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moral and social phenomena are really exceptions to the general certainty and uniformity of the course of nature; and how far the methods, by which so many of the laws of the physical world have been numbered among truths irrevocably acquired and universally assented to, can be made instrumental to the gradual formation of a similar body of received doctrine in moral and political science" and he calls attention to Dr. Brown's treatise on Cause and Effect, since, in his opinion, that philosopher has taken a more correct view than any other English writer, on the subject of the ultimate intellectual laws of scientific inquiry. It is here that Mill becomes a Positivist, his object being ider.tically the same as Comte's. He confines himself to the knowledge of phenomena as gained by observation and experience, and if he only stopped here it would be well enough; but, in his examination of Hamilton, he applies these weapons to the denial and the destruction of the only philosophy which grants to man the full power and scope of an intellectual being, since the explanation of all knowledge, as the product of association and experience, reduces the mind to a mere machine which does not act till set agoing by external means.

He thus stands out in deadly antagonism to Hamilton and the Scottish school in metaphysics, and by the very narrowness of his own philosophy is unable to appreciate Sir William's. In his Examination he gains an apparent advantage from crossexamining Hamilton, who, as his opinions changed, modified these largely, and thus laid himself open, in his entire writings, to the charge of inconsistency. The interminable word-battle which Mr. Mill keeps up on this point throughout the examination is wearisome. In every charge he quotes Sir William in flat contradiction to himself, while Mr. Mill is open to the counter charge that he has not advanced from his original basis as laid down in his system of logic at all, which is just as fatal to the consistency of one whose high claim is to be a progressive philosopher. His first charge against Hamilton is, that he denies the Relativity of human knowledge, which he professed to hold. This is the chief dictum of Hamilton and the foundation of his great specialty, the Philosophy of the Conditioned. But it clashes with his original beliefs and with his opinion that we have an immediate consciousness of the non ego, as, for instance,

the primary qualities of matter, and these inconsistencies Mr. Mill states at the outset, with crushing weight against him. This point established, his Philosophy of the Conditioned, that the Infinite and the Absolute are to us both unconditionally limited, so that neither one can be conceived of, because to think is to condition, is also affected. For knowledge of an exterior existence can not be relative in one case and not in another; and this immediate consciousness of the external world he expressly insists upon in other places. We agree with Mr. Mill, that when you attempt to define Sir William's theory of the Absolute and the Infinite, for want of comprehensible terms, it melts away into thin air. We are between two inconceivables, neither of which we can grasp. As against Cousin, Mr. Mill says, "Whatever relates to God I hold with Sir W. Hamilton to be a matter of inference; I would add, of inference a posteriori.”1 But Mr. Mill has himself shown the method of escape from the error of Sir W. Hamilton's and Mr. Mansel's logic, by showing that we can conceive of attributes which are infinite or absolute, as goodness, justice, power, and that, as these can not be other than absolute or completed goodness and infinite or perfect power, and not different, save in degree, from man's incomplete goodness and imperfect power, we do have a practical conception of the infinite and the absolute. Hence we are not left in the dark as to the knowledge of God, though it is limited by our faculties. In upsetting, first by analysing its own inconsistency, and then substituting practical ideas in its place, this Philosophy of the Conditioned, Mr. Mill has done good service to philosophy and to religion.

It seems to us that, while this author is so vigorously contesting the philosophy of the Conditioned, he abdicates the very position which he takes later on in the more positive part of the examination. He grants that we may conceive of God by "inference a posteriori"; and his method of argument we have just given: but it is essential to this that our views of truth, justice, goodness shall be the same as the infinite Being's; and hence our minds have the same original sense of the good, the right, the just, which belongs to God; or, in other words, we are made in God's image, having a living soul. Mr. Mill's inference is

1 Examination of Sir William Hamilton. Vol. I., p. 48.

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from the analogy of our own moral sense. nation at Mr. Mansel, he admits the very point whose exclusion elsewhere vitiates his theory of utilitarianism, and thus furnishes the best proof of a deeply-seated moral instinct in man. Again, Mr. Mill and Sir W. Hamilton, by different methods, are at one in regard to the impossibility of our knowing anything beyond phenomena. Sir W. Hamilton denies this here (to affirm it again when needed) because it is inconsistent with his favorite dogma of the unconditioned. Mr. Mill denies it because it claims to know more than is gained through observation and experience. And yet each philosopher recoils from the shock given by his logic to the moral sense; and each then has recourse to the only valid ground upon which theology and metaphysics can stand.' To our thinking, each of the theories is true in what it affirms, false in what it denies. Sir W. Hamilton is led by his philosophical theory to bring back the knowledge which is shut down to the finite alone, in the shape of original beliefs given in consciousness; and here he is at one with Reid and the Scottish school, and, as we believe, on right ground. But Mr. Mill is now unsparing in his attacks upon an intuitive philosophy. He aptly says: "When we know what any philosopher considers to be revealed in consciousness, we have the key to the entire character of his metaphysical system."*

Sir W. Hamilton's consciousness is not solely of the ego and

1 This is excellently brought out in an article on Mill's Hamilton, probably by Prof. Fraser, in the recent September number of the North British Review, which always sheds light on philosophical subjects.

