Un this Mr. iMansel remarks (p. 107), " Hamilton is not speaking of " states of things, but of states of the divine nature, as creative or not " creative : and Mr. Mill's argument, to refute Hamilton, must suppose a " time when the new nature of God begins to be better than the old." This is not a happy specimen of Mr. Mansel's powers of confutation. Jf God made the universe at the precise moment when it was wisest and best to do so — and if the universe was made by a perfectly wise and good being, this must have been the case — who besides Mr. Manse), or, accord- ing to hmi, Sir W. Hamilton, would assert that God, in doing so, acquired anew natui'e? or passed out of one state into another state ot his own nature? Did he not simply remain in the state of pertect wisdom and. goodness in which he was before ?
Mr. Mansel makes the odd assertion, that this argument of Sir W. Hamilton is taken from Plato. There is very little in common between it and the passage in the .Republic in which Socrates, to disprove the fabulous metamorphoses of the gods into the forms of men, animals, or inanimate things, argues that no being would, voluntarily change itself from better to worse. I cannot be mistaken in the passage of Plato which Mr. Mansel has in view, for he had himself cited a part of it, with the same intention, in the notes to his Bampton Lectures (p. 2uy.)J
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 59
when The True or The Beautiful are spoken of, the phrase is meant to include all things whatever that are true, or all things whatever that are beautiful.* if this rule is good for other abstractions, it is good for the Absolute. The word is devoid of meaning unless in reference to predicates of some sort. What is absolute must be absolutely something; absolutely this or ab- solutely that. The Absolute, then, ought to be a genus comprehending whatever is absolutely anything — whatever possesses any predicate in finished completeness. If we are told therefore that there is some one Being who is, or which is, The Absolute — not something abso- lute, but the Absolute itself, — the proposition can be understood in no other sense than that the supposed Being possesses in absolute completeness all predicates ; is absolutely good, and absolutely bad; absolutely wise, and absolutely stupid ; and so forth. f The conception o.f
* Mr. Mansel (pp. 108, 109) considers this sentence a curious specimeu of my reading in philosophy, and informs me that " Plato expressly dis- " tinguishes between * the beautiful ' and ' things that are beautif 1 ' as " the One in contrast to the Many — the Real in contrast to the Apparent." Mr. Mansel will doubtless be glad to hear that I already possessed the very elementary knowledge of Plato which he seeks to impart to mt- ; indeed (if it were of any consequence) 1 have elsewhere given an account of this theory of Plato, and made the excuses which may justly be made for such a doctrine in Plato's time. But to recognise it as a theory whicli it is necessary to take into consideration now, is to follow the example of the later German transcendentalists in putting philosophy back to its very incunahida.
t The " Inquirer" objects, that merely negative predicates should be excludexl from the account; and that many of those here mentioned are merely negative : absolute littleness being but the negation of greatness; weakness, ot strength; folly, of wisdom; evil, of good (p. 22). But (without meddling with the very disputable position, that all bad qualities are merely deficiency of good ones) the question is, not whether the qualities which the " Inquirer" enumerates are negative, but whether they are capable of being predicated as absolute. If they are, the general or abstract Absolute logically includes them. And, surely, negations are still more susceptible of being absolute than positive qualities. The " Inquirer" will hardly deny that " absolutely none" is as correct an em- ployment of the word absolute as " absolutely all." With regard to lutiuite, the same writer says, " To talk of infinite littleness — infinite non- " extension or non-duration— is to talk of infinite nothing. Which is " indeed to talk, we must not say infinite, but absolute nonsense." It is hardly fair to refer a pupil of Sir W. Hamilton to mathematics ; but the "Inquirer" might have learnt from Sir W. Hamilton himself that it is not nonsense to talk of infinitely small quantities.
60 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
such a being, I will not say of such a God, is worse than a " fasciculus of negations ;" it is a fasciculus of con- tradictions : and our author might have spared himself the trouble of proving a thing to be unknowable, which cannot be spoken of but in words implying the impos- sibility of its existence. To insist on such a truism is not superfluous, for there have been philosophers who saw that this must be the meaning of " The Absolute," and yet accepted it as a reality. " What kind of an " Absolute Being is that," asked Hegel,* " which does " not contain in itself all that is actual, even evil "included?" Undoubtedly: and it is therefore neces- sary to admit, either that there is no Absolute Being, or that the law, that contradictory propositions cannot both be true, does not apply to the Absolute. Hegel chose the latter side of the alternative ; and by this, among other things, has fairly earned the honour which will probably be awarded to him by posterity, of having logi- cally extinguished transcendental metaphysics by a series of reductiones ad absurdissimum.
What I have said of the Absolute is true, mutatis mutandis, of the Infinite. This also is a phrase of no meaning, except in reference to some particular predi- cate; it must mean the infinite in something — as in size, in duration, or in power. These are intelligible conceptions. But an abstract Infinite, a Being not merely infinite in one or in several attributes, but which is " The Infinite" itself, must be not only infinite in greatness, but also in littleness ; its duration is not only infinitely long, but infinitely short; it is not only infinitely awful, but infinitely contemptible; it is the same mass of contradictions as its companion the Abso- lute. There is no need to prove that neither of them is knowable, since, if the universal law of Belief is of objective validity, neither of them exists.
It is these unmeaning abstractions, however, these muddles of self-contradiction, which alone our author has proved, against Cousin and others, to be unknowable.
* Quoted by Mr. Mausel, " The Limits of Religious Thought," p. 30.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 61
He has shown, without difficulty, that we cannot know The Infinite or The Absolute. He has not shown that we cannot know a concrete reality as infinite or as abso- lute. Applied to this latter thesis, his reasoninfj breaks down.
