LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Receired ..* ________ -S- Accessions No. No. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY A REVIEW, WITH CRITICISMS ; INCLUDING SOME COMMENTS ON MR. MILL'S ANSWER TO SI&&P&i%te!*lA MIL TON. SON. THIRD EDITION: WITH AN ADDITIONAL CHAPTER. MACMILLAN AND CO. 1877. All rights reserved. i / 577 GLASGOW: $rintei> at the anitoersi I!Y RO'SF.RT MACI..RHOSK, 153 WEST NILE STKRET. NOTE TO FIRST EDITION. THE Substance of the greater portion of the following pages was delivered, in the form of Lectures, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, in Albemarle Street, on the afternoons of March 21, 23, and 28, in the present year. London: June, 1865. NOTE TO SECOND EDITION. ALTHOUGH, since the first publication of the Volume, some of the views put forth in it have taken considerable exten- sion in the writer's mind, and there is one general specula- tion, growing out of the whole, which has begun to seem so important to him that it will probably press for exposition at some time, yet, with respect to the original purpose of the Volume, it has not been found necessary, in this reprint, to make more than a few verbal changes. Edinburgh: March, 1867. NOTE TO THIRD EDITION* To bring this Edition into closer connexion with the present time, an Additional Chapter has been thought desirable. For suggestions towards the Bibliographical Conspectus in that chapter I am indebted to Professor Adamson, of the Owens College, Manchester. Edinb urgh : Mav, 1877. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. t- A ( ; K A SURVEY OF THIRTY YEARS: 1835-1865, J CHAPTER II. THE TRADITIONAL DIFFERENCES: HOW REPEATED IN CAKLYLE. HAMILTON, AND MILL, 19 I. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE (pp. 22-37. I II. COSMOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES (pp. 37-51.) III. THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE (pp. 51-67.) CHAPTER III. l.i ri'.CTS OF RECENT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTIONS ON PHILO- SOPHY, 109 Mil CONTEXTS. CHAPTER IV. THE YK.VR 1X05 : I. \TF.ST DRIFTS AND GROUPINGS, .... I. NATIVE SENIORS (pp. I5I-I55 ) II. BRITISH COMTISM (pp. 155-160.) III. MR. i:\IN ANJ) MR. IlKRliKRT SPENCER (160-167.) IV. HAM J HUMANISM AM) ITS MODIFICATIONS (pp. 168-171.) V. MR. Fi RR1KK AND A URITISH HEGELIAN (pp. 1 71 -iSo. ) VI. SW1 J>I:N lioRC.I AMSM AND " SPIRITUALISM " (pp. l8l-I9O.) VII. .MR. MILT. ON SIR AVIU.IAM HAMILTON (pp. 190-261.) A I ) 1>I T ION AL CHAPTK R. SKETCH l-'ROM 1X65 K 1877. 2o2 RECENT BRITISH PHILQ CHAPTER A SURVEY OF THIRTY YEA 1835 1865. BY recent British Philosophy I mean the Philosophy of this country since about the year 1835. But what do I mean by British Philosophy during that period ? You have all a general notion of what I mean. I mean the aggregate speculations during that period of some of our ablest British minds in what are vaguely called "the moral sciences" their aggregate speculations on those ques- tions of most deep and enduring interest to man which have occupied thoughtful minds in all ages of the world, which are handed on from age to age, and which each generation, however much of previous thought concerning them it may inherit and preserve, has to revolve over again for itself. It has been proclaimed among us, indeed, that Philosophy in this sense has at length happily ceased to exist that great Pan is dead. I do not believe it; and, RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. if I did, I should be sad. Whatever nation has given up Philosophy I will be bolder, and, using a word very much out of favour at present, I will say whatever nation . has given up Metaphysics is in a state of intellectual insolvency. Though its granaries should be bursting, though its territories should be netted with railroads, though its mills and foundries should be the busiest in the world, the mark of the beast is upon it, and it is going the way of all brutality. Britain, notwithstanding temporary misrepresentations of her, is not yet in this state. We have not, it is true, and we have not had for a long while, the reputation among our continental neighbours of being a nation caring much for Philosophy. The Germans, in particular, have long pitied us on this account It is many years since one of their greatest thinkers publicly denounced us by pointing out that England was the only country in Europe where the word Philosophy had become synonymous with natural science, where the barometer and thermometer were spoken of as " philosophical instruments," and where a so-called Philo- sophical Journal treated of agriculture, housekeeping, cookery, and the construction of fire-places.* Historically it might be shown that this very degradation of the word Philosophy among us arose from what was originally a philosophical conception, and may have been a good one. Not the less was the taunt well deserved. And, though we may have been recovering since then, our recovery, it must be admitted, has been very gradual. In the year 1835 Mr. John Stuart Mill could write as follows : " England once stood at the head of European * Hegel, as quoted by Mansel, Metaphysics, p. 4, note. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 11 Philosophy. Where stands she now ? Consult the general "opinion of Europe. The celebrity of England, in the " present day, rests upon her docks, her canals, her railroads. " In intellect she is distinguished only for a kind of sober "good sense, 'free from extravagance, but also void of lofty " aspirations. . . . Instead of the ardour of research, the "eagerness for large and comprehensive inquiry, of the "educated part of the French and German youth, what " find we ? Out of the narrow bounds of mathematical and lt physical science, not a vestige of a reading and thinking " public engaged in the investigation of truth as truth, in the "prosecution of thought for the sake of thought. Among " few except sectarian religionists and what they are we all " know is there any interest in the great problem of man's " nature and life ; among still fewer is there any curiosity " respecting the nature and principles of human society, the " history or the philosophy of civilization, or any belief that " from such inquiries a single important practical consequence " can follow ?" * Even at the time when Mr. Mill wrote these words I cannot but think they described matters as somewhat worse than they really were. When I remember that Coleridge and Bentham and Mackintosh were then but recently dead, that Mr. Mill's own eminent father was yet alive, and that the poet Wordsworth, no less the philosophic sage than the poet, survived as an honoured recluse, I cannot think that the tradition of our national faculty in philosophy had become then so utterly extinct. Possibly, however, the educated mind of Britain had, about that time, sunk to its lowest in respect of interest in philosophy, or any * Review of Professor Sedgwick's Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge, 1835 ; reprinted in Mill's Dissertations. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. general notion of what philosophy might be. For Mr. Mill was not the sole British thinker who then looked round with something of this conviction. Other voices had been crying in the wilderness. Mr. Mill's senior, Sir William Hamilton, had strongly uttered the same complaint. " The present "contrast," he had written in 1830, "which the philo- " sophical enthusiasm of France exhibits to the speculative " apathy of Britain is anything but flattering to ourselves. " The new spirit of metaphysical inquiry which the French " imbibed from Germany and Scotland arose with them pre- " cisely at the same time when the popularity of psychological " researches began to decline with us ; and now, when all "interest in these speculations seems here to be extinct, "they are there seen flourishing in public favour with a " universality and vigour corresponding to their encourage- "ment." * Should another authority be wanted to the same effect, it may be found in writings of Mr. Carlyle at about the same date. "It is admitted on all sides," he had written in one of his Essays as early as 1829, "that the " Metaphysical and Moral sciences are falling into decay, "while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect "and attention. Inmost of the European nations there is " now no such thing as a science of Mind ; only more or less " advancement in the general science, or the special sciences, " of Matter. The French were the first to desert Metaphy- " sics, and, though they have lately affected to revive their " school, it has yet no signs of vitality. Among ourselves "the Philosophy of Mind, after a rickety infancy, which " never reached the vigour of manhood, fell suddenly into * Art. on the Philosophy of Perception, Edin. Revieiv, Oct. 1830 ; reprinted in Hamilton's Discussions. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 5 " decay, languished, and finally died out with its last amiable " cultivator, Professor Stewart. In no nation but Germany " has any decisive effort been made in psychological science, " not to speak of any decisive result." * In this passage, notwithstanding a difference in the tone from those written almost immediately afterwards by Hamilton and Mill, there is substantially the same complaint. Now, certainly, the concurring testimonies of three such minds may be taken as evidence, if not that Philosophy was then at a lower ebb than usual in Britain, at least that such British Philosophy as was current did not come up to the standard of the best critics, whether judging by their own requirements and aspirations, or by comparison with other nations. Let us admit, then, that about the year 1835 the philo- sophical credit of Britain was justly low in Europe. Has the state of affairs been changed since then? Surely, to some extent, it has. Those three critics themselves, as we all know, were not content with crying in the wilderness. Even while they were so crying, they had begun their own best efforts that the wilderness should rejoice and blossom. Hamilton, the eldest of them, had begun, in his maturity, to put forth, from his seclusion in Edinburgh, those occasional essays, the fruits of long previous thought, the very titles of which took away people's breath, which probably not twenty persons in Britain could intelligently read, but which, where they were read, astonished by their profundity and erudition, and seemed to herald a new era in formal speculation, if only by reinstating difficulty where men had been taking * Article "Signs of the Times," Edin. Review, 1829; reprinted in Carlyle's Miscellanies. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. their ease. Carlyle, the second in age, had already put forth, in the same periodical or in others, those earlier essays of his in which, though they were in form literary or biogra- phical, there was evidently the working of a great new philo- sophical force, and the deep assumption of a new set of fundamental principles. He had also published his Sartor Resartus, in which, under such a poetico-grotesque guise as confounded all precedent, and took both phantasy and reason by storm, he compelled readers to behold his princi- ples and their developments in something like system. Finally, Mill, the youngest of the three he was but twenty- nine years of age when he wrote the passage which I have quoted had for several years been writing, in the Westmin- ster and other Reviews, articles from which it was to be inferred that, when his courageous and truth-loving father, and that father's friend Bentham, should be gone from the earth, they would leave behind them, in this heir of their hopes, one fit to be an expositor of their ideas through another generation, but who was likely rather to look right and left in that generation for himself, and to honour his descent, not by mere adhesion to what he had inherited, but by an open-mindedness that should even solicit contrary impressions, and push on passionately, at every break of light, in the quest of richer truth. If the history of London during the last reign and the present should ever come to be written, the historian might be reminded of one building in it, now no longer extant, of which rather particular mention might be desirable. It was the dingy old India House in Leadenhall Street, of whose many interesting legends it is now certainly not the least interesting that, many years ago, young John Mill, not so well known to the general public as RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. he has been since, had there his official room, to which, along intricate passages, friends and admirers of his, seeking his conversation, would find their way on late afternoons. If I have mentioned Mill, Carlyle, and Hamilton as the persons in whom, if in any, there was the likelihood, about the year 1835, of a new movement in British Philosophy, I have not done so without good reason. Whatever other men, seniors or coevals of these three, may be named as having co-operated with them, either as urging views of their own, or as continuing the older philosophic influences (and I, for one, think that the beneficial influence of Cole- ridge was not exhausted at his death), certain it is that it is to Carlyle, Hamilton, and Mill that all would point as having been the most prominent leaders of free or un- covenanted British speculation in the thirty years from 1835 to 1865. Probably first in the order of eifect came Carlyle, in all whose writings, historical or other, down to the last, there have been veins and blasts of that philosophy which the earliest of them announced, and the resistless diffusion of which, and even of the phrases and idioms in which it was couched, over the entire surface and through the entire speech of these islands, is a phenomenon not soon to be forgotten. Hamilton's influence was long more local and obscure. But, for twenty years, he was teaching Logic and Metaphysics to large classes in the University of Edinburgh; and thus, as well as latterly by publications bearing his name, there was shed through educated British society some recognition of his system of thought, and a certain Hamiltonian leaven which is still working. Mill, too, has more than fulfilled his promise. To his Logic, 8 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. published in 1843, there have succeeded his other well- known works, and with such accumulated effect that, at the present moment (1865), it may be said that it is Mill, as a philosopher, that is in the ascendant in Britain. It is Mill that our young thinkers at the Universities, our young legislators in Parliament, our young critics in journals, and our young shepherds on the mountains, consult, and quote, and swear by. But, of course, in every year since these three men first stepped out as leaders, there have been additions to the procession which they headed in some cases, perhaps, of mere recruits to one or other of them, but, in others, of inde- pendent minds reasserting previous forms of thought, or even of such marked originality that they already divide attention with the leaders, and, when the head of the column has wound round the hill, they in their turn will seem the chiefs. What the French or the Germans might think of these late efforts of ours, if presented to them collectively, is, indeed, still a question. Not only do we labour under the disadvantage of being an insular people, a people removed from the centre a thing which tells in philoso- phy more than it once did ; but it can hardly be said that the majority of those among us who have betaken themselves systematically to philosophy have taken the necessary pains to acquaint themselves with what had been gone through and settled before, within accessible ground, on the subjects of their research. As presenting in a vivid light the possible effects on our recent philoso- phical literature of these two causes in combination our geographical insularity and our deficiency of learning I RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. will quote a sentence or two from one of the last metaphysical works published in Britain. "What we , "shall take leave to name the historic pabulum," says this resolute writer, " this alone is the appointed food of every ' " successive generation, this alone is the condition of the "growth of spirit; and, this food neglected, we have a " generation that but vacillates vacillates, it may be, even " into temporary retrogression. This last is the unfortunate "position now. The historic pabulum, passing from the "vessel of Hume, was received into that of Kant, and " thence finally into that of Hegel ; but from the vessels "'of the two latter the generations have not yet eaten. " This is the whole Europe (Germany as Germany is itself "'no exception) has continued to nourish itself from the "vessel of Hume long after the historic pabulum had "abandoned it for another and others. Hence all that "we see. Hume is our Politics, Hume is our Trade, " Hume is our Philosophy, Hume is our Religion it wants "little but that Hume were even our Taste. ... In "short, the only true means of progress have not been "brought into service. The historic pabulum, however "greedily it has been devoured out of Hume, has been "left untouched in the vessel of Hegel, who alone of all "mankind has succeeded in eating it all up out of the " vessel of Kant." * You see what the writer means. There have been three, and but three, all-comprehensive European thinkers during the last century Hume in * Britain, and Kant and Hegel in Germany. You may * The Secret of Hegel : being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter. By James Hutchison Stirling. 2 vols., London, 1865. Introd. pp. Ixxiii. Ixxiv. io RECEN'I BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. fancy them as three buckets or reservoirs, one behind the other in a line, with intervals between them Hume stationed in his completeness at about the year 1770, Kant at about the year 1800, and Hegel at about 1830. There have been other philosophers in all countries during the century, of some of whom the historian of Philosophy may be bound to take account ; but, as respects philosophic result, they have, one and all of them, been but as saucers or pannikins ranged by the sides of the great buckets or in the intervals between them. There is nothing worth having in the pannikins that is not in the buckets; and there is a vast deal in the buckets or, at least, in the last two that has never got into the pannikins. Then why go to the pannikins for philosophy? It is not only Britain, it will have been noted, that the writer accuses of this folly of not drawing its philosophy from the main. But it is clearly our recent British philosophizing that he has chiefly in view. He thinks //, above all, inadequately informed with the true hereditary pabulum, and therefore either unconsciously retrogressive, or, at best, beside the point, arid needlessly repetitive. He thinks it made up, as he otherwise expresses it, of "contingent crumbs" from unknown tables. To all this what shall we reply ? We may reply that we are, or at least may be, fully informed from Hume, and that this, on the critic's own principle, is something, seeing that it limits the distance to which we need go back. We may reply that surely some sufficient knowledge of Kant has been possessed by some of our thinkers and scholars since Kant lived, and has been digested in recent British speculation. ^ We may reply that, if Hegel remains unknown, save in a specimen- RE CENT BRITISH PHIL O SO PHY. I j phrase or two, by reason of his terrible abstruseness, one or two of the intermediates and purveyors between Kant and Hegel such as Fichte and Schelling have not been with- out interpreters. We may reply that, as Hegel's date is 1830, it is about time, in the nature of things, that there should be a fourth European bucket somewhere, superseding Hegel ; that, as Britain produced the first, it is not out of possibility that she may repeat her feat and produce the fourth and that towards such an achievement a knowledge of Hegel may be essential, but not a knowledge of all Hegel, or even a worshiping or believing knowledge of Hegel. No disrespect is implied to Hegel. But, whatever Hegel may have been, he was not everybody collectively. As Mr. Artemus Ward said to his American countrymen about the Negro, we ought perhaps to think of him as an important kinsman, but not surely as our grandfather, uncle, aunt in the / country, wife, sisters and brothers, and several of our first wife's relations, all in one. A good deal of the world of mind was and is to be seen out of Hegel a good deal even of what went to make Hegel. May not British thought, starting as it can do from Hume, and with the power of taking Kant in the way, make a leap to all intents and pur- poses beyond Hegel without actually putting both its hands on Hegel's bended back? Did not Hume evolve his abstract philosophy from but an ounce or so of transmitted material in the way of previous system chiefly, indeed, by persistent native meditation on one final doctrine of one previous thinker ? Granted that larger knowledge is neces- sary now for anything really relevant to present intellectual needs, and the very largest knowledge for anything thorough and complete. Still may it not be possible that in these 1 2 RECENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. insular British mists, in these sometimes clear British airs, amid the suggestive bustle of this rich British life, and under British stars that speak of Infinity no less than do the German, diligent and serious British minds may have of late years been ruminating, without any express aid from Hegel, ideas and conclusions of worth to us, and which even Hegel's countrymen might be glad to get ? All this, and more to the same effect, might be said by way of making it probable before-hand that our recent philosophy, if not consummate, need not have been mainly retrogressive, or all merely repetitive and beside the point. But, after all, the best method is to examine it. If saucers and pannikins are all that we have, let us at least take an inventory of our saucers and pannikins. CONSPECTUS OF RECENT WRITERS AND WRITINGS. [Not brought beyond March, 1865.] SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON (not. 1788 ob. 1856): Article, Philosophy j>f the Unconditioned, in the Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1829 ; article, Philosophy of Perception, in the same Review, Oct. 1830 ; article, Logic, in the same Review, April, 1833 ; and other articles, from 1829 onwards; all republished collectively in 1852 as Sir William Hamilton's Discussions. Edition of Reid's Works with Notes and Dissertations (incomplete), 1846. Lectures on Metaphysics, in 2 vols., 1859, edited from Hamilton's manuscripts by Mansel and Veitch. Lectures on Logic, 2 vols., 1860, similarly edited. MR. CARLYLE (nat. 1795) : Articles, State of German Literature and Signs of the Times, in the Edinburgh Review, 1827 and 1829 ; and other Essays, from that date onwards, reprinted as Miscellanies. Sartor Resartus, 1833-4. All his other writings to the present time ; but, perhaps most particularly, for the expression of theory, or for criticism of theories, his Heroes and Hero-worship, 1840, his Past and RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY^, p^^lf^ ?.fc>>l<^y o .3-'**^ V 13 ? 7-^ Present, 1851. 1843, nis Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850, and his Li \ fe. of Sterling, ^SyuA^ MR. JOHN STUART MILL (nat. 1806) : Articles in the Westminster Review and other periodicals from 1832 onwards (including a cele- brated Essay on Bentham, 1838, and a sequel on Coleridge, 1840), reprinted as Mill's Dissertations and Discussions, 2 vols., 1859. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inditctive, 2 vols., 1843. Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols., 1848. Essay On Liberty, 1859. Essay On Utilitarianism, 1863. DE QUINCEY (nat. 178606. 1859). Through many of De Quincey's- Essays there runs a subtle vein of speculative thought, derived from Wordsworth and Coleridge, or on the whole continuing and prolonging their philosophic influence. ARCHBISHOP WHATELY (nat. 1787 ob. 1863). Among various writings, subsequent to his Logic, published in 1826, may be noted his Annotations to Bacon's Essays, 1856, and his Annotations to Paley t 1859. GEORGE COMBE (nat. 1788 0. 1858): The Constitution of Man, 1828 ; System of Phrenology, 1836 ; and other Phrenological Writings. MR. ISAAC TAYLOR (nat. 1789): Natural History of Enthusiasm, 1829 ; and, in a numerous series of subsequent works, perhaps more particularly his Physical Theory of Another Life, 1839, his Elements of Thought, 1843, his Restoration of Belief, 1853, and his Ultimate Civilization, 1860. REV. DR. WHEWELL (nat. 1794) : Philosophy of the Inductive- Sciences, 1840; Elements of Morality, 1845; Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England, 1852; The Platonic Dialogues for Eng- lish Readers, 18591861 ; &c. DR. ARNOLD (nat. 1795 ob. 1842). The influence of Arnold on English speculative thought may be still traced in eminent disciples or admirers of his in the English Church. MR. SAMUEL BAILEY (Author of "Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions," 1821, and of "Essays on the Pursuit of Truth," 1831): A Revie^v of Berkeley's Theory of Vision, 1842; A Theory of Reasoning, 1851 ; Letters on the Philosophy of the Pluman Mind, 18551863. I 4 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. DR. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (nat. 1801). Of the speculative system that underlies Dr. Newman's Theology and Ecclesiasticism, and reveals itself more or less in the whole series of his writings, some interesting and rather precise glimpses are given by himself in his Apologia pro vita stia, 1 864. Miss HARRIET MARTINEAU (nat. 1802). Two of Miss Martineau's works to be particularly noted in connection with Recent British Philosophy are her Correspondence with Mr. Atkinson On the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, 1851, and her condensed Translation of Comte's Positive Philosophy, 2 vols., 1853. REV. F. D. MAURICE (nat. 1805). In the long series of Mr. Maurice's works, all pervaded by his characteristic mode of thought, may be specially noted his History of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, reissued now in several separate volumes ; his Theological Essays, 1853; and his two volumes of contro- versy with Mr. Mansel, entitled What is Revelation? (1859) and Sequel Jo the Inquiry, What is Revelation ? (1860). MR. F. W. NEWMAN (nat. 1805) -.The Soul: Her Sorrows and Aspirations, 1849; Phases of Faith, 1850; and other writings. MR. BENJAMIN H. SMART: Thought and Language: an Essay, .having in view the Revival, Correction, and Exclusive Establishment of Locke's Philosophy, 1855. PROFESSOR DE MORGAN (nat. 1806): Formal Logic, 1847; and occasional parts of his other acknowledged writings. SIR GEORGE CORNEWALL LEWIS (nat. iSo6ol>. 