We wish to refer in this connection to two little volumes by Prof. Fraser. "Rational Philosophy in History and System," Edinburgh, 1858, and "Essays in Philosophy," ibid. 1856; both of which are valuable additions, though not more than this article in the North British, to a new constructive system of philosphy. We can not forbear quoting his own words at the end of an essay on Leibnitz, in this connection: "We love to anticipate a future history of Metaphysics and Theology in this country more encouraging than these omens seem to forebode; and to have disclosed before us in imagination, as one of the characteristics of the succeeding age, an ethically disciplined spirit operating according to the canons of a well applied Logic, under the increasing light of biblical science, towards the production of a nobly intellectual and yet profoundly scriptual theology, and the attainment, for the Christian religion and the Christian church, of a position among the forces at work in society, which the human agency charged with their maintenance and propagation is not at liberty to disregard." We can only say that he has himself done more than any recent philosopher to bring about this very object.

* Examination, Vol. I., P. 137.

its modifications, but also of the non ego. In other words, he taught the doctrine of natural realism or dualism, in opposition to that of cosmothetic idealism, the doctrine of those who hold the existence of an external world-a world, however, unknown in itself, and therefore asserted only as an hypothesis. He held this consciousness of the external world, however, to be only of the primary qualities of matter, the secondary being known through a mediate representation. Mr. Mill differs from him, in thinking that all our knowledge of the non ego is a matter of inference alone, and that our knowledge is only representative and largely derived from our sensations, and when he abandons his usual method of cross-examining Hamilton and turns to the statement of his own philosophy in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth chapters, he becomes deeply interesting and instructive. But while he gives a simpler and less dogmatic view of the units of human knowledge than Sir William Hamilton, what he says is only the complete statement of views which are maintained in the sixth book of his Logic. He reduces, like Comte, all our knowledge to phenomena. The external world of matter is defined as the permanent possibility of sensation; the consciousness is resolved into " sucursions of feeling." But Mr. Mill has himself assisted us to see the inadequacy of his psychological theory to cover the whole ground. He says:

"Besides present feelings, and possibilities of present feeling, there is another class of phenomena to be included in an enumeration of the elements making up our conception of mind. The thread of consciousness which composes the mind's phenomenal life, consists not only of present sensations, but likewise, in part, of memories and expectations. Now, what are these? In themselves they are present feelings, states of present consciousness, and in that respect not distinguished from sensations. They all, moreover, resemble some given sensations and feelings, of which we have previously had experience. But they are attended with the peculiarity, that each of them involves a belief in more than its own present existence. A sensation involves only this; but a remembrance of sensation, even if not referred to any particular date, involves the suggestion and belief that a sensation, of which it is a copy or representation, actually existed in the past; and an expectation involves the belief, more or less positive, that a sensation or other feeling to which it

directly refers, will exist in the future. Nor can the phenomena involved in these two states of consciousness be adequately expressed, without saying, that the belief they include is that I myself formerly had, or that I myself, and no other, shall hereafter have, the sensations remembered or expected. The fact believed is, that the sensations did actually form, or will hereafter form, part of the self-same series of states, or thread of consciousness, of which the remembrance or expectation of those sensations is the part now present. If, therefore, we speak of the mind as a series of feelings, we are obliged to complete the statement by calling it a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future; and we are reduced to the alternative of believing that the mind, or ego, is something different from any series of feelings, or possibilities of them, or of accepting the paradox, that something which ex hypothesi is but a series of feelings, can be aware of itself.

"The truth is, that we are here face to face with that final inexplicability, at which, as Sir W. Hamilton observed, we inevitably arrive when we reach ultimate facts. . . . I think, by far the wisest thing we can do, is to accept the inexplicable fact, without any theory of how it takes place."1

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This is granting all we demand. It concedes the truth of the Hamiltonian philosophy on this point, and this once granted, we have a datum of consciousness, a self-active intelligence, (not a machine,) a power of self which distinguishes between self and not-self, and by necessary inference, the fact of the existence of matter. Now add Mr. Mill's psychological results to this postulate of intelligence, and you have the means of arriving at the sum of human knowledge. It should be remarked that here he touches the ground, which, in controversy with Mr. Mansel, he laid down as the basis of our true philosophical knowledge of God. It shows that there is a mental unknown, call it datum of consciousness or inexplicable fact, to which every philosopher, whatever may be his theory of the powers of mind, must refer for the residuum of human intelligence: so that Mr. Mill and Sir W. Hamilton actually approach each other and shake hands, by however diverse methods. Mr. Mill be more accurate in his logical processes than his antagonist, and his own theory is the simpler one and so less easily becomes inconsistent, yet he has failed to prove his points at the Examination, Vol. I, pp. 260, 261, 262. 8

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VOL. VI.-NO. XXXI.

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