We have seen his principal argument, the one on which he substantially relies. It is, that the Infinite and the / Absolute are unknowable because inconceivable, and in- ^ conceivable because the only notions we can have of them ' are purely negative. If he is risfht in his antecedent, the consequent follows. A conception made up of nega- I tions is a conception of Nothing. It is not a conception \ at all. „
But is a conception, by the fact of its being a con- coJ^ ! ception of something infinite, reduced to a negation ? ew^**^ This is quite true of the senseless abstraction "The I i ( Infinite." That indeed is purely negative, being formed ^^ v^ by excluding from the concrete conceptions classed under it, all their positive elements. But in place of " the i
Infinite," put the idea of Something infinite, and the argument collapses at once. " Something infinite" is a i
conception which, like most of our complex ideas, con- tains a negative element, but which contains positive ' elements also. Infinite space, for instance : is there no- I thing positive in that? The negative part of this con- '
ception is the absence of bounds. The positive are, the idea of space, and of space greater than any finite space. j So of infinite duration : so far as it signifies " without end" it is only known or conceived negatively ; but in so far as it means time, and time longer than any given time, the conception is positive. The existence of a negative element in a conception does not make the con- ception itself negative and a non-entity. It would sur- prise most people to be told that " the life eternal" is a purely negative conception ; that immortality is incon- ceivable. Those who hope for it for themselves have S very positive conception of what they hope for. True we cannot have an adequate conception of space or dura- tion as infinite ; but between a conception which though
SIR VVILMAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
inadequate is real, and correct as far as it goes, and the impossibility of any conception, tliere is a wide difference. Sir W. Hamilton does not admit this diflerence. He thinks the distinction without meaning:. " To say* that *' the infinite can be thought, but only inadequately " thought, is a contradiction in adjecio ; it is the same as " saying that the infinite can be known, but only known " as finite." I answer, that to know it as greater than anything finite is not to know it as finite. The conception of Infinite as that which is greater than any given quan- »^ tity, is a conception we all possess, sufficient for all human purposes, and as genuine and good a positive conception as one need wish to have. It is not adequate ; our con- ception of a reality never is. But it is positive ; and the assertion that there is nothing positive in the idea of infinity can only be maintained by leaving out and ignoring, as Sir W. Hamilton invariably does, the very element which constitutes the idea. Considering how many recondite laws of physical nature, afterwards veri- fied by experience, have been arrived at by trains of mathematical reasoning grounded on what, if Sir AV. Hamilton's doctrine be correct, is a non-existent con- ception, one would be obliged to suppose that conjuring is a highly successful mode of the investigation of nature. If, indeed, we trifle by setting up an imaginary Infinite which is infinite in nothing in particular, our notion of it is truly notliing, and a " fasciculus of negations." But this is a good example of the bewildering effect of putting nonsensical abstractions in the place of concrete realities. AVould Sir W. Hamilton have said that the idea of God is but a negation, or a fasciculus of negations ? As having nothing greater than himself, he is indeed conceived negatively. But as himself greater than all other real or imaginable existences, the conception of him is positive.
Put Absolute instead of Infinite, and we come to the same result. " The Absolute," as already shown, is a heap of contradictions, but '* absolute" in reference to ♦ Lectures, ii. 375.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 63
any given attribute, sisfnifies the possession of that attribute in finished perfection and completeness. A i Bein^ absolute in knowledge, for example, is one who knows, in the literal meaning of the term, everything-, j AVho will pretend that this conception is negative, or unmeaning to us? We cannot, indeed, form an adequate conception of a being as knowing everything, since to do this we must have a conception, or mental representa- tion, of all that he knows. Bat neither have we an adequate conception of any parson's finite knowledge. I have no adequate conception of a shoemaker's know- ledge, since I do not know how to make shoes : but my conception of a shoemaker and of his knowledge is a real conception ; it is not a fasciculus of negations. If I talk of an Absolute Being (in the sense in which we are now employing the term) I use words without mean- ing; but if I talk of a Being who is absolute in wisdom and goodness, that is, who knows ever3^thing, and at all times intends what is best for every sentient creature, T .understand perfectly what I mean: and however much the fact may transcend my conception, the shortcoming can only consist in ray being ignorant of the details of which the reality is composed : as I have a positive, and may have a correct conception of the empire of China, though 1 know not the aspect of any of the places, nor the physiognomy of any of the human beings, compre- hended therein.
It appears, then, that the leading argument of Sir W. Hamilton to prove the inconceivability and consequent unknowability of the Unconditioned, namely, that our conception of it is merely negative, holds good only of an abstract Unconditioned which cannot possibly exist, and not of a concrete Being, supposed infinite and abso- lute in certain definite attributes.* Let us now see if there be any greater value in his other arguments.
* The answer of Mr. Mansel and the " Inquirer" to the preceding argument, is, that it confounda the infinite with the indefinite. They could not have understood the argument worse if they had never read it. Indefinite, in its ordinary acceptation, is that which has a limit, but a limit either variable in itself, or unknown to us. Infinite is that which
64 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
The first of them is, that all knowledge is of things plural and different ; that a thing is only known to us by being known as different from something else ; from ourselves as knowing^ it, and also from other known things which are not it. Here we have at length something which the mind can rest on as a fundamental truth. It is one of the profound psychological observations which the world owes to Hobbes ; it is fully recognised both by M. Cousin and by Sir W. Hamilton ; and it has, more recentl)^ been admirably illustrated and applied by Mr. Bain and by Mr. Herbert Spencer. That to know a thing is to distinguish it from other things, is, as I formerly remarked, one of the truths which the very ambiguous expression " the relativity of human knowledge" has been employed to denote. With tliis doctrine I have no quarrel. But Sir W. Hamilton proceeds to argue that the Absolute, being " absolutely One^" cannot be known under the conditions of plurality and difference,
has no limit. In -wiiat Mr. Mansel calls the metaphysical use of the word indefinite, he affirms it (p. 114) to mean " indefinitely increasable." Else- where (p. 50) he says " An indefinite time is that which is capable of per- " petual addition : an infinite time is one so great as to admit of no " addition." I now ask, which of these is the correct expression for that which is greater than anything finite. Is this a property which can be affirmed of anything which has an undetermined limit ? or of anything which is indefinitely increasable ? or of anything which is capable of perpetual addition P Is a merely indefinite time greater than every finite time ? Is a merely indefinite space greater than every finite space ? Is a merely indefinite power greater than every finite power ? The property of being greater than evei'ything finite belongs, and can belong, only to what is in the strictest sense of the term, both popular and philo- sophical, Infinite.