1863) : Essay on the Influence of Atithority in Matters of Opinion, 1849; On the Methods of Observation and Reasoning in Politics, 1852. PROFESSOR JAMES F. FERRIER (nat. 1808 ob. 1864). Various Metaphysical Papers in Blackwood's Magazine ; and Institutes of Metaphysic, or Theory of Knowing and Being, 1854. PROFESSOR PATRICK C. MACDOUGALL : Contributions to Philo- .sophy, 1852. MR. HENRY ROGERS : Essays in the Edinburgh Review and other Periodicals, republished collectively, 1850-55; The Eclipse of Faith (in reply to Mr. F. W. Newman), 1852 ; and Defence of same (in rejoinder to Newman), 1854. RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OS PHY. z 5 ALFRED TENNYSON (nat. 1810). To those who are too strongly possessed with our common habit of classifying writers into kinds, as Historians, Poets, Scientific and Speculative Writers, and so on, it may seem strange to include Mr. Tennyson in this list. But, as I have advisedly referred to Wordsworth as one of the representatives and powers of British Philosophy in the age immediately past, so I advisedly name Tennyson as succeeding him in the same character. Though it is not power of speculative reason alone that constitutes a poet, is it not felt that the worth of a poet essentially is measured by the amount and depth of his speculative reason ? Even popularly do we not speak of every great poet as the exponent of the spirit of his age ? What else can this mean than that the philosophy of his age, its spirit and heart in relation to all the great elemental problems, finds expression in his verse ? Hence I ought to include other poets in this list, and more particularly MR. BROWNING and MRS. BROWNING, and the late MR. CLOUGH. But let the mention of Mr. Tennyson suggest such other names, and stand as a sufficient protest against our absurd habit of omitting such in a connexion like the present. As if, forsooth, when a writer passed into verse, he were to be abandoned as utterly out of calculable relationship to all on this side of that boundary, and no account were to be taken of his thoughts and doings except in a kind of curious appendix at the end of the general register ! What if Philosophy, at a certain extreme range, and of a certain kind, tends of necessity to pass into poesy, and can hardly help being passionate and metrical ? If so, might not the omission of poets, purely as being such, from a conspectus of the speculative writers of any time, lead to erroneous conclusions, by giving an undue prominence in the estimate to all such philosophizing as could most easily, by its nature, refrain from passionate or poetic expression ? Thus, would Philosophy, or one kind of Philosophy in comparison with another, have seemed to have been in such a diminished condition in Britain about the year 1830, if critics had been in the habit of counting Wordsworth in the philosophic list as well as Coleridge, Mackintosh, Bentham, and James Mill ? Was there not more of what might be called Spinozism in Wordsworth than even in Coleridge, who spoke more of Spinoza ? But there hardly needs all this justification, as far as Mr. Tennyson is con- 1 6 RECENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. cerned, of our reckoning him in the present list. He that would exclude In Memoriam (1850), and Maud (1855), from a conspectus of the philosophical literature of our time has yet to learn what philosophy s. Whatever else In Memoriam may be, it is a manual, for many, of the latest hints and questions in British Metaphysics. MR. ARTHUR HELPS : Essays written in the Intervals of Business, 1841; Friends in Council, first series 1847; second series 1859; &c. DR. WILLIAM SMITH (of Edinburgh) : Translations of various works of Fichte, separately published, and collected in two volumes (with a Memoir) as The Popular Works of Fichte, 1844. MR. J. D. MORELL : History of Speculative Philosophy in the Nine- teenth Century, 1846; Lectures on the Philosophical Tendencies of the Age, 1848; Philosophy of Religion, 1849; Elements of Psychology, 1853; Introduction to Mental Philosophy, 1862. MR. G. H. LEWES : Biographical History of Philosophy, 1845 (second edition, 1857); Comte's Philosophy of the Positive Sciences (an abridged exposition of Comte), 1847. DR. J. GARTH WILKINSON : A Popular Sketch of Swedenborg*s Philosophical Works, 1847; Emanuel Swedenborg: A Biography, 1849; The Human Body and its Connexion with Man, 1851. ARCHBISHOP THOMSON : An Outline of the Necessary Laws of Thought : A Treatise on Pure and Applied Logic. REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY : Phaethon, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers, 1852 ; Alexandria and Her Schools, 1854; with speculative views in his Miscellanies and his writings generally. PROFESSOR M ANSEL: Prolegomena Logica, 1851 ; Lecture on the Philosophy of Kant, 1856 ; Limits of Religious Thought (Bampton Lec- ture), 1858, and Controversy with Mr. Maurice thereon ; Metaphysics (reprinted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica), 1860. HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE : History of Civilization in England, 2 vols., 1857, 1861. PROFESSOR JAMES McCosn : Intuitions of the Mind Inductively Investigated, 1860 (new edition, 1865). PROFESSOR HENRY CALDERWOOD -. The Philosophy of the Infinite; with special reference to the Theories of Sir William Hamilton and M. Cousin: 2d edition, enlarged, 1861. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. PROFESSOR ALEXANDER BAIN (of Aberdeen) : The Senses and the Intellect, 1856 (2d edition, 1864); The Emotions and the Will, 1859; On the Study of Character, 1861. PROFESSOR A. C. FRASER (Sir William Hamilton's successor in the chair of Logic and Metaphysics in Edinburgh) : Essays in Philosophy, 1856; Rational Philosophy in History and in System, 1858 ; and various philosophical articles in the North British Review. REV. DR. JOHN CAIRNS : Article Kant in the 8th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; Examination of Professor Ferried s Theory of Knowing and Being, 1856; The Scottish Philosophy Vindicated, 1856; and various occasional Essays. PROFESSOR THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES (St. Andrews): An Essay on the Neiv Analytic of Logical Forms, 1850 ; Translation of the Port Royal Logic, with Introduction, 1851; Sir William Hamilton (" Edin- burgh Essays "), 1856. PROFESSOR JOHN VEITCH (Glasgow); Joint-Editor with Dr. Mansel of Sir William Hamilton's Lectures ; author of Memoir of Dugald Stewart in collected edition of Stewart's Works ; also of other occasional \\-ritings. MR. RICHARD LOWNDES : An Introduction to the Philosophy of Necessary Beliefs, 1865. MR. HERBERT SPENCER: Social Statics, 1851; Principles of Psy- chology,. 1855; Essays, reprinted from periodicals (ist series 1858, 2d series 1863) ; Education, 1861 ; First Principles (the ist volume of a System of a Philosophy still in progress), 1862. DR. JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING : The Secret of Hegel; Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter. 2 vols. 1865. APPENDIX. Under this head may be included a number of items of which it is difficult to take account in a more special manner, (i) There is the extensive recent literature of so-called "Spiritualism" or " Spirit- Manifestations " a literature partly of native production, but to a great extent imported from America. In a conspectus like the present, which is statistical and not critical, at least a reference to this literature is demanded, in order to bring before us the actual state of affairs. (2) There have been importations from America of B 1 8 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL O SO PHY. works of quite a different speculative kind, of which Draper's History of the Intellectiial Development of Europe (1863) may stand as an example. (3) Among ourselves there is a large quantity of specula- tive thought, of all varieties of tendency, diffused through current Essay-writing in periodicals, or through much of our higher prose- literature not professedly philosophical. MR. FROUDE, for example, who might have been named specially in the list with reference to some of his earlier writings and to more recent individual Essays, comes into the list not less distinctly through his "History." Criti- cisms and discussions recognisable by a characteristic mode of philoso- phical thought, and sometimes of expressly philosophical nature, might be brought together, with but little trouble, from some of our leading periodicals, and associated, if I am not mistaken, with the name of MR. FITZJAMES STEPHEN. Finally, not to multiply names, a distinct vein of philosophical opinion, and of criticism of prevailing opinion, has made its appearance in the Essays of MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD. It is of recent British Philosophy as represented to the eye in this conspectus of writers and writings that I mainly propose a review in the chapters which follow. The nature of the references made will indicate on what writers my knowledge enables me to lay the stress, and what others I have in view but slightly. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. CHAPTER II. THE TRADITIONAL DIFFERENCES I HOW REPEATED IN CARLYLE, HAMILTON, AND MILL. OUR conspectus presents us, certainly, with a sufficient medley. For an adequate review of the course of recent British speculative thought as it is there represented, we should have to disentangle those separate tissues or movements of speculative inquiry which have received separate names according to the objects with which they are mainly conversant. We should have to take account separately of recent British Psychology, of recent British Logic, of recent British Ethics, of recent British Juris- prudence, of portions of recent British Theology, and of what has been done under such heads as the Philosophy of Art, the Philosophy of History and Politics, and the Science of Education. In each of these divisions of Philosophy certain names would occur as peculiarly pro- minent ; nor, in pursuing the views of all the thinkers in each, is there any limit to the subdivisions that might be necessary. A survey of this kind is obviously not what we can attempt here. We must employ some much more sum- 2 o RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. mary method. Instead of trying to grasp the extensive body of recent British Speculation, we must, if possible, seize it at the very nape, where the trunk and lirnbs are united with the head. That such a method need not be impossible is indicated by the fact that the different departments of speculative inquiry are obviously inter- connected. It is rare to find a thinker that does not pass from one department to another ; and he only is spoken of as a systematic philosopher whose scheme of thought has taken some account of them all. What does this imply but that there are for every philosopher certain root-principles, the thinking-out of which in all directions and in all kinds of conjunctions constitutes his very business as a philosopher? Let there be a difference / between two thinkers as to their root-principles, and this difference will shoot its correspondences into all the subjects about which they speculate. Further, if any set of differences as to root-principles can be pointed out as repeating itself among philosophers generally, we have here a means of classifying philosophers into schools. Our concern, then, is to see whether we can lay our hands on any set of ultimate differences which seem to have been constant or recurring in philosophy. If we can do so, we shall have an instrument for our purpose. The ultimate differences among philosophers hitherto are to be sought in Metaphysics proper. It is in the views they take of certain metaphysical questions that philosophers, first of all, or most essentially of all, part company. But Metaphysics is a terrible bugbear of a word in these days. You know the popular definition : When A talks to B, and B does not know what A is RECENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. 2 r saying, and A himself does not very well know either, but both B and A keep up the pretence and nod to each other wisely through the fog that is Metaphysics. We are all dearly in love with the Physics ; but we cannot abide the Meta prefixed to them. Perhaps it is a pity. There are some who would not object to see the beautiful Greek word dancing out again in its clear pristine mean- ing, and naming thoughts and objects of thought which must be eternal everywhere whether there is a name for them or not, but which it is an obstruction and beggarli- ness of spirit not to be able to name. We need not go farther than Shakespeare for our warrant : ' ' The golden round Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To have thee crowned withal." Surely a word that Shakespeare used, and used so exactly and lightly, need not ever be un-English. But there is no use in rowing against the stream; and, till there is a restitution of the word Metaphysics to its English estates, perhaps it is best to get on as much as possible without it. I will try to do so at present. And yet I do not know that you will thank me, or think I have hit on any great improvement as respects perspicuity, when you hear what I propose to substitute. I believe, then, that the differences among philosophers hitherto may be resolved ultimately into (i) a difference of Psychological Theory, accompanied by (2) certain differences of Cosmological Conception, all subject to or ending in (3) a difference in respect of Ontological Faith. Here are three phrases, each more uncouth, it must seem at present, than the 22 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. single term " Metaphysics," whose meaning I distribute among them. But I will do my best to explain each, and, in doing so, to make the reason for such a triplicity of terms apparent. I. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE. All that we know comes to us in what we call mind or consciousness. We may differ as to what mind is as to the origin of this strange thing, or power, or organism, or mode of existence, which we call Consciousness, and as to the gradations in which it ' may be found actually appearing up to Man, or may be imagined as ascending beyond Man. Nay, w r e may differ even as to the ultimate scientific necessity of that distinction between Mind and Matter, Soul and Body, which has come down sanctioned by immemorial usage, and pervades all our language. But we all talk of Mind ; nor, with whatever reserve of liberty to speculate what it is, or how it came to be, can we do otherwise. Nothing is known to us except in and through mind. It is in this Conscious- ness, which each of us carries about with him, and which, be it or be it not the dissoluble result of bodily organization, is thought of by all of us not under any image suggested by that organization, but rather as a great chamber or aerial transparency, without roof, without walls, without bounds, and yet somehow enclosed within us, and belonging to us it is within this chamber that all presents itself that we can know or think about. Except by coming within this chamber,. or revealing itself there, nothing can be known. Whatever may exist, only as much as can break through into this sphere, or send a glimmering of itself into it,' exists for our RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 23 intelligence. From the farthest ends of space, from the remotest moment of time, whatever fact, object, or event would be known by me as happening or existing, or as having ever happened or existed, can be so only by having itself announced, somehow or other, within this present room or chamber which I call my Mind. That comets are at this moment pursuing their curves at mighty distances unseen from Qur Earth ; that there was a period when the Earth was a cooling mass of hot matter not yet habitable by organisms known to us ; that there came a later period when it was possessed by strange saurians and other animal forms now extinct ; that there once lived a Julius Caesar ; that the Earth is a spheroid ; that there is an Australian Continent for any of these conceptions or beliefs my sole warrant lies in corresponding facts of my own consciousness. The Universe, past, present, and to come, rolls into my ken only through my mind. On this ground of Consciousness, then, as the repository, storehouse, or conventicle of all knowledge, all philosophers take their stand even those who end by explaining Consciousness itself as a temporary result or peculiarly exquisite juncture of the conditions which it employs itself in recalling and unravelling. So far there is no difference among philosophers, no division into schools. Should any one attempt to set up as a philosopher on any other ground, it could only be because he did not under- stand the use of terms. But let us advance a step. What is the origin of all those multitudinous ideas, notions, or informations, which flutter through our Consciousness which rise there, at our bidding or without our bidding, in all sorts of combinations, and out of which we construct our knowledge or beliefs as to what 24 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. has been, or is, or is to be ? Whence come the ideas into our minds that we find there, and that constitute our intel- lectual stock? Is any portion of our knowledge of a ../ different origin from the rest, and of a different degree of validity in consequence of that different origin? On this question there has been a polar antagonism among philoso- phers since there were philosophers in the world. In nothing have philosophers, in nothing have men at large, differed so essentially as in the answers they have given, knowingly or implicitly, to this question. Here is that difference of Psychological theory wherein, as T have said, we must look for the first split among philosophers, and the explanation of further discrepancies. The history of Philo- sophy hitherto has been mainly a struggle, varying in form from age. to age, but not in substance, between two radically opposed psychological theories. According to one school or series of philosophers hitherto, all our knowledge, all our notions, all our beliefs, are derived solely from Experience. There is a streaming into our minds, through the senses, of multiform impressions from the external world, which are combined within the mind by laws of association, and are discriminated, classified, analysed, recollected, grouped, and what not, till they form the entire miscellany of our facts, cognitions, and habits, and even our highest principles, propositions, axioms, and general- izations. All that is in Man all that he calls truth (let it be even mathematical truth, or his highest notions of right and wrong, or any ideas he may have of beauty, or noble- ness, or even Deity) is but a deposit or induction from the circumstances in which Man is placed. Had these condi- tions been different, the deposit would have been different. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPH\C> ' 2^ \v _ .j All truth, therefore, is contingent or historically arrived at. There is no such thing as innate or a priori truth, or dii to truth ; and any higher certainty that some truths may possess over others is but the consequence of a wider, more perfect, and more frequently repeated induction. Such, more or less clearly recognised, avowed, and argued from, has been the theory of one school or series of thinkers since Philosophy began. It is usually called the Empirical theory, or the theory of Sensationalism. The former name (though it unfortunately has reproachful associations) is only intended to imply what the philosophers in question avow when they say that they own no other origin of our know- ledge than Experience ; and the latter name only expresses what has also been admitted by the most thorough of these philosophers to wit, that the assertion that all our know- ledge originates in experience is tantamount to the assertion that it all comes into the mind through the channels of the senses. " Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu" ("Nothing is in the intellect which has not before been in the senses ") is the formula of this class of philoso- phers, propounded by some of themselves, and adopted by others in describing them. Another of their phrases is that the mind is to be conceived as originally a tabula rasa, or white paper, containing no characters whatever, but receiving whatever is inscribed upon it wholly from without* To this view, however, there has been, on the part of * The objection to the word Sensationalism, as defining the theory of the resolvability of all Truth, or Knowledge, or Faculty, into Experience, is that some who hold the theory would repudiate such a name for it. The objection to the name Empiricism is that it imports mere popular prejudice into a philosophical question, by calling up 2 6 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. other philosophers, a continued opposition. There have always been philosophers who maintained that there is another source of our knowledge than Experience or Sense that there are notions, principles, or elements in our minds which could never have been fabricated out of any amount of experience, but must have been bedded in the very structure of the mind itself. These are necessary beliefs, d priori notions, innate ideas, constitutional forms of thought, truths which we cannot but think. " Yet hath the soul a dowry natural, And sparks of light some common things to see, Not being a blank where nought is writ at all, But what the writer will may written be. " For nature in Man's Heart her laws doth pen, Prescribing Truth to Wit, and Good to Will ; Which do accuse, or else excuse, all men For every thought or practice good or ill. "And yet these sparks grow almost infinite, Making the world and all therein their food, As fire so spreads as no place holdeth it, Being nourished still with new supplies of wood. " * There have been various forms of this doctrine, some of them confused and mystical enough. But amid all the diversities there is recognisable -a common pyschological theory, contradictory of that of Sensationalism. It is known associations with the word "Empiric " as used in an opprobrious sense. As Mr. Mill has used the adjective " Experiential " as unexceptionably conveying the meaning for which a word is sought (Article on Comte in Westminster Review, April, -1865), perhaps the substantive Experieii- tialism, though crude to the ear, might be brought into use. * Sir John Davies's Poem " On the Soul," written in 1592. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 27 as the theory of a priori ideas, necessary beliefs, or latterly as the' theory of Intuitionalism or Transcendentalism. By this last name is implied the supposition that there are elements of knowledge the origin or reason of which transcends or lies beyond the horizon of historical condi- tions. Discerned in the ancient world in the form of Aristotel- ianism versus Platonism, traceable through the middle ages in the controversy between the Nominalists and the Realists, this opposition of philosophies has been bequeathed into our modern times, and has represented itself in Britain as well as in other countries. It is difficult to determine certainly, as regards BACON (1561 1626), on which side he would have ranged himself. He rather abstained from grappling with the question at all, as too recondite for his purposes, and preferred going out with his whole strength on the exposition of a method in which either set of thinkers might find satisfaction. Yet the general tenor of Bacon's writings leaves an impression as if he had given a splendid impulse to Empiricism, and tried to commit the British nation to a contented futurity in that faith. Among Bacon's British contemporaries, however, there were not wanting respectable defenders of the other psychological theory. And if, on coming on to the next generation, we find, in the powerful figure of HOBBES (1588 1679), an undoubted and avowed champion of Em- piricism in its most pronounced form, it is only to see around him resolute maintainers of the contrary philosophy in such men as SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605 1682), HENRY MORE (1614 1687), CUDWORTH (1617 1688), and the Cambridge Platonists. But then there arose LOCKE (1632 28 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 1704) the " Father of English philosophy," as he has so generally been called. He certainly did pledge his nation, if any man could do such a thing, to a futurity that should reject from its philosophic faith every rag or vestige of the doctrine of innate ideas. He is indeed hazy in his language whenever he seeks to define what he means by his cardinal principle that all our ideas originate in experience hazier, considerably, even than Hobbes had been. For he seems to avoid or deny the conclusion that this would leave but one ultimate original of our knowledge to wit, sensations of external objects -, and he expressly constitutes another source of knowledge under the name of " Reflection," the ' Internal Sense," or the cognisance which the mind has of its own proceedings. But critics of his language on this point have shown, I think, that it can have no meaning unless it implies a surrender of Locke's own principle. By self-consciousness, or the mind's reflection on its own pro- ceedings, the mind certainly knows of these proceedings but the very question is, whence these proceedings proceed. The mere knowledge of the proceedings, if this is all that Locke means by " Reflection," cannot be a source, in the first instance, of any part of the proceedings. If material is once brought into the mind, the mind may keep a register of what it does with such material ; but this mere keeping of the register cannot be spoken of as an independent source of any of the material. In short, though it may be against Locke's will, his Empiricism cannot stop short of Sensation- alism, and this has been seen and avowed by his most con- sistent disciples. " The mind is a blank organism, receiving sensations from without, and knowing and registering what it does with them " in some such form as this must the RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. radical proposition of Locke's philosophy be expressed; and, if the phrase " blank organism " be unintelligible, it can only be, I apprehend, because the radical proposition of the Empirical philosophy, as hitherto propounded, is really un- thinkable. If knowledge is worked-up sensation, then quite as important a constituent of knowledge as the aggregate of sensation that has been worked up is the mode in which it has been worked up ; and this refers us to the structure of the working-up machine, or mind itself, as having contributed its pressure to the result. Little wonder, then, that, notwithstanding the power with which Locke's philosophy has transmitted itself in England a power so great that Lockism and its developments have been recognised abroad as peculiarly the English philosophy it has never been without assailants in Eng- land itself. "The question in dispute could not," as Mr. Mill well says, "so long have remained a question, if the more obvious arguments on either side had been unanswerable." * CLARKE (1675 1729) and BUTLER (1692 1753) were English representatives of the a priori philosophy, contemporary with Locke, or near his time. Abroad, in DESCARTES (1596 1650), in SPINOZA (1632 1677), and in MALEBRANCHE (1638 1715), there had been more systematic and illustrious maintainers of the principle of such a philosophy; and their influence had not been unknown in Britain. But what was considered the staggering blow to the Lockian philosophy for the time came from the German LEIBNITZ (1646 1714). " Nihil est intellects quod non priiis fuerit in sensu" was his famous retort upon the maxim of the Sensationalists,, * Essay on Coleridge, 1840, reprinted in Mill's Dissertations. - o RE CENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. " nisi intellect-its ipse" : "Nothing is in the intellect which has not before been in the senses unless it be the in- tellect itself." This epigram of Leibnitz has been ridiculed as meaningless ; but it seems to me to have been, in its time, one of the most perfect aphorisms ever uttered. At all events, it denned with surprising exactness the work that remained to be accomplished by another German, and a greater than Leibnitz, if the world were not to be given over to Lockism and to what Lockism might lead to. In Britain there had arisen a beautiful-minded BERKELEY (1684 1743), who, accepting the notion that the sole furnishing of the mind consists of sensations, but alarmed at certain consequences which he saw, or foresaw, from the prevalent use of that notion, sought to set matters right by denying that the mind had any right to pursue its sensations beyond its own walls, or to attribute them to any real external world of matter. What I am conscious of, all that I really know of, is sensation /;/ my mind, and not any external material world beyond my mind ; and if you, for your part, adopt the gross and purely gratuitous supposition of such a world, I feel myself both far more faithful to experience and in possession of a creed far more glorious and solacing when I reject all your external ma- terial world all your hills, and seas, and trees, and stones, and stars as anything more than existences or motions in some mind or minds ! Not that these images, so dear to all of us, are meaningless ! What if they are possessed so familiarly by all of us in common, and occur over and over again with such constant regularity, only because they are hieroglyphic and sacramental of the one unseen Spirit RECENT BRITISH PHIL O SO PHY. 3 r and Father of all, ceaselessly communicating His nature and will to His creatures in such well-chosen and sufficient symbols? But hardly had Berkeley thus made his asser- tion of Mind or Thought as the only legitimately-conceivable reality in the Universe when there came a HUME (1711 1776), with his simple ruthlessness, to show that, on the principles of philosophic reason, even this reality must vanish from the universe, and not a rack be left to float in the void. This succession of ideas, which is called Mind, and which is all that is really known, has //, when you investigate sufficiently, any substratum of real con- tinuous being? Is not Mind, too, if you come to that, ' a hypothesis beyond the facts? Is there any certainty, any substantiality at all, anything but an illusive series of phantasms flitting in a vague nothingness of Time and Space ? Doubt had in Hume reached its extreme limits. Far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but desolation, or at - the utmost a phantasmagory of merely empirical co-existences and successions floating over a pit of Nonentity. Aghast at this result of philosophy, radical thinkers everywhere set themselves, as by a common impulse, to a re-examination of that psychological theory of Empiricism itself to which, it was generally seen, the result was to be credited. On Locke's theory of Experience as the one ultimate origin or reason of knowledge, no answer to Hume seemed pos- sibly forthcoming ; all the possibilities in that direction seemed to have been exhausted and evaporated by Hume's criticism. If there was to be a rebuilding at all of any edifice of human certainty on the desolated space which Hume had swept, it could only be on a foundation laid 32 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPIIY. afresh in some form of the psychological theory opposed to Locke's the theory of necessary beliefs, or a priori constituents of knowledge. That is what makes Hume's name so great, and his epoch so important, in the history of European philosophy that, having exhibited one of the two competing psychological theories in its uttermost developments, and these such as the soul could not abide in, he occasioned everywhere a disposition to revert to the other theory and take it on trial. In Hume's own country, while his philosophy was yet flowing fresh and cold from the fountain-head, REID, who was his senior by a year (1710 1796), but whose philo- sophical activity was first called forth by him, oifered that sober, and, if not subtle, yet rich and grave " Philosophy of Common Sense," the essential character of which was that it fell back on a supposed equipment of necessary beliefs or elements of knowledge, given in the very structure of the mind itself, and not historically or empirically col- lected. Reid left his foundation of necessary beliefs in a somewhat chaotic and questionable state ; but he at least established in North Britain, while Hume was alive or well remembered, a philosophy of some sort, that might witness to the possibility of a theory of necessary beliefs against the persevering Lockism of South Britain. For, in England, the Empirical Philosophy of Locke, either ignoring its seeming self-explosions in the developments given it by Berkeley and Hume, or else voting these seeming self-explosions to be no self-explosions at all, but only blazes of irrelevant metaphysics kindled on the road by a fantastical Irishman and a dialectical Scotchman, but not interrupting the road anything to speak of for RECENT BRITISH PHIL SOPHY. 