Mr. Mansel, in his rejoinder, defends himself by saying that Descartes and Cudworth agree with him in giving the name indefinite to what I (and as he acknowledges, the mathematicians) understand by infinite. I cannot affirm that Descartes and Cudworth have nowhere done this ; but they certainly have not done it in the passages which Mr. Mansel quoted, either in his first reply or in this. All that either Descartes or Cudworth says in those passages is that the indcfiniteness, to our minds, of the possible extension of the physical universe, is not tantamount to, nor a proof of, its infinity ; as of course it is not.
Mr. Mansel adds that even supposing me to be in the right, it would only follow, not that Sir W. Hamilton is wrong, but that he and T do not mean the same thing by the same term. Whoever has read the present note must, however, be aware, that I maintain my position to be true even in what Mr. Mansel affirms to be Sir W. Hamilton's meaning of the term.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 65
and as these are the acknowledged conditions of* all our / knowledge, cannot, therefore, be known at all. There is here, as it seems to me, a strange confusion of ideas. Sir W. Hamilton seems to mean that, being absolutely One, it cannot be known as plural. But the proposition that plurality is a condition of knowledge, does not mean that the thing known must be known as itself ^^^ plural. It means, that a thing is only known, by being known as distinguished from something else. The plu- rality required is not within the thing itself, but is made up between itself and other things. Again, even if we concede that a thing cannot be known at all unless ' known as plural, does it follow that it cannot be known as plural because it is also One ? Are the One and the Many, then, incompatible things, instead of different ' aspects of the same thing? Sir W. Hamilton surely does not mean by Absolute Unity, an indivisible Unit; the minimum, instead of the maximum of Beinij. He must mean, as M. Cousin certainl}^ means, an absolute ^ Whole ; the Whole which comprehends all things. If j this be so, does not this Whole not only admit of, but necessitate, the supposition of parts ? Is not an Unity which comprehends everything, ex vi termini known as a plurality, and the most plural of all pluralities, plural in an unsurpassable degree ? If there is any meaning in the words, must not Absolute Unity be Absolute Totality, which is the highest degree of Plurality ? There is no escape from the alternative: the Abso- lute either means a single atom or monad, or it means [ Plurality in the extreme degree. ({JU %, 'nJ- W- Iwvjv, a-\ y^
Though it is hardly needful, we will try this argument by the test we applied to a previous one; by substituting the concrete, God, for the abstract Absolute. Would Sir W. Hamilton have said that God is not cognizable under the condition of Plurality — is not known as dis- tinguished from ourselves, and from the objects in nature? Call any positive Thing by a name which expresses only its negative predicates, and you may easily prove it under that name to be incognizable and
66 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
a non-entity. Give it back its full name (if Mr. Mansel's reverential feelings will permit), its positive attributes reappear, and you find, to your surprise, that what is a reality can be known as one.*
The next argument is chiefly directed against the doctrine of M. Cousin, that we know the Absolute as Absolute Cause. This doctrine, says Sir W. Hamilton, destroys itself. The idea of a cause is irreconcilable with the Absolute, for a Cause is relative, and implies an Effect : this Absolute, therefore, is not an Absolute at all. This would be unanswerable, if by the Absolute we were obliged to understand something which is not only " out of" all relation, but incapable of ever passing into relation. But is this what any one can possibly mean by the Absolute, who identifies it with the Creator? Granting that the Absolute implies an existence in itself, standing in no relation to anything : the only Absolute with which we are concerned, or in which anybody
* Mr. Mansel, as I have mentioned, vehemently objects to testing what Sir W. Hamilton says of the Infinite by its applicability to God, affirm- ing that the Infinite which Sir W. Hamilton is speaking of, namely the Infinite as we conceive it, is a " pseudo-infinite." This is a curious in- version of the parts of Sir W. Hamilton and of his critic. It is I who assert that Sir W. Hamilton's Infinite is a pseudo-infinite ; it is he who maintains that it is the real. At least he substitutes this pseudo-infinite which is really inconceivable, for an intelligible infinite, a concrete Deity, and proving the inconceivability of the one, thinks he has sufficiently proved the inconceivability of the other. It was his business, it is what he professes, to prove that God, considered as Infinite, is inconceivable by us. Instead of this, he proves the inconceivability of an Infinite "which is not and cannot be God, and which does not and cannot exist, and leaves it to Mr. Mansel to discover (after others have pointed it out) that this is a pseudo-infinite.
Mr. Mansel is still more indignant that I should try what Sir W. Hamilton says of the Absolute, by the test of applicability to God, and says that this is actually inverting Sir W. Hamilton's meaning, since his definition of the Absolute, " the unconditionally limited," is contradictory to the nature of God. But Sir W. Hamilton is here arguing with M. Cousin, who does not mean by Absolute the limited, but the complete, and who does predicate it of God. As Mr Bolton truly remarks (p. 169) " In discussing the doctrines of Schelling and Cousin, Hamilton uses the '* word Absolute in conformity with their usage, according to which the " Infinite and the Absolute are not opposed, or contraries, as in Hamil- " ton's own terminology." Nor for this does he deserve any blame; for if the Absolute which he affirms to be unknowable, because it cannot be known under the conditions of Plurality, is Absolute only in his own sense of the term, and not in M. Cousin's, he has not refuted M. Cousin.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 67
believes, must not only be capable of entering into rela- tion with things, but must be capable of entering into any relation whatever, except that of dependence, with anything. May it not be known in some, at least, of those relations, and particularly in the relation of a Cause ? And if it is a " finished, perfected, completed " Cause, i.e. the most a cause that it is possible to be — the cause of everything except itself — then, if known as such, it is known as an Absolute Cause. Has Sir W. Hamilton shown that an Absolute Cause, thus under- stood, is inconceivable, or unknowable ? No : all he shows is, that,, though capable of being known, it is known relatively to something else, namely, to its effects ; and that such knowledije of Grod is not of God in him- self, but of God in relation to his works. The truth is, M. Cousin's doctrine is too legitimate a product of the metaphysics common to them both, to be capable of being refuted by Sir W. Hamilton. For this knowledge of God in and by his efi'ects, according to M. Cousin, is knowing him as he is in himself : because the creative power whereby he causes, is in himself, is inseparable from him, and belongs to his essence. And as far as I can see, the principles common to the two philosophers are as srood a warrant to M. Cousin for saying this, as to Sir W. Hamilton for maintaining that extension and figure are " essential attributes " of matter, and perceived as such by intuition.
I have now examined, with one exception, every argument (which is not merely ad hominem) advanced by Sir W. Hamilton to prove against M. Cousin the unknowableness of the Unconditioned. The argument which I have reserved, is the emphatic and oracular one, that the Unconditioned must be unthinkable, because '* to think is to condition." I have kept this tor the last, because it will occupy us the longest time : for we must begin by finding the meaning of the proposition ; ' which cannot be done very briefly, so little help isj afforded us by the author.
According to the best notion I can form of the mean-
r 2
68 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
ing of " condition," either as a term of philosophy or of common Hfe, it means that on which something else is contingent, or (more definitely) which being given, some- thing else exists, or takes place. I promise to do some- thing on condition that you do something else : that is, if you do this, I will do that ; if not, I will do as I please. A Conditional Proposition, in logic, is an asser- tion in this form : " If so and so, then so and so." The conditions of a phsenomenon are the various antecedent circumstances which, when they exist simultaneously, are followed by its occurrence. As all these antecedent circumstances must coexist, each of them in relation to the others is a conditio sine qua non ; i.e. without it the phsenomenon will not follow from the remaining condi- tions, though it perhaps may from some set of conditions totally different.
If this be the meaning of Condition, the Uncondi- tioned should mean, that which does not depend for its existence or its qualities on* any antecedent ; in other words, it should be synonymous with Uncaused. This, however, cannot be the meaning intended by Sir W, Hamilton : for, in a passage already quoted from his argument against Cousin, he speaks of the effect as a condition of its cause. The condition, therefore, as he understands it, needs not be an antecedent, and may be a subsequent fact to that which it conditions.
He appears, indeed, in his writings generally, to reckon as a condition of a thing, anything necessarily implied by it : and uses the word Conditioned almost interchangeably with Relative. For relatives are always in pairs : a term of relation implies the existence of two things, the one which it is affirmed of, and another : parent implies child, greater implies less, like implies another like, and vice versa. Eelation is an abstract name for all concrete facts w^hicli concern more than one object. Wherever, therefore, a relation is affirmed, or anything is spoken of under a relative name, the exis- tence of the correlative may be called a condition of the relation, as well as of the truth of the assertion. When,
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. C,9
accordingly, Sir W. Hamilton calls an effect a condition of its cause, he speaks intelligibly, and the received use of the term affords him a certain amount of justification for thus speaking.
But, if the Conditioned means the Relative, the Un- conditioned must mean its opposite ; and in this accep- tation, the Unconditioned would mean all Noumena; | Things in themselves, considered without reference to the effects they produce in us, which are called their phaenomenal agencies or properties. Sir W. Hamilton does, very frequently, seem to use the term in this sense. In denying all knowledge of the Unconditioned, he i often seems to be denying any other than phenomenal knowledge of Matter or of Mind. Not only, however, he does not consistently adhere to this meaning, but it directly conflicts with the only approach he ever makes to a definition or an explanation of the term. We have seen him declaring that the Unconditioned is the genus of which the Infinite and the Absolute are the two species. But Things in themselves are not all of them infinite and absolute. Matter and Mind, as such, are neither the one nor the other. It is evident that Sir . W. Hamilton had never decided what extent he intended giving to the term Unconditioned. Sometimes he gives it one degree of amplitude, sometimes another. Between the meanings in which he uses it there is undoubtedly a link of connexion ; but this only makes the matter still worse than if there were none. The phrase has that most dangerous kind of ambiguity, in which the meanings, though essentially different, are so nearly ' allied that the thinker unconsciously interchanges them one with another.*
* In page 8 of the Discussions, speaking of the one of M. Cousin's three elements of Consciousness which that author " variously expresses - *' by the terms, unity, identity, substance, absolute cause, the infinite, pur- i " tkought, &c.," Sir W. Hamilton says, " we will briefly call it the Uncon- \ " ditioned." What M. Cousin denominates "plurality, difference, phcBno\ i *' menon, relative catise, the finite, determined thought, &c ," ISir W. Hamilton says, " we would style the Conditioned." This, 1 think, is as near as he ever comes to an explanation of what he means by these words. It is obviously no explanation at alL It tells us what (in logical language)
70 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
The probability is that when our author asserts that " to think is to condition," he uses the word Condition in neither of these senses, but in a third meaning, equally familiar to him, and recurring constantly in such phrases as " the conditions of our thinking faculty," " conditions of thought," and the like. He means by Conditions something similar to Kant's Forms of Sense and Categories of Understanding ; a meaning more correctly expressed by another of his phrases, " Necessary Laws of Thought." He is applying to the mind the scholastic maxim, " Quicquid recipitur, re- cipitur ad modum recipientis." He means that our perceptive and conceptive faculties have their own laws, wliich not only determine what we are capable of per- ceiving and conceiving, but put into our perceptions and conceptions elements not derived from the thing per- ceived or conceived, but from the mind itself: That, therefore, we cannot at once infer that whatever we find in our perception or conception of an object, has necessarily a prototype in the object itself: and that we must, in each instance, determine this question by philosophic investi- gation. According to this doctrine, which no fault can be found with our author for maintaining, though often \ for not carrying it far enough — the " conditions of thought" would mean the attributes with which, it is supposed, the mind cannot help investing every object of thought — the elements which, derived from its own structure, cannot but enter into every conception it is able to form ; even if there should be nothing cor- responding in the object which is the prototype of the conception : though our author, in most cases, (therein ditfering from Kant) believes that there is this cor- respondence.