3 3 practical purposes in England, I say, Locke's philosophy had been persevering triumphantly as if nothing were the matter. HARTLEY (1705 1757), ABRAHAM TUCKER (1705 1774), PRIESTLEY (17331804), and PALEY (1743 1805), were all Lockians differing among themselves, it is true, and not thinking Locke's views by any means final, but accepting his main principle as intact by anything that had happened, and acting on it in their different ways. Nay, there was a waft into England of a more thorough- going Sensationalism than it might have been able to ex- cogitate for itself out of Locke. This was that philosophy of the French CONDILLAC (1715 1780) which some regard as only Lockism compelled to know itself, and which, boldly reducing the mind to the single function of animal sensibility, declared all knowledge, all habit, all faculty, all belief, to be but " transformed sensation." With but Reid's sober bequest of a so-called Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense to antagonize all this mass of English and imported Sensationalism, what was Great Britain to do? The help which British Transcendentalism, left at such odds, was calling for, was to come to it from without was to come to it from that quarter from which the entire Europe of the eighteenth century was to derive its intellectual refreshing. Now it was that there arose that fellow-countryman of Leibnitz who was to remember / his famous aphorism against Locke, "nisi intellectus ipse" and was to give it a significance and explication still wider in the world. The Critical Philosophy of KANT (1724 1804) has been spoken of as that one event of modern times which is comparable for the dimensions of its spiritual effects to 3 4 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. the French Revolution in the political order of things. Of what Kant did all have now some general idea. Feeling, as Reid had done, that the inanity into which Hume had dissolved everything was a dreariness which the human soul could not sustain, he addressed himself to the same task as Reid, but by a different method, in an atmosphere freer from prejudice, and with a profounder reach of spirit. The result was that he reported the mind to be no mere blank organism, receiving sensations and registering its own proceedings with them (even were such a representation thinkable in its very terms), and no mere concretion of transformed sensations round a still-active centre of mere sensibility, but an organism of very definite powers and structure, flung from a fathomless unknown into the world of sensible and historical conditions, and seizing and interpreting these conditions according to " forms" native to itself and of a priori origin. Sensibility itself had its forms Space and Time not being external existences, but structural habits of the perceiving mind : the Understanding proper had its forms certain modes in which, and in which alone, it could think of things ; nay, a-top of the Understanding, or forming its supreme part, was a certain highest faculty, which might be called Reason, having a structural relation to three boundless, unknowable, and yet necessarily-asserted objects the World, the Soul, and God. But, if Kant thus substan- tially reasserted the theory of Transcendentalism against that of Empiricism, he did so in a way that set aside much of the previous philosophizing of the Transcen- dentalists, and prescribed to Transcendentalism in future a more modest behaviour. By his very use of the phrase RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 35 " necessary forms of thought/' as at least an alternative for the phrase "innate ideas!' till then generally in use, he removed a stumbling-block. He thus brought into clearer view the essential assertion of Transcendentalism to wit, that the structure or a priori capability of the organism, called Mind, which works up the material given in sensation, has at least as much to do with the worked-up result, called Knowledge, as the material itself. But, by the same means, he disowned and cleared away the numerous theosophic and metaphysical systems which previous Transcendentalists had offered to a disgusted world in the name of Transcendentalism systems which had, in many cases, consisted in first asserting the prin- ciple of "innate ideas," and then offering as an authentic col- lection of these "innate ideas" some set of very definite and locally-elaborated propositions of some small particular person. This two-edged character of Kant's Philosophy has been sympathizingly remarked upon by a British expositor. "The result of Kant's Critical Philosophy," he says, "was that, against the Sceptics, a whole system " of knowledge, underived from experience, was proved " to exist in the mind, and that, against the Dogmatists, " this knowledge was declared to give no hold, at least " so far as speculation is concerned, over the nature of "things, or metaphysical truth. The Kantian Philosophy " thus substitutes for positive Metaphysics a criticism of " pure Reason, explaining why there can be none, and "at the same time vindicates those elements of knowledge " that beget metaphysical inquiry from sceptical rejection "and contempt."* But no man can be final in this * Dr. Cairns : Art. Kant, Encyc. Britannica : 8th edit. 3 6 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. world; and the German followers of Kant proceeded less on the restricting lesson of his teaching than he would perhaps have wished. FICHTE (1762 1814) and SCHEL- LING (1775 1854), not to speak of HEGEL (1770 1831), went on certainly into varieties of a tolerably positive Metaphysics in the name of Transcendentalism, though of kinds that would never have existed but for Kant, and that referred themselves to Kant ; and it is the aggregate of their speculations and those of others, along with Kant's, that we think of now as the German Philosophy. This Philosophy had been long in progress before any influence from it was felt within our islands. Such easier native philosophizing as lay in the continuation and further development of the hereditary Lockism of England, partially antagonized by the Scottish Philosophy of Reid, had sufficed for British purposes. Surviving Priestley and Paley as a universally recognised representative of British Empiricism, though a representative of novel and unique figure, was BENTHAM (1749 1834) ; beside whom, with more of the keen faculty of the pure psychologist, appeared JAMES MILL (1773 1836). Admired and respected through the island, on the other hand, as the classic expositor of Reid's homely Scottish Philosophy in its own - territory, was DUGALD STEWART (1753 1828); the brilliant aberration from whom of his pupil THOMAS BROWN (1778 1820) was compensated by the greater, though eclectic, con- * sistency of MACKINTOSH (1765 1832). On the whole, though the meeting of the two opposed tides was visible, it was rather in a kind of would-be commingling than in any very violent conflict: and, but for the appearance of one spokesman for Transcendentalism, of a richer genius RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 37 constitutionally than the thinkers of the Scottish School, and in secret correspondence with that new German Philo- sophy of which they knew little or nothing. Benthamism in Britain would have had no adequate counteractive. This was COLERIDGE (1772 1834), whose philosophical function may be defined by saying that through him there was transmitted an opportune suffusion of Kant and Schel- ling into England, as of light softened through a stained- glass medium, and that into this suffusion he also resumed whatever of Anglo-Platonism had been floating, long neglected, in the works of old English Divines. 'At the back of Coleridge, however, in all this, if one looked rightly, was to be seen, abetting him in the main, if criticising him in particulars, the massive personality of WORDSWORTH. II. COSMOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES. Thus have I traced down, to the exact point of its connexion with the British present, that struggle of the two opposed Psychological Theories in which, in Britain as in every other country, so much of the essence of the history of Philosophy is involved. Let us now attend to that second difference, or set of differences, among philosophers which I described as a difference or differences of Cosmological Conception. Not the less because the view which I want here to bring out is susceptible of popular exposition, and may be invested with popular associations, am I disposed to set some store by it. By " cosmological conception" I do, in effect, mean 3 8 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. very much that general image of the totality of things which each one carries about with him, and which is sometimes spoken of more grandly as his " theory of the universe." The beauty of the thing for our purposes is that every one has it. A " psychological theory" is a learned luxury, which the immense majority of people may go from their cradles to their graves without consciously possessing; but every one has a " cosmological conception," though he may not be aware of it under that pedantic-looking name. Yon cottager who spins at her own door has her "cosmological conception," her working-image of the world she lives in. There is a past of mystery, all opaque beyond her own immediate memory or the traditions of her kith and kin, save where the Bible lights up a gleaming islet or two in the distant gloom; there is a present of toil and care, not without help from on high; and, a little way on, the hour is thought of when body and soul shall be severed the one to its rest under the churchyard-grass, the other to that heaven above the stars where loved ones that have gone before will mayhap be seen again : " We'll meet and aye be fain In the land o' the leal." And, from the cottager upwards, we have endless variations of the cosmological conception, according to character and knowledge, and yet with wondrously little difference in the main. Not that the variations are without significance. That image of the totality of things which any one carries about with him, and under RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 39 the power of which he is continually living and acting, is, all-in-all, the most comprehensive expression of his whole being and its acquisitions. It embodies more of himself than his utmost reason, however trained it may be, can reduce into thesis or proposition. For everything in him goes to make it the very feelings, and longings, and last impressions or inspirations, which his reason has not yet organized j it is tremulous to every touch of new fact, or reading, or meditation. The " cosmological conception" of any man, his sensuous image of the world, would be, if we could get at it, the truest abstract or representation of his whole mind or philosophy. It is to be expected, in the case of philosophers, that the cosmological conception shall be visibly in accord with the psychological theory. This, however, has not always happened. The history of philosophy presents curious instances in which the cosmological conception of a philosopher has seemed to be grander than his set of avowed principles ; or, on the other hand, the propagand- ist of propositions of glorious capability has been seen dwelling personally in a cosmological conception little better than a hut. Hence, in the case of any philosopher, the necessity of taking account, if possible, of his cosmological conception as well as of his psychological theory ; and hence, again, the necessity of having at least some general classification of the cosmological conceptions that have prevailed among philosophers, wherewith to supplement or correct our mere distribution of them, on the grounds of psychological theory, into the two schools of Transcendentalists and Empiricists. A classification of systems of philosophy according to 40 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. the cosmological conceptions governing them has actually been made. It is founded on a consideration of the differences among philosophers as to what that totality of existence is which is to be accepted as really vouched for by Mind. All agree, as we have said, that Mind is the sole voucher for anything ; but philosophers are divisible into schools according to the various views they have taken of the constitution of that phenomenal Universe, that Cosmos, that total round of things, of which we have a recurring assurance in every act of perception, and which is orbed forth more or less fully for each man in his wider contemplations. The popular or habitual conception of mankind in general is that there are two distinct worlds mixed up in the phaenomenal Cosmos a world of Mind, consisting of multitudes of individual minds, and a world of Matter, consisting of all the extended immensity and variety of material objects. Neither of these worlds is thought of as begotten of the other, but each of them as existing independently in its own proper nature and within its own definite bounds, though they traffic with each other at present. Sweep away all existing minds, and the deserted Earth would continue to spin round all the same, still whirling its rocks, trees, clouds, and all the rest of its material pomp and garniture, alternately in the sunshine and in the depths of the starry stillness. Though no eye should behold and no ear should hear, there would be evenings of silver moonlight on the ocean-marge, and the waves would roar as they broke and retired. On the other hand, suppose the entire fabric of the material Universe abolished and dissolved, and the dishoused ^PL , ^ ^^ RECENT BRITISH PHILdSOPH&*>\ ttyf 41 population of spirits would still somehow sun imaginable vacancy. If this second notion is not or common as the first, it still virtually belongs to the popular conception of the contents or constitution of the Cosmos. The conception is that of a Natural Dualism, or of the contact in every act or perception of two distinct spheres, one an internal perceiving mind, and the other an external world composed of the actual and identical objects which this mind perceives. On the first exercise of philosophic thought, however, this conception is blurred. An immense quantity of what we all instinctively think of as really existing out of our- selves turns out, on investigation, not to exist at all as we fancy it existing, but to consist only of affections of the perceiving mind. The redness of the rose is not a real external thing, immutably the same in itself; it is only a certain peculiar action on my physiology which the presence of an external cause or object seems to deter- mine. Were my physiology different, the action would be different, though the cause or object remained the same. Indeed, there are persons in whom the presence of a rose occasions no sensation of redness such as is known to me, but a much vaguer sensation, not distin- guishable from what I should at once distinguish as greenness. And, as colour is thus at once detected as no external independently-existing reality, but only a recur- ring physiological affection of myself and other sentient beings like myself, so with a thousand other things which, by habit or instinct, I suppose as externally and inde- pendently existing. When I imagine the depopulated 4 2 RECENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. ^ Earth still wheeling its inanimate rotundity through the daily sunshine and the nocturnal shadow, or one of its bays still resonant in moonlit evenings with the ro'ar of the breaking waves, it is because, in spite of myself, I \ intrude into the fancy the supposition of a listening ear and a beholding eye analogous to my own. It is only by a strong effort that I can realize that a great deal at least of what I thus think of as the goings-on of things by themselves is not and cannot be their goings-on by them- selves, but consists at the utmost of effects interbred between them and a particular sentiency in the midst of them. But the effort may be made ; and, when it is made repeatedly, in a great many directions, and with reference to a great many of the so-called properties of matter, the inevitable result for the philosophic mind is that the popularly-imagined substance of a real external world finds itself eaten away or corroded, at least to a certain depth. So far philosophers are agreed. It is when they proceed to consider to what depth the popularly-imagined substance of the real external world is thus eaten away, or accounted for, that they begin to differ. Some philosophers, departing as little as may be from the popular judgment, suppose that, however much of the appa- rent external world may be resolved into affections of the subjective sentiency, there still remains an objective residue v of such primary qualities as extension, figure, divisibility, mobility, &c., belonging to external matter itself, and by the direct and immediate cognisance of which the mind is brought face to face with external substance and knows something of its real goings-on. Philosophers of this school are known RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 43 generally as REALISTS. More numerous, however, are those who, not allowing an objective and independent reality even to the so-called primary qualities of matter, but believing them, as well as colour, odour, or savour, to be only affections of the sentiency, deny that the mind is in any sense brought face to face with real external things such as they seem in the act of perception. To thinkers of this school there has been given the general name of IDEALISTS. This broad distinction of Philosophers cosmologically into REALISTS and IDEALISTS is so far convenient enough. Cosmologically, or in respect of this present Universe of ours, with its dualism of Mind and Matter, every man must declare himself either a Realist or an Idealist, if he understands the meanings attached to these terms. The distinction has reference solely to this notion of the so-called external or material world in its rela- tions to the perceiving mind. If he abides, though only in part, by the popular conception, and regards the material world as a substantial reality independent of the perceiving mind, and which the mind, according to its powers, presses against and directly apprehends in every act of perception, then he is a REALIST. If, on the other hand, he cannot see that there need be asserted any external material world with such characters as we attribute to it, but supposes that our unanimous agreement in the imagination of such an ex- / ternal world is merely a habit of our own sentiency, projecting its ideas or affections outwards and giving them a body, then he is an IDEALIST. The mere distribution of Philosophers, however, into the two great orders of REALISTS and IDEALISTS does not answer all the historical requirements. Each order has been subdi- vided, still on cosmological grounds, into two sections- 44 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. Among Realists, the Materialists or Materialistic Realists have been distinguished strongly from the Dualistic Realists, called also Natural Realists. Similarly, among Idealists there has been a large group of what may be called Constructive Idealists, distinguishable from the Pure Idealists. But this is not all. Not only by this subdivision of each of the orders, still on cosmological grounds, into two sects, are we provided with the four sects of Materialists, Natural Realists, Constructive Idealists, and Pure Idealists ; but (by bringing considerations into the classification which, I think, are not exclusively cosmological) these four sects have been flanked by two extreme sects, called respectively Nihilists and Pantheists. The doctrine of these last is called also, in recent philosophical language, the doctrine of Absolute Identity. Thus six systems in all, professedly cosmological, have figured in the past history of Philosophy. Let us re-enume- rate them in the arrangement which will be most convenient for us in the sequel, adding such further explanations as seem necessary. (i.) There is the system of Nihilism, or, as it may be better called, Non-Substantialism. According to this system, the Phsenomenal Cosmos, whether regarded as consisting of two parallel successions of phenomena (Mind and Matter), or of only one (Mind or Matter), resolves itself, on analysis, into an absolute Nothingness mere appearances with no credible * substratum of Reality ; a play of phantasms in a void. If there have been no positive or dogmatic Nihilists, yet both N Hume for one purpose, and Fichte for another, have pro- pounded Nihilism as the ultimate issue of all reasoning that does not start with some a priori postulate. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY, 45 (2.) There is the system of Materialism or Materialistic Realism. According to this system, a certain sum-total of real existence is assumed as underlying the conscious succes- sion of ideas, but the seeming dualism or co-ordinate inde- pendence of two worlds, one of. Mind and the other of ^ Matter, is got rid of by supposing Matter to be the primor- dial unity, and Mind to be, or to have been, educed from it. There have been avowed Materialists among Philosophers, of whom Hobbes is an early English example. But many have been called Materialists who have really not been such; nor, if we consider the contradictory varieties of thought which may exist within one apparent drift of speculation, ought the name, while odium attaches to it, ever to be ap- plied to any one without his own permission. (3.) There is the system of Natural Realism or Natural Dualism. According to this system, while Mind or Spirit is regarded as an undoubtedly real essence, or substance, or energy of one origin and nature, the extended Material World in the midst of which this Mind or Spirit seems to find itself, and with which it seems to have commerce, is also assumed as a distinct reality, and not as a distinct reality of some highly-removed sort, acting, upon us illusively through mediate signs and impulses, but as actually very much that solid and substantial world which we get at through our senses. There have been varieties, however, cruder and finer, of this Natural Realism. What do mankind in general believe ? They believe that the material world is exactly and in every respect the world which our senses report to us as external to ourselves. They believe that the rocks, the hills, the trees, the stars, that we all see, are not mere hieroglyphics of a something. 