We have here an intelligible meaning for the doctrine
the terms denote, but not what they connote. An ennmeration of the things called by a name is not a detinition. If the name, for instance, were " dog," it would be no definition to say that what are variously denominated spaniels, mastiffs, and so forth, " we would style " dogs. The thing wanted is to know what attributes common to all these the word signifies, — -what is affirmed of a thing by calling it a dog.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. 71
that to think is to condition ; and as Mr. Mansel, in his reply, guarantees this as the true meaning of Sir W. Hamilton, I will accept it as being so. If, then (which I do not here discuss), the philosophical doctrine be true, which was held partially by Sir W. Hamilton, and in a more thorough-going manner by Kant, viz. that, in the act of thought, the mind, by an a priori necessity, invests the object of thought with attributes which are I not in itself, but are created by the mind's own laws ; ' and if we consent to call these necessities of thought i the conditions of thought ; then evidently to think is to condition, and to think the Unconditioned would be to think the unthinkable. But the Unconditioned, in this application of the term, is not identical with the Infinite : plus the Absolute. The Infinite and the Absolute are ^ not necessarily, in this sense, unconditioned. The ' words infinite and absolute, as ^I have already said, have no meaning save as expressing some concrete reality or supposed reality, possessing infinitely or absolutely attributes of some sort, which attributes, as finite and limited, we are able to think. In thinking these attri- butes, we are not able to divest ourselves of our mental conditions, but we can think the attributes as surpassing \ the conditions. " To condition," and " to think under conditions," are ambiguous phrases. An Infinite Being may be thought, and is thought, with reference to the conditions, but not as limited by them. The most familiar examples of the alleged necessary conditions of thought, are Time and Space : we cannot, it is affirmed, think anything, except in time and space. Now, an Infinite Being is not thought as in time and space, if this means as occupying a portion of time or a portion of space. But (substituting for Time the word Duration, to get rid of the theological antithesis of Time and Eternity) we do actually conceive Grod in reference to Duration and Extension, namely, as occupy- ing the whole of both ; and these being conceived as infinite, to conceive a Being as occupying the whole of them is to conceive that Being as infinite. If thinking
72 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN.
God as eternal and omnipresent is thinking him in Space and Time, we do think God in Space and Time : if thinking him as eternal and omnipresent is not thinking" him in Space and Time, we are capable of thinking something out of Space and Time. Mr. Mansel may make his choice between the two opinions. I have already shown that the ideas of infinite space and time are real and positive conceptions : that of a Being who is in all Space and in all Time is no less so. To think anything, must of course be to condition it by attributes which are themselves thinkable ; but not necessarily to condition it by a limited quantum of those attributes : on the contrary, we may think it under a degree of them greater than all limited degrees, and this is to think it as infinite.*
If we now ask ourselves, as the result of this long discussion, what Sir W. Hamilton can be considered as having accomplished in this celebrated Essay, our answer must be : That he has established, more thoroughly perhaps than he intended, the futility of all speculation respecting those meaningless abstractions " The infi- nite" and " The Absolute," notions contradictory in themselves, and to which no corresponding realities do or can exist. f Respecting the unknowableness, not of
* " To be conceived as unconditioned," says Mr. Mansel (pp. 17, 18), " God must be conceived as exempt from action in time : to be conceived " as a person, if his personality resembles ours, he must be conceived as " acting in time." Exempt from action in time, as much as you please ; in other words, not necessitated to it, nor restricted by its conditions ; but d.d any one ever conceive the Deity as not acting in time ? Nay, even if he is not conceived as a person, but only as the Brst principle of the uni- verse, " one absolutely first principle on which everything else depends," a belief which is held by Mr. Mansel along with the Christian doctrine of the Divine Personality (pp. 7 to 18) ; even so, the first principle of every- thing which takes place in Time, must, from the very meaning of the words, not ouly be conceived as acting in Time, but must really act in Time, and in all Time. Action in Time does not belong to the Deity as a Person, but quite as much to the Deity as the tirst principle of all things, which is what Mr. Mansel means by the Unconditioned.
t On this Mr. Mansel's remark is (pp. 110, 111) that Sir W. Hamilton did not assert these to be unmeaning ab.stractions. I never pretended that he did ; the gist of my complaint against him is, that he did not per- ceive them to be unmeaning. " Hamilton," says Mr. Mansel, "maintains " that the terms absolute and infinite are perfectly intelligible as abstrac-
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AGAINST COUSIN. . 73
" the Infinite," or "the Absolute," but of concrete persons or things possessing infinitely or absolutely certain specific attributes, I cannot think that our author has proved anything ; nor do I think it possible to prove them any otherwise unknowable, than that they can only be known in their relations to us, and not as Noumena, or Things in themselves. This, however, is true of the finite as well as of the infinite, of the imperfect as well as of the completed or absolute. Our author has merely proved the uncognoscibility of a being which is nothing but in- finite, or nothing but absolute : and since nobody supposes that there is such a being, but only beings which are something positive carried to the infinite, or to the abso- lute, to have established this point cannot be regarded as any great achievement. He has not even refuted M. Cousin ; whose doctrine of an intuitive cognition of the Deity, like every other doctrine relating to intuition, can only be disproved by showing it to be a mistaken inter- pretation of facts ; which, again, as we shall see here- after, can only be done by pointing out in what other way the seeming percepti^ons may have originated, which are erroneously supposed to be intuitive. C[
" tions, as much so as relative and finite." Qu/is duhitavit ? It is not the terms absohite and infinite that are unmeaning; it is "The Infinite" and "The Absolute." Infinite and Absolute are real attributes, abstracted from concrete objects of thought, if not of experience, which are at least believed to possess those attributes. " The Infinite " and " The Absolute " are illegitimate abstractions of what never were, nor could without self- contradiction be supposed to be, attributes of any concrete. 1 regret to difi"er, on this point, from my distinguished reviewer in the Westminster Review, who considers these to be intelligible abstractions, though of a higher reach of abstraction than the preceding (p. 14). The distinction is seized by one of my American critics. Dr. H. B. Smith (p. ISi), who re- gards it as the difference between talking " about the Infinite and Abso- lute as entities," and considering them " simply as modes or predicates of real existences." That there are persons " in Laputa or the Empire" (as Sir W. Hamilton phrases it) who do talk about them as entities, up to any pitch of wild nonsense, I am quite aware ; and against these Sir W. Hamilton's Essay, as the protest, though the insufficient protest, of a rival Transcendeutalist, has its value.
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74
CHAPTER V.
WHAT IS REJECTED AS KNOWLEDGE BY SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, BROUGHT BACK UNDER THE NAME OF BELIEF.
We have found Sir W. Hamilton maintaining with great earnestness, and taking as the basis of his philosoph}""; an opinion respecting the limitation of human know- ledge, which, if he did not mean so much by it as the language in which he often clothed it seemed to imply, / meant at least this, that the Absolute, the Infinite, the \ Unconditioned, are necessarily unknowable by us. I have discussed this opinion as a serious philosophical . dogma, expressing a definite view of the relation between the universe and human apprehension, and fitted to guide us in distinguishing the questions which it is of any ^,%vail to ask, from those which are altogether closed to j>r^ our investigations. , ^^ V But had the doctrine, in the mind of Sir W. Hamilton, )*^^^meant ten times more than it did — had he upheld the w^^V^ relativity of human knowledge in the fullest, instead of t^ the scantiest meaning of which the words are susceptible . — the question would still have been reduced to naught, ^ or to a mere verbal controversy, by his admission of a
second kind of intellectual conviction called Belief; which is anterior to knowledge, is the foundation of it, and is not subject to its limitations ; and through the medium of which we may have, and are justified in having, a full assurance of all the things which he has pronounced unknowable to us ; and this not exclusively by revelation, that is, on the supposed testimony of a Being whom we have ground for trusting as veracious, but by our natural faculties.
BKLIEF WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE. 75
Trom some philosophers, this distinction would have the appearance of a mere fetch — one of those transparent evasions whi^-h have sometimes been resorted to by the assailants of received opinions, that they might have an opportunity of ruining the rational foundations of a doctrine without exposing themselves to odiura by its direct denial ; as the writers against Christianity in the eighteenth century, after declaring some doctrine to be contradictory to reason, and exhibiting it in the absurdest possible light, were wont to add that this was not of the smallest consequence, religion being an affair of faith, not of reason. But Sir W. Hamilton evidently meant <^q}^ what he says ; he was expressing a serious conviction, ujfi^ and one of the tenets of his philosophy : he really recog- '^'^ij^ nised under the name of Belief a substantive source, T was '^^ t'^''^ going to say, of knowledge ; I may at all events say of trustworthy evidence. This appears in the following passages : —
" The* sphere of our belief is much more extensive " than the sphere of our knowledge, and therefore, when " I deny that the Infinite can by us be known, I am far " from denying that by us it is, must, and ought to be, " believed. This I have indeed anxiously evinced, both " by reasoning and authority."
" St. Austinf accurately says, 'We know, what rests *' upon reason ; but believe, what rests upon authority! " But reason itself must rest at last upon authority; for " the original data of reason do not rest on reason, but " are necessarily accepted by reason on the authority of " what is beyond itself These data are, therefore, in ** rigid propriety, Beliefs or Trusts. Thus it is that in " the last resort we must perforce philosophically admit, " that belief is the primary condition of reason, and not " reason the ultimate ground of belief. We are com- " pelled to surrender the proud Intellige ut credas of Abe- " lard, to content ourselves with the humble Crede ut " intelligas of Ansel m."
* Letter to Mr. Calderwood, in Appendix to Lectures, ii. 530, 531. t Dissertations on Reid, p. 76U,
,
76 BELIEF WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE.
And in another part of the same Dissertation,* (he is arguing that we do not believe, but know, the external world) — " If asked, indeed, bow we know that we know " it ? how we know that what we apprehend in sensible " perception is, as consciousness assures us, an object, " external, extended, and numerically different from the " conscious subject ? how we know that this object is not " a mere mode of mind, illusively presented to us as a " mere mode of matter ; then indeed we must reply th;it " we do not in propriety knoio that what we are com- " pelled to perceive as not-self is not a perception of self, " and that we can only on reflection believe such to be " the case, in reliance on the original necessity of so " believing, imposed on us by our nature."
It thus appears that, in Sir W. Hamilton's opinion, Belief is a conviction of higher authority than Know- ledge ; Belief is ultimate, knowledge only derivative ; Knowledge itself finally rests on Belief; natural beliefs are the sole warrant for all our knowledge. Knowledge, therefore, is an inferior ground of assurance to natural Belief; and as we have beliefs which tell us that we know, and without which we could not be assured of the truth of our knowledge, so we have, and are warranted in having, beliefs beyond our knowledge ; beliefs re- specting the Unconditioned — respecting that which is in itself! unknowable.
I am not now considering what it is that, in our author's opinion, we are bound to believe concerning the unknowable. What here concerns us is, the nullity to which this doctrine reduces the position to which our author seemed to cling so firmly — viz., that our know- ledge is relative to ourselves, and that we can have no knowledge of the infinite and absolute. In telling us that it is impossible to the human faculties to know any- thing about Things in themselves, we naturally suppose he intends to warn us off the ground — to bid us under- stand that this subject of enquiry is closed to us, and
* Pp. 749, 760.
BELIEF WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE.
77
exhort us to turn our attention elsewhere. It appears that nothing of the kind was intended : we are to un- derstand, on the contrary, that we may have the best grounded and most complete assurance of the things which were declared unknowable — an assurance not only equal or greater in degree, but the same in nature, as we have for the truth of our knowledge : and that tjie matter in dispute was only whether this assurance or convicfcion shall be called knowledge^ or by another name. If this be all, I must say I think it not of the smallest consequence. If no more than this be intended by the " great axiom " and the elaborate argument a^rainst Cousin, a great deal of trouble has been taken to very little purpose ; and the subject would have been better left where Reid left it, who did not trouble himself with nice distinctions between belief and knowledge, but was content to consider us as knowing that which, by the constitution of our nature, we are forced, with entire conviction, to believe. According to Sir W. Hamilton, we believe premises, but know the conclusions from them. The ultimate facts of consciousness* are " given less in " the form of cognitions than of beliefs :" " Conscious- " ness in its last analysis, in other words our primary " experience, is a faith." But if we know the theorems of Euclid, and do not know the definitions and axioms on which they rest, the word knowledge, thus singularly applied, must be taken in a merely technical sense. To say that we believe the premises, but know the conclu- sion, would be understood by every one as meaning that we had other independent evidence of the conclusion, .^v^" ^, If we only know it through the premises, the same name V ^'^i, ought in reason to be given to our assurance of hoih.f J ■:\\'^ III common language, when Belief and Knowledge are distinguished. Knowledge is understood to mean complete i 'j^^
\ •
* Discussions, p. 86. t Accordingly Sir W. Hamilton himself, in one of the Dissertations on Reid (p. 763), says that " the principles of our knowledge must be them- ( " selves' knowledge " And there are few who will not approve this use of language, and condemn the other.