4 6 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. different from themselves and from us, but are really what is there. That outer vastness of space in which orbs are shining and wheeling is no mere representation or visionary allegory of something ; it is the thing itself. This is, and Always has been, the popular belief of mankind in general. All mankind may therefore be described, generally, as Natural Realists. But, strange to say, Natural Realism has been the system of but one or two modern philosophers among whom Reid is named as a type. Nay, more, among these philosophers it is not the popular form of the belief that is entertained. Mankind in general suppose sweetness, shrillness, colour, &c., to be qualities inherently belonging to the objects to which they are attributed, while the philosophers who are Natural Realists admit that at least these so-called "secondary qualities" of objects have no proper outness, but are only physiological affections affections of the organs of taste, hearing, sight, &c., pro- duced by particular objects. Thus the Natural Realism of philosophers is itself a considerable remove from the Natural Realism of the crude popular belief. It does not, with the crude popular belief, call the whole apparent external world of sights, sounds, tastes, tacts, and odours the real world that would be there whether man were there or not; but it descries in that apparent world a block or core, if I may say so, which would have to be thought of as really existing, even if there were swept away all that consists in our rich physiological interactions with it. (4.) There is the system of Constructive Idealism. It may be so called to distinguish it from the more developed and extreme Idealism presently to be spoken of. According ^ to this system, we do not perceive the real external world RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 47 immediately, but only mediately : that is, the objects which we take as the things actually perceived are not the real objects at all, but only vicarious assurances, representatives, ornuntii of real unknown objects. The hills, the rocks, the trees, the stars, all the choir of heaven and earth, are not, in any of their qualities, primary, secondary, or whatever we choose to call them, the actual existences out of us, but only the addresses of a " something," to our physiology, or educ- tions by our physiology out of a " something." They are all Thoughts or Ideas, with only this peculiarity involved in them, that they will not rest in themselves, but compel a reference to objects out of self, with which, by some arrangement or other, they stand in relation. Difficult as this system may be to understand, and violently as it wrenches the popular common sense, it is yet the system into which the great majority of philosophers in all ages and countries hitherto are seen, more or less distinctly, to have been carried by their speculations. While the Natural Realists among philosophers have been very few, and even these have been Realists in a sense unintelligible to the popular mind, quite a host of philosophers have been Con- structive Idealists. These might be farther subdivided according to particular variations in the form of their Idealism. Thus, there have been many Constructive Idealists who have regarded the objects rising to the mind in external perception, and taken to be representative of real unknown objects, as something more than modifica- tions of the mind itself as having their origin without. Among these have been reckoned Malebranche, Berkeley, Clarke, Sir Isaac Newton, Tucker, and possibly Locke. But there have been other Constructive Idealists, who have 48 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. supposed the objects rising in the mind in external percep- y tion to be only modifications of the mind itself, but yet, by some arrangement, vicarious of real unknown objects, and intimating their existence. Among such have been reckoned Descartes, Leibnitz, Condillac, Kant, and most Platonists. The general name "Idealists," it will be seen, properly enough includes both the classes as distinct from the Natural Realists, inasmuch as both classes hold that what the mind is directly cognisant of in external perception is only ideas. But, inasmuch as these ideas are held by both classes, though under divers hypotheses, to refer to real existences beyond themselves, and distinct from the per- ceiving mind, the thinkers in question may also properly enough be called Realists or Dualists, though not "Natural" Realists or Dualists. They occupy a midway place between the Natural Realists and the philosophers next to be men- tioned. (5.) There is the system of Pure Idealism, which abolishes ^ Matter as a distinct or independent existence in any sense, and resolves it completely into Mind. Though this system is named in the scheme, for the sake of symmetry, and as the exact antithesis to Materialism, it is difficult to cite representatives that could be certainly discriminated from the merely Constructive Idealists just mentioned on the one hand, and from the school of philosophers next following on the other. Fichte is, perhaps, the purest example. (6.) There is the system of Absolute Identity. According to this system, Mind and Matter are phenomenal modifica- tions of one common Substance. The whole Cosmos, both of Matter and of Mind, is referred to a one Absolute Entity, of which it is to be conceived as but the function, activity, RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. manifestation, or forthrushing. This system, it will be noted, is at the opposite extreme from Nihilism. It is the system of Spinoza, and also, though with a difference, of ' Schelling. In this classification of Philosophical Systems from one point of view, I have followed, with some liberty of rearrangement and change of expression, the best recent authority on the subject* Objections may be taken to the classification even in respect of what it was intended for ; nor, whatever may be its worth as respects the past, do I think that it provides, as it stands, a sufficient means of recognising and naming the various working cosmological conceptions now extant among philosophers, and of which it might be desirable to take account, f But it goes so far. It brings out, at all events, what I wished to bring out to wit, that we can have by no means an adequate collective view of the philosophers of our time, so long as we trust to - * Sir William Hamilton's Discussions (Articles " Philosophy of Perception" and "Idealism"); also his Lectures on Metaphysics (i. 293297); but particularly his Dissertations on Reid (748 749 and 816 819). In these portions of Sir William's writings his classifica- tion of Philosophical Systems from the point of view of the Doctrine of External Perception is turned over and over again in all sorts of ways, and with all sorts of side-lights. I have taken his authority for the facts, but have modified and re-arranged the classification to suit it to my purpose in the text. f For example, a very prevalent form of cosmological conception among thinkers of the present day is one which, if I am not mistaken, it would be difficult to assign to any one of the six systems enumerated. It is a compound of Materialism with Constructive Idealism. A very- large number of thinkers, if I am not mistaken, always think of Mind as bred out of Matter, and yet, when they study this Mind as perceiving and taking cognisance of that World of Matter out of which it has been bred, do not allow that it grasps the reality at all, but only that it D RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. a mere preliminary division of them, however accurate, into Empiricists and Transcendentalists. Behold what crossings and matchings, both of Empiricism and Trans- cendentalism, incalculable beforehand, in even the cosmo- logical classification so suggested to us ! Empiricists among the Idealists, side by side with Transcendentalists ! On the other hand, Transcendentalists in almost all the six classes, and even in those where we should expect only Empiricists! What if there should be such a thing even as a Transcen- dental Materialist, or a Materialistic Transcendentalist ? I am not concerned here with what ought to be possible or impossible in cosmological conception consistently with either of the two psychological theories. My statement is that a philosopher may have a working cosmological con- ception which could not be reconciled with his avowed psychological theory if he would think that theory consis- tently out, or respecting which, at all events, his opponents give him this assurance. In short, as there have been strange crossings and matchings of the psychological theories with the prevailing cosmological conceptions in the past, so there may be in the future. And what if we were still farther to complicate the intertexture by introducing, even at this point, the theological element? There have ''been Atheistic as well as Theistic Idealists; there have substitutes for the reality a hypothetical construction of its own affec- tions. Sentiency, they think, is the child of Matter, but has never beheld, nor can behold, the real face of its mother. Are there not also millions of forms and degrees of sentiency, from the lowest of living ' creatures up to man, each apprehending the world according to a differ- ent measure of capacity? Is the dog's world i.e. the construction of his own affections to which the dog attributes an external reality the same, even so far as it goes, as his master's ? RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 5 1 been Theistic as well as Atheistic Empiricists ; there are in the world some whom rough popular speech does not hesitate to describe as Transcendental Atheists; and, as there have been examples of what might be called Theistic Materialism in the past, what if something still describable by that name should exist somewhere at present, throwing stones both at Atheism and Pantheism ? III. THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE. Mind or Consciousness, whatever it may be, is that organism in the midst of all things through which all our knowledge of all things must come. Philosophers, there- fore, may make a study of that ; and they have done so under the name of Psychology. Round this organism, howsoever related to it, is the vast and varied Cosmos, or phaenomenal and historical Universe, which the organism reports to us as hung in Space and voyaging through Time. Philosophers may make a study of that ; and such a study would be Cosmology. But, beyond this whole phenomenal Universe or Cosmos which has the Mind of Man in its midst, it has been the passion of Philosophy to assert or speculate a transcendent Universe, or Empyrean of Things in Themselves, of Essential Causes, of Absolute or Noumenal, as distinct from Phaenomenal, Existence. What ' enspheres the Cosmos ; what supports it ; of what Absolute Reality underneath and beyond itself is it significant ; of what Absolute Meaning is it the expression, the allegory, the poem ? May not the entire Phaenomenal Cosmos, hung in Space and voyaging through Time, be but an illusion and this whether we consider it to be, within itself, a play of 5 2 RECENT BRITISH PHIL SOPHY. Matter alone, or of Spirit alone, or of both Matter and Spirit ? If we feel that it is not, on what warrant do we so feel ? In what tissues of facts and events, material or moral, in this phaenomenal Space-and-Time World shall we trace the likeliest filaments of that golden cord by which we then suppose it attached to a World not of Space and Time; and how shall we, denizens of Space and Time, succeed in throwing the end of the cord beyond our Space-and-Time World's limits ? Is the Cosmos a bubble ? Then, what breath has blown it, and into what Empyrean will it remelt when the separating film bursts? Asking these questions in all varieties of forms, Philosophy has debated the possibility of an Ontology, or science of things in themselves, in addition to a Psychology and a Cosmology. These two are sciences of the Phsenomenal, but that would be a science of the Absolute. It would be the highest Metaphysic of all, and, indeed, in one sense, the only science properly answering to that name. It would be the science of the Supernatural. Can there be such a science ? A question this which seems to break itself into two Is there a Supernatural ? and can the Supernatural be known ? It is the differences that have shown themselves among philosophers in their answers, express or implied, to these questions that I have in view under the name of their differences in respect of Ontological Faith. The Ontological difference is intertangled with the Psychological and Cosmological differences, and a dis- cussion of them always brings it into sight. Most probably, if matters were fully reasoned out, all the three sets of differences might be knit together, and it might be shown that adhesion to one of the two psychological theories RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 53 involved, in strict consistency, an obligation to a particular mode of cosmological conception, and that this again involved obligation to a particular form of ontological faith. But the minds even of philosophers, coming at separate times on questions which are really inter-related, do not always march up to them in the same state of feeling, but sometimes bring forces to the front in one case which remain in the background in others. Hence, just as it seemed impossible to infer with any precision from our knowledge of a philosopher's theory of the Origin of our Ideas in which of the six systems of conception as to the constitution of the Phenomenal Universe he might be found ranking himself, so neither from a philosopher's psychological theory nor from his cosmological system would it be safe, as things go, to infer his ontological faith. Take the first ontological question. Is there an Ab- solute, a Supernatural, or is the Phenomenal Universe all that exists? It might seem that only the Transcen- dentalist would be entitled to a strong affirmative to this question. His very theory of the Mind of Man, as an organism bringing with it into the Phaenomenal World ideas or structural forms of a priori origin, refers one, if it has any meaning, to a Supernatural World or Empyrean, out of which the Mind of Man is to be conceived as having proceeded, and from which it still carries recollec- tions, or shreds of affinity. From the Empiricist on the other hand it might seem that the only answer to be expected to the question is " I do not know, nor can any man know." As all knowledge, according to the Em- piricist, is the product of experience, and as there cannot have been and never can be experience of anything beyond 54 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. the bounds of Experience, the assertion of an Absolute or / Supernatural, save in the sense of "the yet unknown" or " all that nobody yet knows anything about," would seem to be incompetent to the Empiricist. And yet there have been most positive Theists and Theologians among the Empiricists firm and even dogmatic believers in an Ab- solute ; and there is nothing that such Theistic and Theological Empiricists have resented more than the assertion of Transcendentalists that their Theism was irreconcileable with their Empiricism, and that they had no right to leap to the conclusion of an Infinite Intelli- gence beyond the world, or in it, from the observation of ever so much of worldly watch-making. If thus, practically, the ontological creed of a philoso- pher, even in its first article, cannot be always inferred from his psychological theory, neither can it be safely inferred from the form of his cosmological conception. If any one could assert "There is no Absolute," surely it might be the Nihilist, who has analysed away both Matter and Thought, and attenuated the Cosmos into vapour and non-significance. Yet, from the abyss of a speculatively-reasoned Nihilism more void than Hume's, Fichte returned, by a convulsive act of soul which he termed faith an intense, a burning, a blazing Ontologist. A fortiori, the Materialist has not seen that he need deny an Absolute. Regarding the Cosmos, considered within itself, as wholly a development of Matter, he has not always thought himself debarred, any more than other people, from assuming an Absolute from which this Cosmos of developed matter may have its metaphysical tenure. For Natural Realists, again, and for either Constructive RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 55 Idealists or Pure Idealists, the belief in a Supernatural is obviously easy and congenial. Analysing the double series of phsenomena which he finds in the Cosmos, and coming in each case upon a substratum of ultimate reality- in the one upon a Thinking Substance constituted in such and such a manner, and in the other on an extended and resisting Substance of Matter diversely constituted the Natural Realist feels as if at both points he were actually grating on the rock of the Absolute. He feels himself at both points in contact with some immeasurable Real Existence, beyond all phsenomenal Nature, and yet deter- mining it and projected into it. With the Constructive Idealist it is the same, save that, as his notion of Matter is more impalpable and hypothetical than that of the Realist, his sense of contact with the Supernatural is concentrated rather in his notion of the necessity of a real noumenal origin for the grand phenomenon of Con- sciousness. In this, the Pure Idealist, for whom the Universe resolves itself wholly into this single phseno- menon, may well outdo his more' hesitating brother. All that is, was, or will be, in this Space-and-Time World is, according to the Pure Idealist, but the organized, con- solidated, and transmitted aggregate of the thoughts of the Minds within it. All the more, therefore, must that power of thinking which has involved itself in such a vast cocoon of wonders be itself conceived as originating in the fiat of some Absolute Cause. And yet, as, in the end, it is only a felt necessity or compulsion of thought that either Realists or Idealists can plead when they assert a Supernatural beyond the Phsenomenal, and as this feeling of necessity or compulsion is itself liable 5 6 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. to alternations of strength and weakness, both Realists and Idealists will be found to have wavered greatly in respect even of that first article of any ontological faith which would simply aver a Supernatural and stop there. Thus Shelley, the very principle of whose life and poetry was philosophical Idealism, seemed willing, throughout a great part of his life, not only to be thought of, but to think of himself, as an Atheist. And so it is quite con- ceivable that a Natural Realist, even when grappling the rock of an Absolute through his ultimate investigations of the two orders of cosmical phenomena whose distinctness he recognises, should have moments of doubt whether it is a rock he is grappling, or only an illusion. In short, only those whose interpretation of the Cosmos merges in a metaphysical doctrine of Absolute Identity would seem to have got hold of a cosinological principle which, in itself, and without aid from any act of the soul not allowed for by its own ' terms, would positively and continuously pre- suppose and assert a Supernatural. With them Nature is the Supernatural in one of its moments. The Cosmos does not swim in an Empyrean from which it is divided by any film, but is that very state or embodiment of the entire Empyrean which has been attained up to this instant. The Phenomenal is the life of the Absolute. It is when we pass, however, to the second question pro- pounded towards an Ontology that the interest grows most vivid. It being supposed that an Absolute exists, is any knowledge thereof possible to man? Here, of course, leaving out of sight all who would actually deny that there is an Absolute, and also all whose position in respect to that prior question is that they think an Ay or a No to be equally RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOP. absurd, we need attend only to those who, manner, stand by an affirmative to that prior qi What has been the history among them of the farther question as to the cognisability of this affirmed Absolute of things ? The history of the question, we may say confidently, has consisted in a continuous, emphatic, and nearly unanimous iteration of a negative answer to the question, accompanied all the while by modes of thought, speech, and conduct, in which a positive answer to it, and very definite forms of a positive answer, have been practically assumed. The almost unanimous assertion of philosophers, since philosophy began, has certainly been to the effect that in no form is an Ontology, or knowledge of things in themselves, possible to Man. It has been the assertion not only of philosophers, but of the most devout and most dogmatic of theologians. That the finite cannot apprehend or conceive the Infinite ; that neither matter nor mind can be known in its essence ; that all man's knowledge can only be relative and according to the measure and mode of his intelligence; that any attempt of human thought to transcend the phseno- menal world is only as if a bird should hope to soar above that element the beating of its wings in which is the very cause of its soaring at all ; that it is blasphemy to think that God is as we can think him to be in these and a thousand other ways the thing has been stated. The Socratic definition of the highest human wisdom that it is the most assured knowledge of our own inevitable ignorance has been re- peated, in this connexion, till it is the best-known of philoso- phical maxims. The only loudly-heard voice from antiquity proclaiming the possibility of an Ontology seems to be that of Socrates's 58 CENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. disciple, Plato. The far-famed Idealism of Plato is, in fact, a theory of the cognisability of the Absolute.* Our Phaeno- menal World, Plato loves to fancy, is not so utterly and hopelessly disconnected from the Absolute World of Nou- mena, Ideas, or Things in Themselves, but that for the pure and persevering reason a passage from the one to the other may be possible. He taxes his gorgeous imagination for ways of representing his notion of this transcendent pos- sibility. Human Life, or the Cosmos of Man, he says in one place, may be likened to a dungeon or cave, the in- mates of which are chained, with their faces toward the interior wall, and incapable of turning round. Lo ! on the wall on which they gaze there flit strange shapes and phantas- * Here we may note the confusion of practice in the use of the word Idealism. It is used in three different senses, and in combinations of these. First, Transcendentalism in Psychology, inasmuch as it avows a belief in innate ideas, or necessary forms of thought, is sometimes called Idealism. Secondly, there is the more accurate and now the philoso- phically accepted use of the term, which identifies Idealism with a par- ticular form of Cosmological Conception that, to wit, which resolves all material phenomena into subjective affections or ideas of Con- sciousness. This is the sense in which the term has been employed, unless where there is indication to the contrary, throughout the text. But, thirdly, there is Plato's Idealism, which includes much more than mere Psychological Idealism, and is quite different from Cosmological Idea- lism. It is an Ontological Idealism, or a theory how the phenomena of this world may be but reproductions or disguises of the ideas or essen- tial realities of a Supernatural World, or Empyrean of things in them- selves. There has been no end of misstatements arising, even in histories of Philosophy, from inattention to these different meanings of the word Idealist. Philosophers have been spoken of as Idealists who were Idealists only in one of the senses and by no means in the others. Nay, when a thinker now declares of himself that he is an Idealist, it is still necessary to ask in which of the three senses, or in what combination of them, he uses the term. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 59 magories the phaenomena of this world. Voices also are heard, which they, the beholders of the phantasmagories, at- tribute to the phantasmagories, and connect with them as well as they can. For the phantamsagories on the wall, and the accompanying voices, are the sole realities to these tenants of the cave. But what if they could turn their faces round towards the entrance to the cave, where it communi- cates with a larger and freer world ? Then would they begin to surmise differently. For along the mouth of the cave, though separated from it by an embankment, there lies a bit of roadway, on which persons belonging to that freer world are ever passing and repassing, carrying images or what not, and talking to each other the while ; and beyond the roadway there is a blazing light; and the phantasmagories on the inner wall of the cave are but the shadows of the tops of the im- ages which the pedestrians on the bit of roadway in front of the cave are carrying past it ; and the voices heard and at- tributed to the shadows are the voices of the invisible bearers of these images. Thus, in our world of Sense, all those phaenomena which seem realities to us are but the shadows and echoes of real objects and ongoings in the un- seen World of Archetypes, Ideas, or Self-subsisting Intelli- gences. If we could but turn round ! Nay, what are philosophers but those who do contrive somehow to turn round, and even, though dazzled at first, to work their way to such a full glimpse of the Archetypal World as that they can bring back a report of it to the other dwellers in the cave, and press upon them that explanation of the phaenomena .of the cave which the report furnishes ? Or, again, as an alter- native to this theory of Archetype and Shadow, expounded in some parts of Plato's writings, we have, in others, his 60 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. theory of Reminiscence. Man, though now the denizen of this World of Sense, has had a former and grander life in the Empyrean of Ideas, and, when here he investigates truth and arrives by contemplation at the pure ideas or forms of phse- nomena, these are but recollections or recoveries, more or less faint, of the knowledge familiar to him in his former ex- istence. Those d priori elements of knowledge which Plato, as the supreme Transcendentalist of antiquity, con- tended for so strongly under the name of Ideas, were, there- fore, in his language, a priori in a very special sense. They were fragments of a former Absolute Existence, actually shivered through our life amid the phsenomena of sense ; and it was the very business of Philosophy to seek for the fragments and to piece them together. Wordsworth here is but a renderer of the Transcendentalism of Plato : " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar ; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home." Allowance being made for the exuberance of Plato, and for the perplexity as to some parts of his final meaning arising from his very exuberance, it seems inevitable to conclude that he did not limit the possibilities of Philosophy to a Psychology and a Cosmology, but regarded it as the very work of Philosophy to push on through these to an Ontology, or Science of Absolute Truth. Now, in this matter, men in all time, or at least. Transcendentalists in RECENT BRITISH PHIL SOPHY. 