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7S BELIEF WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE.
conviction, Belief a conviction somewhat short of com- plete ; or else we are said to believe when the evidence is probable (as that of testimony), but to know, when it is intuitive, or demonstrative from intuitive premises : we believe, for example, that there is a Continent of America, but know that we are alive, that two and two , . • make four, and that the sum of any two sides of a triangle \jk^ ifyis greater than the third side. This is a distinction of ^. «-\^ practical value: but in Sir W. Hamilton's use of the term, it is the intuitive convictions that are the Beliefs, and those which are dependent and contingent upon them, compose our knowledge. Whether a particular portion of our convictions, which are not more certain, f^ but if anything less certain, than the remainder, and ^jiM^ . . according to our author rest on the same ultimate basis, p shall in opposition to the common usage of mankind, ^ ^^ receive exclusively the appellation of knowledge, is at \^Ji. the most a question of terminology, and can only be A/(^'''*^ ^ made to appear philosophically important by confound- J^ ^ ing difference of name with difference of fact. That Jj>*» anything capable of being said on such a subject should Ij 5.^ pass for a fundamental principle of philosophy, and be X\\ ^"one of the chief sources of the reputation of a meta- ^'^ physical system, is but an example how the mere forms S , 'W^ of logic and metaphysics can blind mankind to the total
absence of their substance. *jj>'^. It must not be supposed, from anything which has . '^Yy-' ^ ' been here said, that I wish to abolish the distinction f ^ yivV between Knowledge and Belief (meaning True Belief) or maintain that it is necessarily a distinction without a difference. Those terms are employed to denote more than one real difference, and neither of them can conve- niently be dispensed with in philosophy.* What con-
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* There is much dispute among philosophers as to the difPerence between Knowledge and Belief; and the strife is not likely to terminate, until they perceive that the real question is, not what the distinction is, but what it shall be ; what one among several differences already known and recognised, the words shall be employed to denote. "The word belief," says Dr. M'Cosh (p. 36), in this more discerning than the generality, " is *' unfortunately a very vague one, and may stand for a number of very
BELIEF WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE.
79
cerns us in the present chapter is not the rationale of the distinction between knowledge and beUef, but whether that distinction is relevant to the question between Sir W. Hamilton and M. Cousin about the Infinite and the Absolute ; and whether Sir W. Hamilton is warranted in giving back under the name of Belief, the assurance or conviction respecting these objects which he refuses under the name of knowledge. My position is, that the Infinite and Absolute which Sir W. Hamilton has
" different mental aflFections. When I am speaking of firat or intuitive *' principles, 1 use the term to signify our conviction of the existence of '• an object not now present, and thus I distinguish primitive faith from " primitive knowledge, in which the object is present." This distinction agrees well with usage in the cases to which Dr. M'Cosh applies it : we know that which we perceive by the senses, and believe that which we only re- member : we know that we ourselves, and (while we look at them) our house and garden, exist, and believe the existence of the Czar of Russia and tile Island of Ceylou. Every definition of Belief, as distinguished from Knowledge, must include these cases, because in them the conviction which receives the name of Belief falls short of the complete assurance implied in the word knowledge : our memory may deceive us ; the Czar or the island may have beeu swallowed up by an earthquake. But if we attempt to carry out Dr. M'Cosh's distinction through the entire region of thought, the whole of what we call our scientific knowledge, except the primary facts or intuitions on which it is grounded, has to pass into the category of Belief ; for the objects with which it is conversant are seldom present.
Mr. Mansel might be supposed to be adopting Dr. M'Cosh's distinction, when he says (p. 126), "We believe that the true distinction between " knowledge and belief may ultimately be referred to the presence or " absence of the corresponding intuition." But his criterion of the dis- tinction, and, according to him, feir W. Hamilton's also, is the following : we believe that a thing is, but do not know even that it is, unless we can conceive how, or in what manner, it is. " When I say that I believe in " the existence of a spiritual being who can see without eyes, I cannot " conceive the manner in which seeing co-exists with the absence of the " bodily organ of sight" (p. 126). " We cannot conceive the manner in " which the unconditioned and the personal are united in the Divine " Nature ; jet we may believe that, in some manner unknown to us, they " are so united. To conceive the union of two attributes in one object of " thought, I must be able to conceive them as united in some particular " manner : when this cannot be done, I may nevertheless believe thai the " union is possible, though I am unable to conceive how it is possible." This may be more briefly expressed by saying that we can beheve what is inconceivable, but can know only what is conceivable ; and undoubtedly EolH these contrasted propositions are maintained by Sir W. Hamilton. But to regard them as a clue to the distinction in his mind between knowledge and belief, would be to misunderstand his opinions : for the convictions which he most emphatically characterized as beliefs, in contra- distinction to knowledge, are what he calls our natural and necessary
80 BELIEF WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE.
been proving to be unknowable, being made up of con- tradictions, are as incapable of being believed as of being known ; tbat tbe only attitude in reference to tliera, of any intellect which apprehends the meaning of language, is that of disbelief. On the other hand, there are In- finites and Absolutes which, not being self-contradictory, admit of being believed, namely, concrete realities sup- posed to be infinite or absolute in respect of certain attributes: but Sir W. Hamilton, as I maintain, has done nothing towards proving that such concrete reali- ties cannot be known, in the way in which we know otber things, namely, in their relations to us. When, therefore, he affirms that though the Infinite cannot by us be known, " by us it is, must, and ought to be be- " lieved," I answer, that the Infinite which, as he has so Liboriously proved, cannot be known, neither is, must, nor ought to be believed ; not because it cannot be known, but because there exists no such thing for us to
beliefs, "the original data of reason," which, far from being inconceivable, are usually tested by being themselves conceivable while their negations are not. If knowledge were distinguished from belief by our being aware of the manner as well as the fact, we coald not believe and know the same fact ; our knowledge could not rest, as he says it does, on a beUef that it is itself true.