6 1 all time, have felt with Plato, even while reasoning with Aristotle. If an Ontology is an impossibility for the human spirit, a Transcendentalism that should not root itself in an assumed Ontology seems equally an impossibility. What has been the history of the Soul of the World but a rage of Ontology? Why have there been wars, why have there been martyrdoms, but because one Supernaturalism sought to put down another? What has genius been, what has religious propagandism been, but a metaphysical drunken- ness? Conceive a spiritual teacher coming forward, and, in reply to questions as to the certainty of his doctrine, owning that he knew it only to be cosmologically true, but whether true absolutely he could not tell. Would not his virtue seem to be gone from him in the very act of the confession? Above all, if he were a Transcendentalist, contending for necessary and universal elements or ideas in the human reason, and if, when put to it, he were to admit that he knew even this mental organism, this Soul with its necessary ideas of God and Right, only and exclusively as a phenomenon, and dared not affirm whether its necessary ideas had a basis in the eternal nature of things or not, would not this diffidence be his ruin ? But it never so happens. Men do proceed on the notion that what they know to be true has a foundation in the nature of things. Transcendentalists cannot use their phrase "d priori elements of the human soul" without implying strenuously not only that these elements come out of some priority, but that they are bond jide intentions of that priority, and not deceptions. But what is this but to profess to know something about the Absolute ? It is not only to assert that there is an Absolute and stop there 62 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. (which would itself be something) ; it is also to assert something very specific of the Absolute to assert a some- thing equivalent to what, in human speech, is called veracity. And yet, rationally, the Absolute is incognisable, unthinkable ! How is this ? What is the reconciliation ? There has been one almost invariable answer. " The sphere of Faith transcends the sphere of Reason." There is, it is said, an organic necessity of man's nature, or of his nature in certain moods, which compels him to believe much that he cannot know. It is by Faith, it is said, and not by Reason, that we can refer the laws of our own consciousness, or the constitution of the material world around us, to a valid origin or purpose in Absolute Being ; it is by Faith, and not by Reason, that we can even assert an Absolute at all, except as a mere blank, or negative, or paralysis of knowledge. Faith, and not Reason, is that condition of spirit in which Man, by his nature, must ever ponder the ultimate problems. And so it is at this point that Christian Theology comes in, and, showing her creden- tials, offers instruction. But even she presents herself not as capable of theorising the Absolute for human reason, but only as the bearer of a special message. Whatever authority she may assume as she proceeds with her teach- ings, her opening address to man, when he first questions her metaphysically, is but as that of Raphael to Adam, when he began, at Adam's request, the narrative of the events of that supra-mundane Universe which had preceded Man's : " High matter thou enjoinest me, O prime of Men, Sad task and hard ! For how shall I relate To human sense the invisible exploits RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 63 Of warring Spirits ; how, without remorse, The ruin of so many, glorious once And perfect while they stood ; how, last, unfold The secrets of another World, perhaps Not lawful to be revealed ? Yet, for thy good, This is dispensed ; and what surmounts the reach Of human sense I shall delineate so, By likening spiritual to corporal forms, As may express them best though what if Earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought ? " In no modern philosopher is the attitude of Psychological Transcendentalism to the question of the possibility of an Ontology presented more interestingly than in Kant. He was, as we have seen, the refounder of Transcendentalism in modern Europe. In an age when Empiricism seemed to have taken universal possession, and killed out its opposite, he re-proclaimed that opposite. As the result of an investi- gation of the human mind more exact and profound than had ever been undertaken before, he reasserted the mind to be an organism of certain structural or d priori capabilities, or forms of operation, which necessitated its mode of com- merce with all matter of experience, and the notions, thinkings, and beliefs that might accrue from that com- merce. Nay, as the supreme a priori elements of human reason, he recognised the ideas of three supra-sensuous or trans-conscious objects God, the Soul, and the World. In the Soul of Man, at its very highest, what was perceived, as structural and connate, was a straining after these three objects of trans-conscious enormity. And yet, in answer to the question whether, after all, this might not be a mere straining into vacuum, a delusive grappling towards objects in an ocean of no objects, Kant declared speculative 64 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. reasoning to be impotent. Here was the sceptical side to his Transcendental Philosophy. As to the fact of an organic and necessary grappling of the mind in search of an Absolute he had no doubt; but as to the positive existence of an Absolute to answer the grappling, and much more as to the nature of the being of such an Absolute, if it existed, he had nothing to say, in the name of Reason, but that Reason could say nothing. A rational Ontology or Metaphysic was impossible. Only in the phsenomenal world did Man's mind live, move, and have its being; not an inch beyond that world could it chase any pheno- menon whatever not even the momentous phsenomenon of its own constitution. Objectively, therefore, the Absolute was nothing more than a name for Unknowableness Inconceivability. Subjectively, however, or as a regulative principle or fact of the mental organism itself, the notion of an Absolute, or the instinctive straining towards the Unknowable, was to be considered as something more for Man than mere nescience. In this position Kant left the question, appending to his philosophy of the Pure Reason a philosophy of the Practical Reason, wherein Man, returning from his hopeless attempt to outfly the phaenomenal, might take consoling refuge. Here it is that the post- Kantian philosophers of Germany refused to abide with Kant. The post-Kantian movement, as represented in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, was a stren- ^ uous exertion for the recovery of Ontology, as that without which all the Psychology and all the Cosmology in the world would be little better than blindman's-buff. Thus, in the speculative philosophy of Fichte there were two stages. The first landed him in pure Subjective Idealism, or that RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 65 system which, annihilating the Cosmos, save as the exter- nalizing of one's own' thoughts, may be said to have merged Cosmology utterly in Psychology. Ontology itself, if there could be such a science, was also merged in Psychology for either the only all-in-all or Absolute was that Self of which the Cosmos was a poem, or, if there was a transcendent Absolute which had spun the Self which spun the Cosmos, Self could not mount back to it. Dissatisfied, however, with this state of things, or with the resolution which he began to think inevitable of his Subjective Idealism into Nihilism, Fichte was latterly ravished with the notion of a doctrine which should start with an Ontology from which Psychology and Cosmology should be derivatives. If there were assumed a one Absolute existence, identical both with Self and Not-Self a kind of Neutrum of Self and Not-Self, and of which the two together constituted the life or mani- festation here Psychology might have a real ontological beginning. It remained, however, for Schelling and Hegel to work out this famous Identity-doctrine, if, indeed, it did not belong to them, or to one of them, originally more than to Fichte. As Schelling first distinctly published the doc- trine, and as he outlived Hegel for many years, it is with Schelling's name that the doctrine has been universally associated, and the place usually assigned to Hegel has been that of an Aristotle contemporary with this Plato in the most important part of his career, and subjecting all his views, the Identity-doctrine included, to a vigorous logical grasp. * Taking the Identity-doctrine, therefore, as Schelling's, and * For some very interesting observations on the relations of Hegel to Schelling in respect of the Identity-doctrine, and on the relations of both generally to Fichte, and of all three to Kant, see Dr. Stirling's E 66 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. leaving Hegel out of account in the meantime, we can see how, in the Schellingian doctrine, the world was made aware of a form in which the possibility of an Ontology might be vindicated. The Absolute, according to this doctrine, is the one Infinite Existence or Essence of which both Mind and Nature are the manifestations. The Absolute going forth expansively, or embodying itself in the finite or phenomenal, is Nature ; the regressive or contractive movement of the Absolute out of the finite or phaenomenal back into itself is the sum-total of Mind or Consciousness. Being and Knowing are coincident ; all that is known /V, and nothing is that is not known ; the universe of Knowledge and the universe of Existence are the same ; Ontology is the self- consciousness of the Absolute. But how can individual men rise to such an ontology ? By participation in the self- consciousness of that Absolute of which they are items ? How is this possible ? By an act of " intellectual intuition " the soul of man may swoon beyond the bounds of mere individual consciousness, and may behold and know the Eternal Essence of things ! It is on this power in the reason of each of us to participate in the self-knowledge of the Absolute, and to know itself as a fibre in that Absolute, that the Universe proceeds and holds together. It is this certain intuition of Absolute Truth, and not any spasmodic action of the soul in the shape of a faith straining into a void, that has been, is, and ever will be, the sustenance of mankind, the basis of religion and of all great action. So, "Secret of Hegel," vol. i. pp. 20 31. Dr. Stirling holds that the outcome of the German philosophical movement was in Kant and Hegel, and that Fichte and Schelling, though interesting historically, may be neglected by the student of results. RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. 67 in brief terms, I interpret the ontological doctrine of Schelling. Having thus expounded severally the three great differ- ences, or sets of differences, that have been found appearing and re-appearing hitherto in the history of Philosophy and having named them, for the sake of easier reference, the Psychological Difference, the Cosmological Difference, and the Ontological Difference let me proceed to inquire how far, and in what forms, these differences have repeated them- selves in recent British Philosophy. In this inquiry, as has been already explained, it is with Sir William Hamilton, Mr. Carlyle, and Mr. John Stuart Mill, that we must first concern ourselves : I. In respect of the Psychological Difference. Here Mr. Carlyle and Sir William Hamilton obviously range them- selves on one side, and Mr. Mill as obviously on the other. Take Mr. Carlyle. " Our whole Metaphysics itself," he wrote in 1829, in that Essay from which we quoted his complaint as to the miserable condition into which Philo- sophy had fallen in Britain, " our whole Metaphysics itself " from Locke's time downwards has been physical not a "spiritual philosophy, but a material one. The singular "estimation in which his Essay was so long held as a " scientific work (an estimation grounded, indeed, on the " estimable character of the man) will one day be thought a " curious indication of the spirit of these times." This is surely an abjuration of Lockism. Again, in the same 68 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. Essay, he writes, " To speak a little pedantically, there is a " science of Dynamics in Man's fortunes and nature, as well " as of Mechanics. There is a science which treats of, and " practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and " energies of Man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, " and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, and Religion, all " which have a truly vital and infinite character, as well as a " science which practically addresses the finite, modified " developments of these, when they take the shape of imme- " diate ' motives,' as hope of reward, or as fear of punish - " ment. Now it is certain that in former times the wise "men, the enlightened lovers of their kind, who appeared "generally as moralists, poets, and priests, did, without " neglecting the Mechanical province, deal chiefly with the "Dynamical."* This also is an assertion of the principle of Transcendentalism. Indeed, in a previous Essay, Mr. Carlyle had approvingly expounded the Transcendentalism of Kant's philosophy in opposition to the Empiricism of Locke and Hume. "The Germans," he had said, "take " up the matter differently, and would assail Hume, not " in his outworks, but in his citadel. They deny his first " principle, that Sense is the only inlet of knowledge, that " Experience is the primary ground of belief. Their pure " truth, however, they seek, not historically and by experi- " ment in the universal persuasions of men, but by intuition, " in the deepest and purest nature of Man." f But what need of proving by particular quotations that Mr. Carlyle *Art. "Signs of the Times," in Edin. Rev., 1829; reprinted in Carlyle's Miscellanies. t Art. "State of German Literature," in Edin. Rev., 1827; re- printed in Carlyle's Miscellanies. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 69 then was, and since then has always continued to be, a champion of the doctrine of necessary or ct priori truth or elements of truth ? What else mean his well-known phrases " Eternal Justice," " the Eternal Veracities," and the like? In short, if words have any meaning, Mr. Carlyle, since Coleridge died, and with an energy of genius more vehe- ment and tumultuous, has been the most conspicuous Transcendentalist, the most conspicuous anti-Lockist, anti- Ben thamist, in the Literature of Britain. What Mr. Carlyle has been implicitly, and for the mind of the nation at large, in this aspect, Sir William Hamilton has been explicitly, and for our philosophic scholars. He has been the founder of a philosophy which, though it offered itself primarily as a continuation and improvement of that previously known (and thought old-fashioned) as the Scottish, and though it might be properly enough called " Scoto-German," is described most truly of all as the Hamiltonian. And, from first to last in this philosophy,, and in almost every scrap of writing that came from Hamilton's pen, we mark the strength of his conviction that only on the theory of necessary ideas, a priori forms of thought, could philosophy establish itself, or the spirit of man find satisfaction. "A very able disquisition," he would say again and again, commenting upon some treatise or essay of the opposite school which he thought worthy of praise ; " but I do not see how you can fabricate this notion (naming it) out of experience ! " A reduction of what was to be taken as necessary in our beliefs to the smallest com- pass in which it could be expressed an essence of the fewest and deepest propositions was a task in the achieve- ment of which he foresaw results that might have made 70 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. Reid groan, and Kantists uncomfortable.* He did not live to accomplish the task. But the whole tenor of his labours was towards an assertion, purification, and redefinition of Transcendentalism ; and, when he died, he left the flag of Transcendentalism waving anew over more than one citadel of the land. It will be a dreary day for the world when disagreements cease, when there are not even fundamental differences. There is an old Wiltshire song, which has this remarkable stanza : " If all the world were of one Religion, Many a living thing should die ; But I will never forget my true love, Nor in any way his name deny. " Now, if there is any man among us who has pre-eminently helped to keep Britain from that danger of intellectual death to many which would arise from her being of one religion in Philosophy, it is Mr. Mill. He has never for- gotten his true love, the principle of Empiricism, nor in any way denied its name though the name " Empiricism " is one which he would not himself choose, and for which he would probably substitute Experientialism. In stating the question between the two metaphysical schools, in that Essay on Coleridge which was so admirable an example in its time of the sympathetic appreciation of a system of opinions different from one's own,f Mr. Mill thought it right to record his own view, even when refraining from * See Dissertation A., appended to Edition of Reid, p. 743 : Footnote. f Essay on Coleridge, London and Westminster Review, 1840 ; reprinted in Mill's Dissertations. RECENT BRITISH PHIL OS PHY. 7 1 arguing for it. "It is," he said, "that the truth, on this " much debated question, lies with the school of Locke and " Bentham." And in his writings before this, and in all his writings after this, the same assertion of the principle of his philosophical faith is continually made. But, indeed, not only is this principle continually avowed in Mr. Mill's writings ; it is the key to the nature of the writings them- selves. Mr. Mill's Logic corresponds with what the science of Logic could alone be consistently with his fundamental psychological principle. It could not be, like the old Logic and Hamilton's Logic, a Science of the Necessary Laws of Thought, but only a Science of the method of quest after * experimental truth or probability. So, in his fine Essay on Liberty the radical idea is that one can never be surer of anything, be it even the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid, than in proportion as the chances of contradiction are exhausted ; and the high value set there \ upon human freedom, and even upon eccentricity of thought or action, seems to be grounded on the conviction that the human race can never know what it may attain to, in the shape either of knowledge or of power, until it has sent out a rush of the largest number of individual energies simultaneously, and with the least restraint from law or custom or mutual disparagement, on actual experiments and investigations in all directions. As for the Essay on Utilitarianism, it is expressly a restatement of Paley's and Bentham's theory of expediency as the sole possible foundation of morals, but with a suggestion of this higher and more exquisite definition of expediency, characteristic of Mr. Mill, that it means the largest possible amount of pleasure, and the least possible amount of pain, not to you 7 2 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. or me, or this age, or all mankind only, but to the sum-total of sentient existence. In short, if I am not mistaken, Mr. Mill's writings prove that, if he thinks of any one particular mode of thought among his contemporaries as being more than any other chargeable with the total mass of obstruc- tion, fallacy, and misery that yet rolls in the heart of society as being more than any other the False God, or Baal, or Moloch, of the human mind it is of the theory of necessaiy beliefs. One marks almost an impatience of manner in his writings whenever this word " necessary " comes across him. % " Never name to me," he seems to say, " that brute of a word." It required, indeed, that the cause of British Empiricism should have no ordinary standard-bearer. The learning and speculative profundity of a Hamilton, and the great spiritual energy of a Carlyle, were a formidable conjunction of op- posite forces. Even numerically, in respect of the leaders, the odds were as two to one. And, curiously enough, this is about the numerical odds in which, if we take the whole list of our recent philosophical writers, British Transcendentalism has continued to stand to British Empiricism to the present day. It is difficult to be exact in such a matter, and I will not specialize at present ; but the names of Whewell and Tennyson at once suggest themselves on the one side, and that of the late Mr. Buckle on the other. II. In respect of the Cosmological Differences. To think we had laid sufficient hold of the movement of British Philoso- phical thought since 1835 merely by the division of its repre- sentatives into two schools, according to their difference in respect of Psychological Theory, would (it must be felt now, RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPL if it was not felt before) be a very great mistake. Carlyle, Whewell, and Tennyson we may bracks men together and have a reason for it ; but what would men themselves say ? One sees strange mutual glances pas- sing among them in part, glances of mutual liking, but not all of that character. Nor, though the conjunction of Buckle and Mill might be less amiss, in respect of reputed affinity, would that conjunction be beyond criticism. In short, we must complicate matters by having recourse to the second means of distributing philosophers the recognition of the differences of their cosmological conceptions. But here too we are confronted with difficulty and chance of error. "Who told you my cosmological conception, pray?" is what many a man, and even many a writer, might say to a critic professing to fasten one upon him and to expound it. What a man generally keeps to himself is precisely his cosmological con- ception. In this country especially, that which most men avoid, even when they are our public teachers and writers . that which they are compelled to avoid by the tyranny of a ^ many-voiced multitude, whose own cosmological conception was made for them long ago, and might be hung up in the British Museum as a curiosity to-morrow nay, worst of all, that which the cynicism of a blase literature of wit, and mutual ~" chaff, and a cultivated antipathy to the large or grand, com- pels them to avoid is the attempt to present, in any ap- proach to complete form, systematic or poetical, their real .and total conception of the world. The more the pity ! Never was there a great book in the world that did not flash . out, and burn into the minds of its readers, some outline of its author's cosmological conception. Nor,, under all the discouragements of our time, have our best and greatest for- 74 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. gotten this duty, nor their right hands, in performing it, the true and ancient cunning. What and here surely, if any- where, we may name him what of our laureate Tennyson ? Or, again, of Mr. Carlyle ? What is it that breaks through upon us from all Mr. Carlyle's writings, and seems to consti- tute, when we investigate through all the rest, their distin- guishing peculiarity? What but a pervading, continually pre- sented, cosmological conception of surpassing vastness y intense and stern at the centre, where the moral forces meet round a solid terrestrial core, but otherwise astronomically boundless ? Nay is it not his habit to have faith in this presentation again and again of a cosmological conception, constant or slightly varying, as better than formal philoso- phizing ? Reconceive, if you can, my cosmological concep- tion, he seems to say; let it burst the obstructions and boundaries it meets with in your mind; and from the new mental heaven there will doubtless be a rain, as far as is necessary, of the right proportions ! Jhst because Mr. Carlyle's philosophy takes so much the form of the incessant presentation of his general cosmo- logical conception that it refuses to argue about the conception itself, it is difficult to bring him into a place in any of those six philosophical systems which have been enumerated as resulting from the attempt to classify philosophers by attend- ing to their points of attachment to different theories of the act of external perception. It might not be really impossible so to place him ; but it would be difficult. Let us, therefore, take leave of him, and attend to the other two. In regard to them, from the nature of their writings, there is not the same difficulty. Six philosophical systems, we said, have been recognised as. RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. 7 5 arising out of the different known interpretations of the so called act of external perception Nihilism or Non-Substan- tialism, Materialism, Natural Realism, Constructive Idealism, Pure Idealism, and the Identity-System. Of these six systems, I may now say, only the middle four seem to me purely cosmolo- gical. The two extreme systems, Nihilism &n& Absolutism, involve ontological considerations, i'hey are not solely thed- ries of the contents of the Cosmos, considered in itself, but also theories on the subject of the relatedness or non-related- ness of the Cosmos, whatever may be the conception of its contents, to an essence of things beyond. The middle four, however Materialism, Natural Realism, Constructive Ideal- ism, and Pure Idealism are more strictly cosmological. Now each of these four systems has had a footing in Britain, and the question is, to which of them Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mill respectively adhere. Sir William Hamilton is a Natural Realist. He regarded it, indeed, as perhaps the chief distinction of his speculative philosophy that, in opposition to the tradition of all former modern philosophers, save one or two, it proclaimed the cosmological doctrine of Natural Realism to be the true one. His views on the subject are expressed in his Edinburgh Review articles " The Philosophy of Perception" and "Idealism" (reprinted in his Discussions); d&Q in his Lectures on Metaphysics (Lectures XV. XVI.) ; but they are to be gathered, with greatest abundance of illustration and detail, from his Notes, B, C, D and D*, appended to his edition of Reid. In these Notes he first expounds, as all-important to his purpose, the distinction between Presentative, Immediate, or Intuitive Knowledge, and the Knowledge called Repre- sentative or Mediate. Presentative Knowledge is that in 7 6 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. which the mind apprehends a thing directly, in itself, and as it were face to face ; Representative Knowledge is that in which the mind apprehends a thing not directly, but through some sign, image, or suggestion, distinct from the thing itself. Now, though the great mass of our accumulated knowledge is undeniably Representative all our knowledge, for example, of 'the past and the distant yet, in the centre of all, as the ever-welling momentary supply out of which all the rest is evolved or woven, there is a Presentative Know- ledge in every act of present consciousness. More particu- larly in what is called the act of external perception we have a direct, immediate, face-to-face knowledge of objects in an external world. Most philosophers, Sir William proceeds to say, have denied this, and have maintained that our know- ledge of an external world is only representative, or a bundle of inferences from certain signs in our own affections, which may, or may not, be in analogy with the things they repre- sent. Reid alone had got hold of the doctrine of an immediate face-to-face cognition of external nature in every act of perception. But Reid's use of the doctrine had been vacillating, confused and incomplete, insomuch that he had been misunderstood in all that depended upon it by his critics, and most of all by Brown. Hence, vindicating Reid, and at the same time avowing his own acceptance of Reid's doctrine, though he should be left in a minority of one in supporting it, Hamilton does all he can to put the doctrine in proper shape. " The developed doctrine of Real Presenta- " tionism, the basis of Natural Realism," he says, " asserts " the consciousness or immediate perception of certain essen- " tial attributes of matter objectively existing ; while it admits " that other properties of body are unknown in themselves, RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPPIY. y 7 " and only inferred as causes to account for certain subjective " affections of which we are cognisant on ourselves." The attributes of matter thus alleged to be immediately perceived as really and objectively existing are mainly those which since Locke's time had been generally known as the " primary qualities," to wit, solidity or extension, impene- trability, number or divisibility, size, figure, mobility, and position in space. In addition to these qualities Sir William discriminates two other classes the " secundo-primary qualities" (such as gravity, cohesion, repulsion, &c.), in which he recognises modifications of the primary by conjunction with a subjective element ; and the " secondary qualities" proper (colour, sound, flavour, heat, &c.), which he allows to consist merely in determinations of the subjective sentiency. Such is Sir William Hamilton's system of Natural Dualism or Natural Realism. In the course of his expositions of his own system he has some criticisms of the rival systems. If he were not a Natural Realist, then, he avows, he would be a Pure Idealist. " Natural Realism and Absolute Idealism," he says emphatically, "are the only systems worthy a philo- sopher." * On the other hand, the rival system which he liked least, and which he pronounced " the most inconse- quent of all systems," was that half-way kind of Idealism which we have called Constructive Idealism. He admitted, nevertheless, that this was the system which had been " em- braced in various forms by the immense majority of philo- sophers." t Now, as far as I have been able to ascertain, it is precisely to this system that Mr. Mill would confess his * Note C to Edition of Reid, p. 817, footnote. tArt. Philosophy of Perception : Discussions, p. 55. 7 8 KE CENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. allegiance. I make the statement somewhat diffidently. It has seemed to me doubtful whether some of his views might not be susceptible of an interpretation into Pure Idealism. On the whole, however, I am inclined to think that, if any of the existing cosmological systems might claim him, it is that of Constructive Idealism. In his Logic there is a chapter devoted to an enumeration or classification of "the Things denoted by names." It results in the conclusion that there are four classes of name- able things (i) " Feelings, or States of Consciousness;" (2) "The Minds which experience these feelings;" (3) * " The Bodies, or external objects, which excite certain of v these feelings;" and (4) " The Successions and Coexistences, the Likenesses and Unlikenesses, between feelings or States of Consciousness." This is so far a cosmological classifica- tion ; but, from the paragraphs through which it is arrived at, it distinctly appears that it is not Mr. Mill's ultimate classification of the contents of the Cosmos as given in con- sciousness, but a classification deferring, partly at least, and for the practical purposes of Logic, to popular habits of speech and thought. In reading these paragraphs it is dis- tinctly seen that, according to Mr. Mill, the one and only reality of the Cosmos for our knowledge consists in the existence of the first of the four classes of nameable things, or of the first compounded with the fourth. All that we really know, or are in any way aware of, is a series of feel- ings or states of consciousness, a stream or succession of sensations, thoughts, emotions, and volitions. When we speak either of Mind as a substance undergoing these suc- cessive states, or of Matter or Body as an external cause of some of them, we go beyond what we know. Thus, of RECENT BRITISH PHIL O SO PHY. 7 9 Mind : " There is a something I call Myself, or, by another " form of expression, my mind, which I consider as distinct " from these sensations, thoughts, &c. a something which " I conceive to be not the thoughts, but the being that has " the thoughts, and which I can conceive as existing for " ever in a state of quiescence without any thoughts at all. " But what this being is, although it is myself, I have no " knowledge further than the series of its states of conscious- " ness." * So of Matter or Body : " A Body, according to " the received doctrine of modern metaphysicians," says Mr. Mill, " may be defined the external cause to which we " ascribe our sensations. . . . The sensations are all " of which I am directly conscious ; but I consider them as "produced by something not only existing independently " of my will, but external to my bodily organs and to " my mind. This external something I call a body. It " may be asked, How came we to ascribe our sensations to " any external cause? and is there sufficient ground for so " ascribing them ? It is known that there are metaphysi- u cians who have raised a controversy on this point, main- " taining the paradox that we are not warranted in referring " our sensations to a cause such as we understand by the " word Body, or to any cause whatever, unless, indeed, the " First Cause. ... A fixed law of connexion, making " the sensations occur together, does not, say these philo- " sophers, necessarily require what is called a substratum to " support them. The conception of a substratum is but " one of many possible forms in which that connexion " presents itself to our imagination a mode of, as it were, " realizing the idea. If there be such a substratum, suppose * Logic : 1st Edit. vol. i. p. 82. 8 o RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHl \ " it this instant annihilated by the fiat of Omnipotence, and " let the sensations continue to occur in the same order, and " how would the substratum be missed ? By what signs " should we be able to discover that its existence had ter- " minated ? Should we not have as much reason to believe "that it still existed as we now have? and, if we should " not then be warranted in believing it, how can we be so " now? A body, therefore, according to these metaphysic- " ians, is not anything intrinsically different from the sen- " sations which the body is said to produce in us ; it is, in " short, a set of sensations joined together according to a " fixed law. . . . These ingenious speculations have at " no time in the history of philosophy made many proselytes ; " but the controversies to which they have given rise, and " the doctrines which have been developed in the attempt " to find a conclusive answer to them, have been fruitful of " important consequences to the Science of Mind. . . . " It was soon acknowledged, by all who reflected on the "subject, that the existence of matter could not be proved " by extrinsic evidence. The answer, therefore, now usually " made to Berkeley and his followers is, that the belief is " intuitive that mankind, in all ages, have felt themselves " compelled, by a necessity of their nature, to refer their " sensations to an external cause; that even those who deny "it in theory yield to the necessity in practice, and, in " speech, thought, and feeling, do, equally with the vulgar, " acknowledge their sensations to be the effects of some- " thing external to them. . . . But, though the extreme " doctrine of the Idealist metaphysicians, that objects are "nothing but our sensations and the laws which connect " them, has appeared to a few subsequent thinkers to be RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. 8 1 " worthy of assent, the only point of much real importance " is one on which these metaphysicians are now very gener- " ally considered to have made out their case viz. : that all " we know of objects is the sensations which they give us, " and the order of the occurrence of these sensations. . . . " There is not the slightest reason for believing that what '"we call the sensible qualities of an object are a type of " anything inherent in itself, or bearing any affinity to its " own nature. A cause does not, as such, resemble its " enacts ; an east wind is not like the feeling of cold, nor is "heat like the steam of boiling water: why then should "matter resemble our sensations; why should the inmost " nature of fire or water resemble the impressions made by " these objects upon our senses ? And, if not on the prin- "ciple of resemblance, on what other principle can the " manner in which objects affect us through the senses afford " us any insight into the inherent nature of these objects ? " It may therefore safely be laid down as a truth, both " obvious in itself and admitted by all whom it is at " present necessary to take into consideration, that of " the outward world we know and can know absolutely " nothing, except the sensations which we experience " from it." * Now, so far as these quotations indicate Mr. Mill's cosmological system, it is certainly not the Natural Realism of Reid and Sir William Hamilton. But, when we inquire with which of the other systems Mr. Mill's views are to be identified, the atmosphere does not seem so clear. There is evident, indeed, a broad general preference for the * Logic : 1st Edit. vol. i. pp. 74 81. F 82 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. Idealistic manner of thought. The sole cosmical certainty v for us, Mr. Mill avows, is a certain succession of ideas, or states of consciousness ; this is the one phsenomenon which we cannot transcend in knowledge, do what we will; all else is faith, hypothesis, or inference. Now this, at first sight, looks like Pure Idealism. It goes beyond even the Idealism of Berkeley, which only abolished Matter or Body as an independent cosmical factor, and retained Mind ; and it approaches the extreme Idealism of Hume and Fichte, which, by abrogating all knowledge of a substance of Mind, as well as all knowledge of a substance of Matter, left nothing between one and Nihilism or Non-Substan- tialism, save an act of ontological faith, which one might experience or not, or wish to experience or not. But Mr. Mill's language seems to show that, more willingly and easily than Hume, if not with such vehemence and passion as Fichte, he would allow as much of ontological faith in Philosophy as would keep it from the Nihilistic conception of the Cosmos as a mere baseless succession of ideas. True, all that we really know is a succession of ideas or states of consciousness, and our imagination either of a substance Mind undergoing these, or of an external world of Matter implicated in some of them, may be purely illusive. But, as all mankind proceed on the imagination, and can no more shake themselves clear from it than they can leap off their own shadows, Philosophy must risk the illusion, espe- cially as the character of orderliness in the succession of ideas conveys to Philosophy itself (legitimately or illegiti- mately?) a notion of ulterior law. In short, some mystery, some hypothesis of an unknown, must be allowed in Philo- sophy, and the question is, How much? Allow the minimum, RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 83 and we are brought back to Pure Idealism, recovering itself from Nihilism, and positing in the Cosmos at least a some- thing nameable as Mind, an unknown something that feels and thinks. Mr. Mill is willing, however, to go farther, and, always with the proviso that we are talking in the dark, to allow another unknown something in the Cosmos, exter- nal to the mind, and which is the determining cause of some of the mind's feelings. Accordingly he sums up thus : " As " Body is the mysterious something which excites the mind " to feel, so Mind is the mysterious something which feels " and thinks." Again, " As Body is the unsentient cause to " which we are naturally prompted to refer a certain portion " of our feelings, so Mind may be described as the sentient " subject (in the German sense of the term) of all feelings " that which has or feels them. But of the nature of either " body or mind, further than the feelings which the former " excites, and which the latter experiences, we do not, " according to the best existing doctrine, know anything." * Of Body, indeed, we may assume (so Mr. Mill has already argued) that we know something negatively. Whatever it is, it can hardly be, in any way or to any degree, that which we are in the constant habit of supposing it to be. When we speak of solidity, impenetrability, size, figure, &c. as primary qualities of bodies, and of colour, roughness, hardness, sour- ness, &c., as secondary qualities of the same bodies, we but skeletonize an unknown and unknowable cause in the form of some of its effects, and then clothe the skeleton with a garment of others of its effects. And so, Mr. Mill's cosmological doctrine, as he seems willing that it should * Logic : 1st Edit. i. pp. 81, 82. 84 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. stand, after sufficient caveats and explanations, seems to be that of Constructive Idealism* III. In respect of the Ontological Difference. So far as we have gone, the result is that, compounding the Psychologi- cal doctrine with the Cosmological in the case of each of the two philosophers, and throwing out what alone seems to be doubtful in Mr. Mill's case (to wit, whether under the latter doctrine he is a Pure Idealist or only a Constructive Idealist), we may define Sir William Hamilton's philosophy as a system of Transcendental Natural Realism or Dualistic Transcendentalism, and Mr. Mill's as a system of Empirical * Of attachment on Mr. Mill's part to the Identity-system there is no hint ; and the only other of the six systems to which his views are not adjusted in the text is Materialism. Now it is quite conceivable that a Constructive Idealism such as has been described might resolve itself scientifically into Materialism. Might not Science, starting with the conception of a present Cosmos consisting of a sentient something called Mind and an unsentient something else called Matter, and regarding both as apprehensible only in the successive states of the sentient something, reach the conclusion, through the manipulation of these states themselves, that the unsentient is the more ancient of the two, and that the sentieni, which is thus finding out its own ancestry, is but a development of the unsentient ? Such a suicide of Constructive Ideal- ism, or translation of itself into Materialism, is, as I have hinted in a previous footnote, so far from impossible that it is the commonest of processes in the present state of Philosophy. The reason why I note the fact again here is not that Mr. Mill is ever found forswearing his Idealism, but because the fact is interesting in connexion with his great liking for the speculations of other philosophers who, without denying that a succession of states of consciousness is the sole known reality of the Cosmos, are yet conspicuous for the resoluteness with which they leave that contemplation behind, and assume a material Cosmos of good solid realities, mineral and other, as having existed for ages before it had bred nerve or learnt any trick of self-sentiency. RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. 8 5 Idealism or Idealistic Empiricism. There remains to be applied to each of the philosophers, however, the third of the traditional differences that which we have called the Ontological. Here, at first sight, the two philosophers seem to agree. The agreement, however, even here, is more apparent than real. There are no portions of Sir William Hamilton's writings better known than those in which he proclaimed his convic- tion of the utter impossibility of an Ontology. The very first of his contributions to the Edinburgh Review was his now famous Article " On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," criticising more particularly Cousin's doctrine of the Infinite- Absolute. In all his subsequent writings he assumes this article as lying in the background, to be referred to, if neces- sary, for the correct interpretation of whatever new exposi- tion he may be engaged in ; and on several occasions, as, for example, in the eighth and ninth of his Lectures on Metaphysics he recurs to the topic for a fresh treatment of it. The result has been that there is no doctrine more strongly identified at the present day with Sir William Hamilton's name than the doctrine which he expressed most generally by calling it " The Relativity of Human Knowledge." Thousandfold as might be the differences of system among philosophers, and of vast importance as might be not a few of these differences, yet all philosophers, Sir William Hamilton held, were bound, if they really under- stood what they were talking* about, to agree in one proposition to wit, that our knowledge is, and can be, only of the relative or phsenomenal. This, which he called " the great axiom," he asserted in many varieties of form 8 6 REQENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. and with many varieties of illustration. " Omne quod " cognoscitur? he says, quoting with approbation the cele- brated maxim of Boethius, "non secundum sui vim, sed " secundum cognoscentium potius comprehenditur facultatem : " " All that is known is comprehended, not according to the " force of itself, but according rather to the faculty of those " knowing." Hence, not only is human knowledge relative, but, even in its quality as relative, it may be far inferior to such relative knowledge as might be attainable through an \ extension of our faculties, or as may be even now in the possession of beings with faculties more extended than ours. Just as to a man who has been blind from his birth the phsenomenal world or Cosmos of his conceptions cannot be the same as that figured forth in the conceptions of his seeing fellow-creatures, but must lack all those attributes which depend on the direct co-operation of Sight with the other senses, so, if a new sense or two were added to the present normal number in man, that which is now the phaenornenal world for all of us might, for aught we know, burst into something amazingly wider and different, in consequence of the additional revelations through these new senses. " The universe may be conceived as a '' polygon of a thousand, or a hundred thousand sides or "facets and each of these sides or facets may be con- " ceived as representing one special mode of existence. " Now, of these thousand sides or modes all may be equally " essential, but three or four only may be turned toward us " or be analogous to our organs. One side or facet of the " Universe, as holding a relation to the organ of sight, is "the mode of luminous or visible existence; another, as ''proportional to the organ of hearing, is the mode of RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. g 7 " sonorous or audible existence ; and so on." * But, even were our organs or senses to be made co-numerous with the modes of existence, our knowledge would still be only of the phenomenal, though of a phenomenal totality far more multiplex than the present. " Had we faculties equal in " number to all the possible modes of existence, whether of " mind or matter, still would our knowledge of mind or " matter be only relative." f In every way, therefore, an Ontology, or knowledge of things in themselves, of Noumena or Self-subsisting Actualities, as distinct from Phenomena, must be declared impossible. More expressly, in human Philosophy, must Ontology, or speculation of the Absolute, be ab initio given up. " As the conditionally limited (which "we may briefly call the conditioned} is the only possible " object of knowledge and of positive thought, thought " necessarily supposes conditions. To think 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 may be supported, so the mind cannot " transcend that sphere of limitation within and through " which exclusively the possibility of thought is realized." { All Science, in short, is the science of the phenomenal, or conditioned, or relative, and Philosophy is the science of this Science. In expounding so emphatically this great doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge, Sir William Hamilton professed only to be bringing out into distinctness a proposition * Lectures on Metaphysics, p. 142. f Ibid, p. 145. $ Art. " Philosophy of the Unconditioned ": Discussions,^. 14. 88 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. which philosophers of all schools and times, with hardly an exception, had announced or assumed. " This is, indeed, a " truth," he said, " in the admission of which philosophers, "in general, have been singularly harmonious, and the "praise that has been lavished on Dr. Reid for this "observation is wholly unmerited. In fact, I am hardly " aware of the philosopher who has not proceeded on the " supposition, and there are few who have not explicitly " enounced the observation. It is only since Reid's death "that certain speculators have arisen who have obtained " celebrity by their attempt to found philosophy on an im- " mediate knowledge of the Absolute or Unconditioned." * The speculators here referred to are the post-Kantian philosophers of Germany, Schelling and Hegel, and their French disciples, more especially Cousin. It is against the attempts of these modern philosophers to establish an Ontology, as a development or consummation of Philosophy, that Sir William's article " On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned" is from first to last directed. Cousin, as having made the most elaborate attempt to bring Ontology within the domain of reason, bears the brunt of the attack. Denning Cousin's opinion to be that " the Unconditioned " or Absolute is cognisable and conceivable by conscious- " ness and reflection, under relation, difference, and " plurality," Sir William argues that it is self-contradictory, and in fact consists in calling Absolute that which is at the same time spoken of in terms which are meaningless except as implying relativity. More briefly Schelling's opinion is set aside that opinion being thus defined : " The Uncon- " ditioned is cognisable, but not conceivable ; it can be * Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. i. pp. 138, 139. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. " known by a sinking back into identity with the Absolute, " but is incomprehensible by consciousness and reflection, " which are only of the relative and the different." Of this theory of Schelling's, and of that act of Intellectual Intuition by which he supposed the cognition of the Absolute to be possible, Sir William speaks all but derisively. " Out of Laputa or the Empire," he says, " it " would be idle to enter into an articulate refutation of a " theory which founds Philosophy on the annihilation of " consciousness and the identification of the unconscious " philosopher with God." But even Kant, whose sobriety had kept him far on this side of any such assertion, and one of whose great services to the world had been that he had most emphatically proclaimed or re-proclaimed the pro- position that all human knowledge can only be of the Phaenomenal or Relative even he, according to Sir William, had inadvertently left in his Philosophy a stump of that Ontology of which he believed himself to have cleared the rational world. Kant's statement had been, according to Sir William's summary of it, that the Unconditioned or Absolute " is not an object of knowledge, but its notion, as " a regulative principle of the mind itself, is more than a mere "negation of the Conditioned" In other words, though the Supernatural, as an objective reality, was beyond all cognisance or conception, and could be nothing more to Philosophy than a name for Void Unknowableness, or the cessation of all power of apprehension or predication, yet the psychological fact of a straining, in man's spirit, towards this vacuum, as if towards objects which might or might not be there, was to have some allowance made for it in positive speculation. Not even this, however, would Sir William RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. allow ; and, accordingly, his own doctrine in respect of the Philosophy of the Absolute outgoes even Kant's. "The " Unconditioned is incognisable and inconceivable, its "notion being only negative of the Conditioned, which " last can alone be positively known or conceived." * Such, in contrast with the diverse opinions of Kant, Schelling, and Cousin, is Sir William Hamilton's statement of his own opinion on the question of the Absolute. To the Ontology of Plato's philosophy, or of Spinoza's, or of the Oriental systems, little reference is made in the course of the discussion. How is Sir William Hamilton's ontological doctrine, if we may so call a doctrine which simply repudiated Ontology, to be reconciled with those parts of his Philo- sophy which we have had already before us /. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. to be conceived as generated out of a prime original phenomena, definable in their original state neither as mind nor matter, but only as feelings or sensations and their associabilities. Sunt cogit attorns ; fuerunt cogitationes this is the ultimate statement to which we are led back. A curdling together of phenomena, such as we now call feel- ings or sensations this is the fact of the Cosmos at its uttermost. It is but a secondary or subsequent fact that out of this curdling there has resulted that vast self-differen- tiation of the curdled material whereby it has happened that now, in every act of thought or perception, there is, as by a necessary law of our being, a discrimination, bursting asunder, or mutual release and disengagement, of two notions the notion of an external world of permanent pos- sibilities of sensation, whirled away from us in extension up to the clouds and the stars ; and the notion of a distinct internal persistency of feeling, living on amid this extension, and uniting in its consciousness the past, the present, and the future. Now, is not Mr. Mill's Constructive Idealism only an account of the secondary fact an account of our notions of Ego and Non-Ego as they have been generated for us out of a prior and simpler consistency referred to by himself, and describable neither as Ego nor as Non-Ego, but only as cogitations or associable phenomena of feeling ? If Mr. Mill is forced back to the very end of the avenue which his own system opens to the view, does he not cease to be, cosmologically, a Constructive Idealist, in any preservable sense of the term, and lapse into something else ? It is difficult to see what name already in use would then describe his cosmological conception in its ultimate form. Owing to his describing the ultimate cosmical phenomena as " feel- 2 1 8 RECENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. ings," and thus inducing us to think of them, however vaguely, as phenomena of what we now call the mental or ideal order, there would still be a character of general Idealism in his system. His ultimate resolution of things would involve a preference for the language of the idealistic over that of the materialistic hypothesis. What he would invite us to think of as the prime " matter" of the Universe Avould be describable, at all events, as " matter of feeling." Yet it would by no means be Idealism, as hitherto under- stood, to which we should thus be brought ; for in Idealism as hitherto understood the prime or genetic phenomena have always been feelings imagined as functions of some personality or personalities, whereas in Mr. Mill's system personality is itself a mere notion evolved out of the phenomena, and therefore not to be imported (though I think he does himself inadvertently import it) into the primary contemplation of them. In some respects it is the Nihilism or Non-Substantialism of Hume to which Mr. Mill would seem to be brought back, for in that system there is no denial of anything of phenomenal fact that Mr. Mill seems to think it necessary to keep. But, as Mr. Mill does perhaps make more of the natural associabilities of the prime phenomena than Hume, a more positive name than Nihilism or Non-Substantialism is desirable for his system. On the whole, if I were allowed to invent a term, I should say that Mr. Mill, cosmologically, is now a Cogitationist. The ultimate fact of the phenomenal world, as recognised by him, is neither Matter nor Mind in any present sense of these terms, but a cogitation or coagulation of phenomena which may be called feelings ; out of which cogitation or coagulation it has happened, in virtue of the laws regulating RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 2 1 9 it, that there is now that stupendous fact of all present, or at least of all human, sentiency the instinctive furling off, in every conscious or perceptive act, of a conceived external world of possibilities from a conscious and persisting per- sonality. If we stop at this* fact which we may do for most practical purposes our cosmological system may be that of the new Constructive Idealism ; but, if we persevere in the analysis, we end in Cogitationism. But can we end even here ? Is even this Cogitationism, as it is propounded, ultimate ? For, as we have said, it is still a kind of Idealism. Those prime phenomena, out of the coagulation of which, according to their laws of associ- ability, he represents our cosmos of Matter and Mind to have been wholly evolved, are, he is always studious to re- mind us, phaenomena definable as feelings. What we have to start with, in his scheme, as the prime cosmical matter, is still a matter of feeling the facts or phaenomena of a crude original sort of sentiency, which has not yet worked out the distinction of Ego and Non-Ego, but is only engaged in working it out. He will not even part with the word " con- sciousness " ; but, holding by the expressions " thread of consciousness," and " series of states of consciousness," as, in his opinion, equivalent to Mind, he follows the " thread " or " series," in the case of each individual being, still calling it consciousness, back into that infant confusion of first sensa- tions with first muscular movements wherein the notions of Self and Not-Self are to be conceived as lying yet unseparated and indistinct. Beyond this he does not go. But will the theory serve us to the last extreme ? Mr. Mill has spoken of the difficulty of conceiving how that which, ex hypothesi in his theory of Personality or Mind, is but a series of feelings, 220 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. can be aware of itself as a series, or can grasp the non- present in the present. He has represented this as the one stumbling-block in the way of his total theory of Mind and Matter the final mystery or inexplicability, which he can only accept, without attempting a solution. But are there not mysteries on the back of this one ? How, for example, about our belief in the existence of other sentiencies, or " threads of consciousness," " or succes- sions of feelings," contemporaneous with our own whether our human fellow-creatures, or the inferior sentiencies of all grades, from the largest quadrupeds down to microscopic animalcules ? Mr. Mill sees no difficulty here. He thinks his theory may be easily relieved from that " extrinsic" ob- jection which Reid threw in the way of Idealism, when he maintained that it would leave us without evidence of the ex- istence of our fellow-creatures. Reid, Mr. Mill argues, was here under a complete mistake. What is there, he asks, in the admission that Self or Personality is nothing but a " suc- cession of feelings," or "thread of consciousness," that should prevent our believing that there are other selves besides our own human, or inferior to human, or even hyperphysical and divine provided only these selves are re- garded also but as " successions of feelings " or " threads of consciousness" ? Among my permanent possibilities of sen- sation there are recurring appearances say of bodies like my own, shaped and moving and behaving like my own, and yet felt not to be my own whence I infer that there are around me other human minds or possibilities of feeling besides myself; and from similar marks or signs I conclude, with equal certainty, that there are hosts of sentiencies not human. Now, it is not the mere dizzying intricacy of the RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 2 2 1 conception that would so arise that should prevent us from allowing that Mr. Mill may be in the right here against Reid. But the intricacy is worth noting. According to Idealism, when I meet a man walking in the street, he, as part of my Non-Ego, or possibilities of sensation, is really a production of my Self or series of feelings, and yet I may know that the compliment is returned, and that I, as part of his Non-Ego, am a production of his series of feelings. Again, what is the butterfly I see fluttering in the garden but a little object ac- counted for by the self-evolution of my consciousness or series of feelings, respecting which object nevertheless I am bound to conclude that it also is a little series of feelings, working out its life as self and not-self within the sphere of my Not-Self? Or, again, do not the French Emperor and the whole of the French nation exist for me but as a portion of the aggregate possibilities of sensation that have been gene- rated out of the experience of that series of feelings which constitutes Me, and yet, on the other hand, as neither the French Emperor nor the French nation ever heard of my existence, must I not think of my series of feelings as a something lodging not yet realized amid the possibilities of sensation appertaining to those transmarine threads of consciousness ? In short, what, according to the Idealistic theory, are the millions of human beings of whose existence on the earth contemporaneously with myself I am so well aware, and the countless hosts of inferior contemporary sen- tiencies with which Zoology amazes me, but multitudinous "threads of consciousness" whirring and spinning their lives within the bounds of that which is but a poem of my con- sciousness, and making their poems there, all of which are different from mine, and some of which outsphere mine ? 