But indeed, this notion of Sir W. Hamilton that we have two convic- tions on the same point, one guaranteeing the other — our knowledge of a truth, and a belief m the truth of that knowledge — seems to me apiece of false philosophy, resembling the doctrine he elsewhere rejects, that we have both a feeling and a consciousness of the feehng. We do not know a truth and believe it besides; the belief is the knowledge. Belief, altogether, is a genus which includes knowledge : according to the usage of language we believe whatever we assent to ; but some of our beliefs are knowledge, others are only belief. The first requisite which, by universal admission, a belief must possess, to constitute it knowledge, is that it be true. The second is, that it be well grounded ; for what we believe by accident, or on evidence not sufficient, we are not said to know. The grounds must, moreover, be sufficient for the very highest degree of assu- rance; for we do not consider ourselves to know, as long as we think there is any possibility (I mean any appreciable possibility) of our being mis- taken. But when a belief is true, is held with the strongest conviction we ever have, and held on grounds sufficient to justify that strongest con- viction, most people would think it worthy of the name of knowledge, whether it be grounded on our personal investigations, or on the appro- priate testimony, and whether we know only the fact itself, or the manner of the fact. And I am inclined to think that the purposes of philosophy, as well as those of common life, are best answered by making this the line of demarcation.
BELIEF WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE. 81
know; unless, with Hegel, we hold that the Absolute is not subject to the Law of Contradiction, but is at once a real existence and the synthesis of contradictories. And, on the other hand, the Infinite and Absolute which are really capable of being believed, are also, for anything Sir W. Hamilton has shown to the contrary, capable of being, in certain of their aspects, known.
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82
CHAPTER Vr.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONDITIONED.
The " Philosophy of the Conditioned," in its wider sense, includes all the doctrines that we have been dis- cussing. In its narrower, it consists, I think, mainly of a single proposition, which Sir W. Hamilton often reiterates, and insists upon as a fundamental law of human intellect. Though suggested by Kant's Anti- nomies of Speculative Reason, in the form which it bears in Sir W. Hamilton's writings it belongs, I believe, originally to himself. No doctrine which he has any- w^here laid down is more chara'cteristic of his mode of thought, and none is more strongly associated with his fame.
For the better understanding of this theory, it is necessary to premise some explanations respecting another doctrine, which is also his, but not peculiar to him. He protests, frequently and with emphasis, against the notion that whatever is inconceivable must be false. ** There is no ground," he says,* " for infer- *' ring a certain fact to be impossible, merely from our " inability to conceive its possibility," I regard this opinion as perfectly just. It is one of the psychological truths, highly important, and by no means generally recognised, which frequently meet us in his writings, and which give them, in m}'- eyes, most of their philo- sophical value. I am obliged to add, that though he often furnishes a powerful statement and vindication of such truths, he seldom or never consistently adheres to them. Too often what he has affirmed in generals is
* Discussions, p. 624.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONDITIONED. 83
taken back in details, and arguments of his own are found to rest on philosophical commonplaces which he has himself repudiated and refuted. I am afraid that the present is one of these eases, and that Sir W. Hamil- ton will sometimes be found contending that a thing cannot possibly be true because we cannot conceive it : but at all events he disclaims any such inference, and broadly lays down, that things not only may be, but are, of which it is impossible for us to conceive even the possibility.
Before showing how this proposition is developed into the " Philosophy of the Conditioned," let us make the ground safe before us, by bestowing a brief considera- tion upon the proposition itself, its meaning, and the i foundations on which it rests. u»r^
We cannot conclude anything to be impossible, because V jL^ its possibility is inconceivable to us ; for two reasons. First ; what seems to us inconceivable, and, so far as we are personally concerned, may really be so, usually owes its inconceivabilit}' only to a strong association. When, in a prolonged experience, we. have often had a particular sensation or mental impression, and never without ai certain other sensation or impression immediately ac-I companying it, there grows up so firm an adhesion between our ideas of the two, that we are unable to think of the former without thinking the latter in close combination with it. And unless other parts of our experience afford us some analogy to aid in disentang- \ ling the two ideas, our incapacity of imagining the one liact without the other grows, or is prone to grow, into a belief that the one cannot exist without the other. This , is the law of Inseparable Association, an element of our | nature of which few have realized to themselves the full I power. It was for the first time largely applied to the explanation of the more complicated mental phajnomeua by Mr. James Mill ; and is, in an especial manner, the key to the phaenomenon of inconceivability. As that phsenomenon only exists because our powers of concep- I tion are determined by our limited experience, Incon-
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84 THE PHILOSOPHY Of" THE CONDITIONED.
ceivables are incessantly becoming Conceivables as our experience becomes enlarged. There is no need to go fartber for an example than tbe case of Antipodes. This physical fact was, to tbe early speculators, inconceivable : not, of course, tbe fact of persons in that position ; this the mind could easily represent to itself; but tbe possi- bility that, being in that position, and. not being nailed on, nor having any glutinous substance attached to their feet, they could help falling off. Here was an insepa- rable, though, as it proved to be, not an indissoluble association, which while it continued made a real fact what is called inconceivable; and because inconceivable, it was unhesitatingly believed to be impossible. Incon- ceivabilities of similar character have, at many periods, obstructed the reception of new scientific truths : the Newtonian system had to contend against several of them ; and we are not warranted in assigning a different origin and character to those which still subsist, because the experience that would be capable of removing them has not occurred. If anything which is now inconceiv- able by us were shown to us as a fact, we should soon find ourselves able to conceive it. We should even be in danger of going over to the opposite error, and believ- ing that the negation of it is inconceivable. There are many cases in the history of science (I have dilated on some of them in another work) where something which had once been inconceivable, and which people had with great difficulty learnt to conceive, becoming itself fixed in the bonds of an inseparable association, scientific men came to think that it alone was conceivable, and that the conflicting hypothesis which all mankind had believed, and which a vast majority were probably believing still, was inconceivable. In I)r. Whewell's writings on the Inductive Sciences, this transition of thought is not only exemplified