222 RECENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. Illustrations of this kind might be multiplied, not in the least for the purpose of ridiculing Idealism, but only for the purpose of exhibiting the involutions of idealism within idealism to which the thinking out of the theory leads. Of the Idealists metaphysically, as of the Ptolemaists physically, it may be said that there is an interest in knowing ' ' how they will wield The mighty frame ; how build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances ; how gird the sphere With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb." Whether Mr. Mill has adequately met the alleged difficulty of reconciling such an idealistic theory as his with the belief in the independent existence of contemporary sentiencies I cannot undertake to say, not having been able to think his explanation out to my own satisfaction. It seems to me, however, that the explanation is too summary as it stands. It is not in the least doubted that Idealism may work out the notion of the existence of other beings besides self. It seems only to be questioned whether, on the idealistic hypothesis, this notion must not be regarded as an illusion. For what is the idealistic hypothesis, as entertained by Mr. Mill? Is it not that the sum-total of existence for each sentiency is its own series of feelings worked out ? What I am aware of as really existing is my thread of consci- ousness, my series of feelings. If, in the course of my series of feelings, there occurs to me the notion of another series of feelings out of me, I may certainly call that an existence, in- asmuch as it belongs to my series of feelings. But do I not leap beyond the fact when I set up this second or notionary series of feelings in independent existence, as emancipated RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. 225 from me, nay, as approaching me for the first time out of circumjacent vacancy where I had nothing to do with it, and even as capable of making my series of feelings, of which it is the creature, its creature in return ? Yet is it not in this sense that we believe in the existence of our fellow-mortals ? How can one thread of consciousness be aware of another conceived thread of consciousness as anything more than its own conception ? Will it be replied by Mr. Mill that this- kind or amount of existence is the same that the first thread of consciousness claims for itself? It does not seem to be so. The Ego and Non-Ego of any thread of consciousness are, according to Mr. Mill, conceptions of that thread of consciousness experimentally arrived at ; but he has never said that the thread of consciousness itself is only a concep- tion of the thread of consciousness. The thread of con- sciousness constituting each man is followed up at last to a specific original of feelings and their associabilities which formed that man's peculiar infant existence, and was as yet the neutrum of his Ego and Non-Ego. The existence which each man predicates of himself is, according to Mr. Mill, derivability from that neutrum ; but is the existence which each man predicates of his fellow-creatures also derivability from that neutrum? If, then, I admit the notion of the existence of my fellow-creatures to be a product of the experience of my thread of consciousness, must I not admit also that this notion corresponds to a fact of which my ex- perience can give no account? But is this Empirical Idealism ? Is it Empirical Idealism first to resolve the whole of my Non-Ego into my acquired notion of per- manent possibilities of sensation, and then to have to admit, respecting those moving bits of my Non-Ego in which I 224 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. recognise alien threads of consciousness or possibilities of feeling, that their existence is not rooted within my being ? Let me not be misunderstood. An Idealism or Cogita- tionism that should start with the assumption that there is in the universe a plurality of minds, sentiencies, threads of consciousness, already discriminated from each other in the nature of things, might very well explain the supposed existence of Matter on the idealistic principle, and might adopt Mr. Mill's definition of Matter as the happiest and most exact that has yet been given. Each of these minds, sentiencies, or threads of consciousness comes to be aware of "permanent possibilities of sensation," which it figures, according to its ability, as a substantial world of matter, external to itself, but the cause of which may be in other minds or sentiencies. The cause of all those sensations which each of us feels, and which we body forth in so mighty a framework of imagery, may be not, as the Natural Realists hold, the actual existence out of us of any material objects at all such as we suppose, but only the per- petual uniform determinations of our minds so to think in consequence of influences or suggestions from other minds say hyperphysical intelligences or one Supreme Mind. By this kind of Idealism, which was very much Berkeley's, the Universe might be simplified into Thought or Notion. But it postulates plurality of minds or threads of conscious- ness in the present universe ; and here it is that Mr. Mill's Cogitationism seems to differ from it. For, in Mr. Mill's system, not only is Matter resolved into a conception of each particular thread of consciousness, worked out by the laws of association from its experienced feelings, but the existence of other sentiences or threads of conscious- RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 22$ ness is resolved into a conception of each particular thread of consciousness, arrived at in the same way. Now, if it is a conception merely, how can I predicate the ex- istence of other minds in the same sense in which I predicate my own? In the case of my own, I have the guarantee of the fact of the thread of consciousness which has come at the conception ; and, if I run back that fact to the utmost, I come still, Mr. Mill admits, to the indestructible fact of a specific initial cogitation of phaeno- mena called feelings, a specific neutrum of Ego and Non- Ego, emerging out of a previous complexity of things, or let it be out of nothingness. But in the other case I have no such guarantee; and, unless I can assume the contempo- raneity of other minds as vouched somehow in the initial neutrum of my own consciousness, or can break through that neutrum, so as to see it but as one in a crowd of other neutra, prior or contemporaneous (both of which supposi- tions Mr. Mill's Empiricism would disallow), then I can predicate the existence of other threads of consciousness only in the sense that they are notions of my thread of con- sciousness. When I say that / exist, I do not mean, nor does Mr. Mill's Cogitationism oblige me to mean, that my thread of consciousness is only a notion of my thread of con- sciousness ; but, when I say that my fellow-creatures exist, in what other sense Mr. Mill's Cogitationism allows me to say it than that these fellow-creatures are notions of my thread of consciousness, I confess I cannot see. But farther. Let all difficulty be supposed overcome about the reconciliation of Mr. Mill's theory with the belief in the existence of a countless plurality of minds and sen- tiencies contemporaneous with our own. Let it be supposed 22 6 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. also that the theory is perfectly reconcileable with our belief in those ages, of mind and sentiency, anterior to the present, and sustaining or constituting the history of things down to the present, of which we have assurance in record and in science. Has not recent science been making another conception incumbent upon us the conception of a point in backward time at which not only human sentiency, but all sentiency whatever, disappears from the scene, and yet the Cosmos is not annihilated, but there remains a more or less substantial priority of non-sentiency, which had a history of its own ? Is it not worth while to look at Mr. Mill's Cogitationism, or at Idealism generally, in connexion with this conception ? A while ago the necessity of such a test of cosmological Idealism was not likely to be thought of. The emergence of the completed Cosmos from an Absolute Unknown was imagined as instant or sudden, and all known sentiency, including that of Man, was imagined as introduced into the Cosmos within, at latest, the first week of it. Idealism, whose principle it is that esse is synonymous with perdpi, had only, as it were, to find the means of sup- porting metaphysically a shell of esse, consisting of the heavens and earth with all their material garnishment, for a brief day or two ; after which the arrival within this shell of a competent native provision of sentiency, or plurality of perceiving powers and forms, relieved the chief amount of the strain. But it is different now that the advent of sentiency into the universe is conceived as gradual. There are long tracts of an esse which could not be a percipi at all to any native sentiencies, save of kinds decreasingly inferior to Man : and again, beyond these, there are farther aeons of an esse, claiming to be thought of as by no means nothing, RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 227 but a real and true ongoing of phenomena, though bereft of all native percipiency whatever. How does Cosmological Idealism, or Mr. Mill's Cogitationism, reconcile itself with this scientific conception ? There is one plan, which I suppose was the plan of the old Idealists in regard to that brief interval over which they had to tide of a material esse in the Cosmos before the advent of a native percipiency. It is the plan of deputation to prior mind or percipiency. For the interval which the older Idealists had to tide over, they could suppose the shell of the material universe sustained or suspended, as it were, as an idea or conception in the thoughts of non-native or hyperphysical intelligences, or in the creative mood of Deity himself this conception waiting for the native sen- tiencies that were to leap on to it, or arise within it, and were to inherit it as prompting-ground for their continued constitutional thinkings. By a little adaptation, the same plan of deputation might be available for present Idealism. A world of some kind might be sustained in existence back- ward, far beyond the era of man, by fancying it as the conjoint function of such inferior native sentiencies or percipiencies as were anterior to man. Or, if such a world seemed too mean, resort might be had immediately to that transcendent "metaphysical aid", which would have finally to be resorted to, in any case, when all native percipiency had been exhausted to the dregs, and there still remained a vast priority of esse refusing to be abolished. Hyperphysical intelligences, to whom our human measure of time is naught, might be reading the marvellous poem of creation and cele- brating its completion in chorus ere yet there was appear- ance of any native sentiency in that creation to take up the 228 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. song. Or He to whom a thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years, and of whom we are told that, surveying the emanation of His mind, He pronounced it good might not He have continued the necessary con- templation ? Of this mode of thought Idealism may avail itself, as I believe all religious human feeling must avail itself of some analogous mode of thought in the long run, whether it calls itself Idealism or not. But it is to be observed that it imports a transcendent reality into Idealism. It does not require the particular reality characteristic of Natural Realism /. e., a real block and history of a material world, distinct from all the minds or sentiencies appertaining to it, and to which they help themselves according to their capacities ; but it requires, as a substitute, a reality of previous idea or thought, transmitted as a housing and pasturage for the sentiencies, minds, or threads of conscious- ness, arriving within it, and furnishing them with the sugges- tions that determine their perceptions and thinkings. What is the relation of Mr. Mill's Cogitationism to Absol- ute Idealism we shall presently see. Meanwhile, it does not appear that it is of any such plan of deputation as that just described that he would avail himself in respect of the problem in question. He holds, apparently, that his phrase " permanent possibilities of sensation," taken as expressing that Non-Ego or material world which each individual mind works out for itself, is amply sufficient to cover, for that mind, all requisites of conceivability back to the Nebula. He does not devolve the burden of sustaining the conception of a world not yet tenanted by man, or by any sentient forms, upon supposed non-native or hyperphysical intelligences; but, leaving the question RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 229 of the existence of such intelligences open, he thinks that each human intelligence is capable of sustaining the burden for itself without going beyond the process of its own thoughts. Now we cannot see how Mr. Mill makes this out. There is not the least objection to his phrase " permanent possi- bilities of sensation" as an equivalent for the material world. It is a phrase admirably chosen in many respects, and one which Natural Realists, as well as Constructive Idealists, might accept as expressing what they agree in before they begin to differ. All schools, indeed, agree that there are " permanent possibilities of sensation " ; and the sole ques- tion among them is as to the nature of the cause of these permanent possibilities. Natural Realists find the cause in an actual external material world with which the mind is so constituted as to hold intuitive commerce; Constructive Idealists find it in some agency, physical or hyperphysical, determining the mind to uniform sensations or images, but not necessarily in the least like them in its own nature ; Absolute Idealists find it immediately in the thoughts of the Divine mind. In each case there is a substratum for the possibilities a something out of which they are imagined as springing, and which is independent of the mind of the indi- vidual percipient. But in Mr. Mill's Cogitationism there is no such substratum allowed or taken for granted. Each mind, or thread of consciousness, is supposed to work out its notion of an external world by a process confined to itself; and it is the notion of "permanent possibilities of sensation " so worked out by each mind for itself that Mr. Mill must hold to be a sufficient notion of a material world wherewith to cover all that that mind may be called upon, 230 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. by history or science, to believe in as existing or having happened before its own birth, or before the era of humanity on the earth, or before the era of any forms of sentiency on the earth, or back, if need be, to the imagined convolutions of a universal Nebula. But is any such notion of " perma- nent possibilities " as may be worked out by the process of the individual consciousness sufficient for this immense burden ? As far as I can see, it is not. For either the "permanent possibilities" are only a notion of the individual mind, evolved in the course of that mind's development out of its original condition as a mere neutrum of Ego and Non-Ego, a mere bundle of feelings ; or they are more than a notion, and answer to a fact in the nature of things beyond the individual mind taken in its whole evolution from the first moment. If they are a mere notion, what happens ? The mind may then fill antecedent time with any cloud of possibilities it chooses, and it may elect to fill it with those precise possibilities which history and science represent as real occurrences. But in all this it is only filling antecedent time with a notion ; and a notion won't do. For it is out of antecedent time, and in consequence of the conditions of antecedent time, whatever they were, that the mind must think of itself as having come to exist ; and, if the sole con- tents of antecedent time are a notion of the present mind, then the mind that has formed the notion must think of itself as springing out of the notion which itself has formed. Physics and metaphysics are then at war. The world of antecedent existence is. metaphysically, the child of the conceiving mind, and this child is, physically, the ancestor of its own mother. Mr. Mill, then, cannot mean that the " permanent possibilities of sensation," which he offers as RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 231 equivalent to all we know of an external world, are a mere notion of the individual mind conceiving them, and nothing more. Well, then, let us take the other alternative that these " permanent possibilities " are indeed a notion of the individual mind, but a notion which it knows or believes to answer to a fact in the independent nature of things. Here we should be all right ; only this is precisely the position with respect to our belief in an external world from which Mr. Mill's Empirical Cogitationism seems to seek to drive us. That the mind, without going beyond its own experi- ence, may form a notion of "permanent possibilities of sensation " let it be granted that his theory is competent so far; but, if what is wanted is that the mind may form such a notion, and also know or believe that the notion corresponds to a fact in the nature of things, then how his theory will suffice, unless by knocking a hole in itself, it is difficult to conceive. For to form such a notion, and to know or believe that the notion does not end in itself, but shakes hands with a fact in nature what is this but to have an intuition, to acknowledge a structural compulsion to an act of faith, to refer out of the mind to a basis or security for its conceptions in things beyond ? In order to account, therefore, for our belief in an ante- cedent history of things, whether back to the Nebula, or to any other point that may be taken as the proper cosmical beginning, must not Mr. Mill considerably enlarge that ulti- mate inexplicability to which (at the peril, as it seemed, of the principle of his own philosophy) we found him willing to confess ? If the mind is to be spoken of as a " series of feelings " (which is the definition of Mind he contends for), then, he admitted, an inexplicable mystery must be acknow- 232 RE CEN7' BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. ledged in the mind's constitution. It must be thought of as " a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future." The alternative was that either the definition of mind as " a series of feelings " must be abandoned, and the mind must be thought of as " something different from any series of feelings or possibilities of them," or the paradox must be maintained that " that which, ex hypothest, is but a series of feelings can be aware of itself as a series." Keeping his definition, Mr. Mill must be supposed to have accepted the accompanying paradox. "The true incomprehensi- "bility," he said, "perhaps is, that something which has " ceased or is not yet in existence can still be in a manner " present that a series of feelings the infinitely greater part " of which is past or future can be gathered up into a single "present conception accompanied by a belief of reality" Ob- serve the last phrase. It exactly expresses what we have arrived at in examining the reconcileability of Mr. Mill's Cogitationism with the mind's knowledge of a world pre- existing itself. Only " as a present conception accompanied by a belief in reality" will Mr. Mill's Non-Ego or "perman- ent possibilities of sensation " cover our knowledge of an antecedent history of things. It is not the " present con- ception," but the accompanying " belief in reality", that is the required factotum. But it is a " belief in reality " of a wider range than Mr. Mill then particularly bargained for, though he must surely have been aware of its elasticity even to the present requirement. For then he was thinking only of the life of an individual mind, and only of as much of that life as consisted in the mind's self-consciousness. Even so, in order to account for the indubitable experience of every mind within its own life, it was necessary to suppose RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 233 an organic union of the successive moments of that life in a sense of identity or personality. It was necessary to suppose that a series of feelings could be aware of itself as a series that perhaps something which had ceased, or was not yet in existence, could still be, in a manner, present. But, for the requisites of our present problem, must not this mystery be enlarged ? In order to account for certainty in a world pre- ceding ourselves, must not each series of feelings, constitut- ing a self, be aware of itself not only as a series, but as a series that is not foreclosed at its own nominal beginning, but depends on a vaster series ? In the total self, as well as in each moment of that self, must there not be a sense of a something past which is still in a manner present /'. e. of a bequest into self of a something that was not self? No mere gathering up of the past or future moments of the single thread of consciousness into a single conception will suffice. There must be a conception of the thread of consciousness transcending the whole thread of conscious- ness which conception would be worthless unless accom- panied by a belief in a reality corresponding. What the reality is may be phrased in various ways, by Materialists, Natural Realists, Constructive Idealists, and Absolute Ideal- ists. The belief in some reality or other, supporting or yielding " the permanent possibilities of sensation " of which one figures the past as composed, is what all systems alike require; and, if a single series of feelings, evolving itself from an initial neutrum, could generate the conception of the "permanent possibilities," how else could it add the required belief in a corresponding reality than through some necessity so to believe, inwrought in the very nature of the neutrum ? 234 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. Whatever farther objections may arise to Mr. Mill's new cosmological doctrine will mostly resolve themselves, I fancy, into the question, on which we have just been trenching, of the reconcileability of the doctrine with his principle of Empiricism. We proceed, therefore, to a remark or two on Mr. Mill's volume in as far as it illustrates his present state of feeling with respect to the fundamental principle of all his philosophy hitherto. Had we adhered to our former order of topics, we should have taken this point first. But there have been reasons for the slight difference of arrangement Mr. Mill's volume, we now therefore say in the second place, is wholly, and from first to last, a reassertion of his psychological theory of Empiricism against the opposite theory of Transcendentalism. As it is the latest, so it is the most uncompromising and most thorough-going, British manifesto in favour of Empiricism. Its very purpose is to reassert Locke's principle in a form adapted to the latest developments of opinion, and to exhibit afresh its universal competency. Not only is this the implied drift of every chapter and page, but there are portions of the volume specially devoted to a re-explication of the principle of Experience and a demonstration of its sufficiency for every possible requirement of philosophy. More particularly, there is brought forward, under the name of " the law of inseparable association," a reserve of strength in the Experi- ential principle, which Mr. Mill believes that the Transcen- dentalists, and especially Hamilton and Mansel, have uniformly ignored. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 235 Now, with all our admiration of Mr. Mill's arguments, and with every willingness to admit that, in consequence of some of them, Transcendentalism may have to change some of its dispositions and re-intrench itself (which is always the effect of a good attack, as Empiricism has itself confessed again and again by its own behaviour in like circumstances), we must avow our general conviction that Mr. Mill has left the battle perfectly renewable on the side of Transcenden- talism. We see not the least reason why, notwithstanding the immediate hurrahing that there has been on the other side, and among mere bystanders, over so vigorous and well- conducted an onslaught, Transcendentalism may not be as lively among us as ever, and quite confident of its power, if equally well led, to inflict as valiant a retaliation. Indeed we must say that there is hardly any one of the old stock arguments of the Transcendentalists against Locke's prin- ciple that Mr. Mill's volume seems to have robbed of its real force. Leibnitz's "intdlectus ipse" the well-known illustration of the impossibility of conceiving that two straight lines should enclose a space, and many more of the like, seem to me to survive all Mr. Mill's reasonings in the present volume, and to start up again as popularly available as ever. There is no use, however, in going back on these old forms of objection to the theory of Empiricism. Let us look at the theory in respect of its compatability with that cosmo- logical system of Constructive Idealism, or, as we have called it ultimately, Cogitationism, which Mr. Mill has advanced in its interest. For it is expressly in the interest of the principle of Empiricism that Mr. Mill has advanced his new cosmological conception. Of all our natural, or, as the Transcendentalists say, intuitive beliefs, there is none 236 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. surely more natural, more intuitive, than our belief in the distinction or independent reality of these two things an external world or Non-Ego, and an internal personality or Ego. If, then, the origin of this belief can be empirically accounted for, Empiricism may be said to have been crucially tested. Now Mr. Mill's new cosmological Idealism is propounded expressly to show that Empiricism can stand even this test. It is offered as a proof that the most immense and consequential of all our so-called natural beliefs can be accounted for on the principle of Experience without any d priori supposition. Let us view it afresh in this particular light. First, as to the possibility of accounting empirically for our belief in an external world. " I proceed," says Mr. Mill, breaking ground first on this part of his subject, " to " state the case of those who hold that belief in an external " world is not intuitive, but an acquired product" And how does he proceed? "This theory," he proceeds, "postulates " the following psychological truths, all of which are proved " by experience. ... It postulates, first, that the human " mind is capable of expectation in other words, that, after " having had actual sensations, we are capable of forming * l the conception of possible sensations. ... It postulates, " secondly, the laws of the Association of Ideas. So far as " we are here concerned, these laws are the following : ist. " Similar phenomena tend to be thought of together. 2nd. " Phenomena which have either been experienced or con- " ceived in close contiguity to one another tend to be " thought of together. The contiguity is of two kinds " simultaneity and immediate succession. . . . 3rd. Asso- " ciations produced by contiguity become more certain and RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. 237 "rapid by repetition. Where two phenomena have been " very often experienced in conjunction, and have not in a " single instance occurred separately, either in experience or " in thought, there has been produced between them what " has been called Inseparable, or, less correctly, Indissoluble " Association : by which is not meant that the association " must inevitably last to the end of life, that no subsequent " experience or process of thought can possibly avail to " dissolve it, but only that, as long as no such experience or " process of thought has taken place, the association is " inevitable. . . . 4th. When an association has acquired " this character of inseparability when the bond between " the two ideas has been thus firmly riveted not only does " the idea called up by association become, in our con- " sciousness, inseparable from the idea which suggested it, " but the facts or phaenomena answering to these ideas- u come at last to seem inseparable in existence." * If these postulates are granted, there is no difficulty whatever, Mr. Mill holds, in showing how a notion of an external world or Non-Ego, including all that either people in general or the majority of philosophers require to be bound up in that notion, may have grown up factitiously, as a mere product of experience. For out of these conditions there would inevitably be formed a habit, or call it instinct, of the mature mind, in every act of sensation or conception, to regard what occurred in that act as only the immediately present flash out of an infinitely wider area of permanent external possibilities of sensation, more or less accessible. And what more than this need any theory of the external world include ? Why assume the notion of a Non-Ego as *Pp. 190/191. 238 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL O SO PHY. an original or intuitive datum of consciousness, when we can see so clear a way in which, though it was not in conscious- ness from the beginning, it not only might, but must, have grown up there, so as now to be perpetually and irresistibly present ? Of course, even were this analysis of our notion of the Non-Ego to be accepted with acclamation as absolutely and in every particular satisfactory, Mr. Mill cannot mean that it would establish the principle of Empiricism. It would only establish the Berkeleyan Idealism. It would show that one most important notion or belief that of the existence of an external world need not be held primitive, but may be re- solved into prior notions or beliefs ; but, so far from shutting us up therefore to the theory of a factitious origin for our notions and beliefs in general, it would seem even to work the other way. By retiring the d priori element from one wing, in which its presence seemed unnecessary, it would only mass that element in closer strength on the other wing For what does the speculation amount to? To what else than this that, given a mind, or thinking principle, endowed with a capability of expectation, and with a priori notions of likeness, coexistence, and succession (and in this capability and these notions there seem to be included the notions, or mental forms, of Time and Number, or Plurality, if not also some others), then the notion of an external world might well be a mere result or factitious product of the experience of such a mind? But, surely, in what is here begged or postulated, in the shape of structural pre-equipment for the mind ere the notion of an external world could be generated out of its experience, the Transcendentalist has a pretty large allowance of the sort of thing he wants. Not at this RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 239 stage, therefore, can Mr. Mill think for a moment that the argument is closed. But what if he can account empirically for the notion of Mind too ? Then the whole field will be swept, and not a wrack of the mirage of Transcendentalism need disturb the universal clearness of the view. To this feat, accordingly, Mr. Mill next addresses himself. Having demonstrated, in one chapter, that, according to the correct psychological theory, the belief in matter " is but the form impressed by " the known laws of association upon the conception or " notion, obtained by experience, of contingent (i.e. non- " present, but possible) sensations," he proceeds, in another chapter, " to carry the inquiry a step farther, and to examine 41 whether the Ego, as a deliverance of consciousness, stands " on any firmer ground than the Non-Ego whether, at the " first moment of our experience, we already have in our " consciousness the conception of Self as a permanent exist- " ence, or whether it is formed subsequently, and admits of a ''similar analysis to that which we have found that the " notion of Not-Self is susceptible of." What the issue of the inquiry is we have already seen. It is that the sole effective notion we all have, or can want, of Mind is that of a series of feelings reposing on, or, as we may say, naviga- ting, infinite permanent possibilities of feeling. It is a flash- ing-on of consciousness from moment to moment, each flash giving a horizon of a limited present, but conveying also the irresistible conviction of endless other horizons of a non- present or possible. Now the question is not about the ac- ceptability of this definition of Mind a definition which I can conceive heated, and coloured, and glorified, till it should have charms for the poet no less than for the meta- 2 4 o RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. physician. The question is as to the possibility of an empirical origin for the notion of Mind or Personality, taken as so defined. When Mr. Mill says that such a conception of Mind or Self admits of a " similar analysis" back into ex- perience to that of which the notion of Not-Self has been shown by him to be susceptible, what does he mean ? Does he require for the evolution of the notion of the Ego the same postulates as in the case of the Non-Ego? Hardly the same, surely, though he says nothing on the subject. For what were these postulates ? " That the human mind " is capable of expectation that, after having had actual " sensations, we are capable of forming conceptions of pos- " sible sensations :" also the four laws of the Association of Ideas to wit, (i) that " similar phaenomena tend to be thought of together;" (2) that phenomena experienced or conceived as either simultaneous or immediately sequent " tend to be thought of together ;" (3) that associations of this second class " become more certain and rapid by repeti- tion," till, by very frequent and uninterrupted coincidence, they may acquire a character of inseparability; (4) that, when an association of ideas has acquired this character of inseparability, the notion of inseparability is transferred from the ideas to the phenomena thought of. Mr. Mill cannot surely want this cumbrous allowance of postulation for the evolution of our conception of an Ego out of conditions in which it was not originally present ; or, if he does want it, we may be a little astonished. For what would be virtually his offer in such a case ? What but that, if there w r ere given him a mind endowed with the capability of expectation, and structurally equipped with the notions of likeness, coexist- ence, and succession (involving Time and Plurality), then he RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 241 would undertake to show that out of such a mind's experi- ence of phsenomena there might be generated the notion of " present feelings with a background of permanent possibili- ties of feeling." Would not this be very much as if out of a four-horse stage-coach one were to offer empirically to pro- duce a tandem or gig ? Empirically ! yes, save for the slight a priori concession of the four-horse coach ! Of course, I repeat, Mr. Mill cannot possibly have meant any such absurdity. But he does not sufficiently guard against the chance that it might be attributed to him. The very title of his chapter, " The Psychological Theory of Matter, how far applicable to Mind," suggests that the process of the evolution of belief, explained in the preceding chapter as accounting for the origin of the notion of Matter, is to be carried on into this chapter as accounting also for the origin of the notion of Mind; and I am much mis- taken if the unwary reader of the second chapter does not fancy that he has the full benefit still of the postu- lates of the first. There is no formal abrogation, in the second chapter, of these postulates, nor any re-expression of them to suit a new problem, to which, as they stand, their very phraseology is repugnant; nor is there any sufficient suggestion of a new process whereby that which was spoken of in the foregoing chapter (provisionally, it must be sup- posed) under such terms as " the human mind," " we," " our," &c., and figured as a structure of very definite forms and capabilities holding converse with phenomena, might be now seen to melt itself into the required " series of feelings with permanent possibilities of feeling." In other words, Mr. Mill, in order to account empirically for the notion of the Non-Ego, postulates in one chapter an Ego which is Q 242 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. wonderfully like the ordinary Ego of the Transcendent- alists; this Ego he resolves in the next chapter into a form so different from the Ego postulated that it would be interesting to know how, if he were compelled to go back and work with it as a substitute for the postu- lated Ego, he would be able to repeat his preliminary exposition of the derivativeness of the notion of Matter : but as to how this second notion of the Ego is arrived at, there is, within the limits of the chapter, no detailed explanation. We are not left in the dark, however. We can fall back on the theory of Cogitationism as, from various hints here and elsewhere, we can see that Mr. Mill would work it in that earlier stage of the process when as yet neither the Ego nor the Non-Ego has been developed in the crude conscious- ness, but there is only the initial neutrum of both. Here, of course, we cannot speak of a mind observing phenomena, and forming conceptions and expectations according to the laws of the association of ideas by likeness, coexistence, and succession. That is a form of language not applicable till the mind is supposed sufficiently extricated from the phsenomena of sensation and movement to be able con- sciously to watch them as something distinct from itself. We have not yet got at Mind in this sense. What we are at work with is the material out of which the notions both of mind and matter are evolved. What is that ? Feelings and their associabilities ; a certain curdling or cogitation of phaenomena definable simply as feelings ; that first kind of consciousness in which the Ego and the Non-Ego lie confused or intertwined. It is out of this state of things that Mr. Mill maintains that our notions of Matter, as " a RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 243 permanent possibility of sensation," and Mind as " a per- manent possibility of feeling," might be generated empirically and without any a priori assumption. It seems to me that a very large amount of a priori assumption is implied in the very terms of the statement. It is assumed, in the first place, that there are certain pre- determined associabilities among the phsenomena of feeling from the first that they tend to come together, or to grow together, according to certain laws or rules of associa- bility pre-imparted to them. It is assumed, in the second place, that the phaenomena themselves are, atomically, if I may so express it, or in their own individual nature, apart from their associabilities, of a certain kind, and no other, by a priori derivation : (i.) The Associabilities. These must be represented now not as associabilities by conscious like- ness, coexistence, or succession (for these, with the involved notions of Time and Plurality, are surely mental notions, the origin of which requires to be accounted for as much as the origin of the notions of Matter and Mind, and can hardly have been earlier), but rather as physical or physio- logical associabilities, which we can characterize in the retrospect as likenesses, coexistences, or successions, but which, as acting among the phsenomena themselves, may have involved much not so describable. If we take Mr. Bain's phrase " nervous currents " as furnishing the physical equivalent to the phaenomena of feeling, then we may say that coexistent or immediately consequent nervous currents tend by repetition to form permanent associations, and also perhaps (though this is farther-fetched) that like nervous currents tend to occur together; or there may be other definitions of the associabilities of nerve-currents that 244 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. Physiology has yet to find out. Mr. Mill abstains from the phrase "nerve-currents" preferring to talk consistently with his metaphysical Idealism, according to which, if the nerve-currents are the causes of the feelings, yet, as these nerve-currents, like all other things and existences, are only conceptions or notions of their own effects, the effects must have the precedence in metaphysical discourse. This is very characteristic. That there are feelings is certain ; that there are nerves or human bodies at all is but an item in that conception of a material world which the Idealist main- tains to be merely a conception ; and, though it may be an irresistible part of the conception that the nerves originate or occasion the feelings, it would be doing wrong to Idealism, in metaphysical argument, to start with the nerves. But among those "phenomena of feeling" which Mr. Mill, as an Idealist, consistently does start with, he recognises associabilities not the less describable in the retrospect as associabilities by likeness, coexistence, and succession. Without those precise associabilities among the crude phaenomena of feeling there would not be the result he seeks i.e. the generation of those notions of Mind and Matter, of an Ego and a Non-Ego, which each mature mind has. But, as these associabilities are laws pre-imparted to the phaenomena, and regulating most stringently the process of their cogitation, how can the process be said to be empirical? Precisely what Transcendentalism asserts in opposition to Empiricism is that in every process there must be conceived a derived or d priori element on which the result depends. It matters not how far the inquiry is moved back. If the mature human mind is taken, then Tran- scendentalism asserts that there is an ct priori element in it RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 245 forms or necessities of its structure, according to which it must and does think. If a certain coagulation of phenomena, called feelings, is taken as that out of which the human mind was convolved into completed being, equally there Tran- scendentalism undertakes to place its finger on something and say, "That is ci priori" The associabilities of the feel- ings are a priori; their reason and origin transcend the process itself. (2.) The Feelings themselves. There is an a priori element here too. What the result shall be depends on the a priori kind or nature of the atoms, as well as on the pre-imparted associabilities by which they are drawn into combinations. Else why should there be differences of sentiency? "Feelings" or "phenomena of feelmg" is an indiscriminate Atlantic of a phrase. In fact, there must be millions of kinds of "feelings" or "phsenomena of feeling," all in busy, already discriminated existence, out of a priori depths of the Unfathomable ; so that, even if the same associabilities prevailed among them in common, the results could never approximate. There are feelings and feelings. Why, in one case, should the result of the cogitation of feeling be a dog, or an earwig, rather than a man ? Why but because there was an inherent dogginess or earwigginess in the given kind of associable feelings, which, whatever the associations formed among the feelings, would not let the result be anything else than a dog or an earwig? Is there nothing d priori in this? Deliberately I have brought the question between Em- piricism and Transcendentalism to this pass, knowing what will be said. " What is the mighty difference," it will be said, " between Empiricism and Transcendentalism, if this 246 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. is Transcendentalism ? Would Empiricism deny aught of what you have here called it Transcendentalism to maintain? If it is the sole difference between Transcendentalism and Empiricism that the one maintains that in every thing, or process, there is an a priori or inherited element, necessarily assisting to determine what shall be the history of the thing or the result of the process, while the other maintains that this also, on our mounting higher in the evolution, may be resolved into experience if this is all, is it not only the old story of looking at the gold-and-silver shield from opposite sides, and pronouncing it golden or silver according to the side looked at?" Not so; I cannot think that it is so. Send Transcendentalism and Empiricism back, tugging with each other on the very terms described, through all stages of the evolution from the present moment, and at every stage Transcendentalism is the mode of thought that keeps the field, while Empiricism must still be the fugitive. That is something. And, at the utmost, when the Nebula, or whatever else may be deemed primordial and homogeneous in the phenomenal evolution, is reached and rushed through by the two combatants, the pursued and the pursuing, is there not a mighty consequence in the ultimate victory? If Empiricism, fugitive till then, can then turn at bay and conquer, it can only be because its back is against Zero, against Nihilism, against a wall of absolute blackness. If Transcendentalism is still courageous and sure of the victory, it can only be because it sees in the middle of the wall of blackness a blazing gate, and knows it to be the gate whence the chariots issued and issue of an eternal a priori. And here perspective is as nothing. Wherever we stand, it is either the wall of absolute blackness that terminates our RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 247 view, or the blazing gate shoots its radiance to where we are and move. Mr. Mill having, throughout his volume, reasserted the principle of Experientialism or Empiricism against that of Transcendentalism in philosophy, and having, in one portion of his volume, put forth, as the proper consequence of this principle when applied to our notions of Matter and Mind, that developed system of cosmological Idealism which I have ventured to call Cogitationism, it becomes interesting to inquire, finally, in what attitude, on the platform of such a total metaphysical system of Empirical Idealism, he leaves his readers standing, in view of the permanent ontological questions, or questions of the Supernatural. Partly, we have already had hints and informations on this subject. Accepting the doctrine of the Relativity of all knowledge, but declaring the doctrine to be incompatible, in any sense in which it would be worth keeping, with that cosmological system of Natural Realism with which Sir William Hamilton tried to associate it nay, ultimately identifying the doctrine with the principle of Experientialism itself, and denying by implication its compatibility with Transcendentalism Mr. Mill, as we have seen, agrees with Sir William Hamilton, or even outgoes him, in his formal repudiation of Ontology. All our knowledge, he declares, can only be of the relative or phenomenal ; of Noumena, Absolute Causes, or Things in themselves, we know, and can know, nothing. Again and again this declaration is made. It pervades the entire volume. We have now to note, however, two respects in which, notwithstanding this 248 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. formal agreement with Sir William Hamilton in the repudia- tion of all Ontology, Mr. Mill is by no means at one with Sir William on that last frontier of speculative philosophy where the shore of the ontological is supposed to be reached. (i.) Under the name of Faith, Sir William Hamilton affirmed, as Mr. Mill has himself explained, much that he declared to be utterly unpredicable in the name of Reason. There is, he thought, a structural necessity of the human mind whereby it is compelled to believe much that it cannot know to accept inexplicabilities, nay, inconceivabilities, as nevertheless facts. It was on this principle (avowed, but not sufficiently explained) that Sir William Hamilton, not- withstanding his speculative doctrine of ultimate Nescience, or the incognoscibility of the Absolute, assumed, with a fervour equal to that of any Ontologist, the veritable Absolute of the Theists. Now, although Mr. Mill has had at one point to resort practically for himself to an ultimate salvo which looks very like Faith although, to stop a hole in his theory of Mind, he has had to assume an inexplica- bility, an inconceivability, a paradox, as nevertheless a fact yet, in his general philosophy, he provides no room or function whatever for Belief as distinct from Knowledge. If we assert a Deity, it must be as a legitimate inference from the phenomena of our experience ; if we predicate certain attributes or actions of this Deity, these also must be rational inferences from the facts that come within our observation, investigated according to the ordinary principles of reason- ing. In other words, if Theism and Theology are to sustain themselves at all, it can only be by the a posteriori argument, and not by any form or forms of the a priori one. This is RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 249 certainly an interesting intimation of Mr. Mill's opinion to professional theologians. That Bridgewater " Argument from Design " which has been so much derided of late is, after all, he asserts, the only argument on which Theism can make any stand ; and the much-abused method of Paley, both in Natural Theology and in the matter of the Christian Evidences, was, after all, the only right method. If Paley fails, or rather if Paley's style of argument fails, all is over. Herein, I say, there is certainly a difference between Mr. Mill and Sir William Hamilton a difference which will be construed by many as giving the advantage to the Hamil- tonian system in connection with Theism and Theology. For, without forgoing whatever may be of worth in the a posteriori argument, Sir William would reach Theism and Theology also, or primarily, through faith, or an a priori necessity of our mental constitution ; and, since our surfeit of Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises some time ago, this is the kind of warrant for Religion that has seemed deepest and strongest to most Theists. (2.) Per contra^ however, Mr. Mill makes some correc- tions of Sir William Hamilton's doctrine of Relativity, or our nescience of the Absolute, which may be taken as relieving that doctrine itself from certain supposed impediments to rational religious belief. For example, Sir William Hamil- ton's assertion was that in our notion of the Absolute there is nothing positive whatever that our sole conception of the Absolute is that of "a negation of conceivability." And Mr. Mansel, expanding the statement, declares the Ab- solute and the Infinite to be but " names indicating, not an " object of thought or consciousness at all, but the mere " absence of the conditions under which consciousness is 250 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. " possible." Many critics of Hamilton, while agreeing with his doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge, or the Unknow- ableness of the Absolute, have dissented from this extreme form of it, which would allow in our notion of the Absolute nothing else than a negation or paralysis of all conception. Mr. Herbert Spencer, for one, has argued at some length against this as " a grave error," even while expounding ap- provingly Sir William's main doctrine of Relativity.* He contends for the necessarily positive character, however vague, of our consciousness of the Unconditioned. In our notion of the Unlimited, he argues, our consciousness of limits is abolished, but not the consciousness of some kind of being stretching out and away into an illimitable. Here and with considerable similarity in the mode of argument Mr. Mill follows and corroborates Mr. Spencer in his criticism of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy of the Conditioned (Chapter VI.). So long as we use the abstractions, " the Absolute," " the Infinite," he says, it may be possible to as- sert that our corresponding conceptions are utterly void of any positive element are, in fact, simple failures to conceive any meaning at all. But couple the predicate "Absolute " or "Infinite" with a subject say "Infinite Space," or "Ab- solute Goodness," and then the mind is conscious of a tolerably positive element in the compound effort of thought. When we think of space as infinite, we think away the limits, but we do not cease to think of it as continuing to be space ; when we try to imagine absolute Goodness, we fail in realis- ing the predicate " absolute," but the Goodness remains in our thoughts substantive enough. Or, if what we mean by * Mr. Spencer's First Principles, pp. 8797. RECENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. 2 5 1 the abstractions " the Absolute," " the Infinite," be (as Mr. Spencer understands, and as Sir William Hamilton himself doubtless understood when he used these phrases indepen- dently), " Absolute Existence" or " Infinite Being," then still, Mr. Mill would say (as Mr. Spencer has said), there is a positive element, however vague and general, present in our conception inasmuch as we still think of Existence or Being as that something whose absoluteness or infinitude is incon- ceivable. Nor is all this without consequence. Not unim- portant as regards Sir William Hamilton's own philosophy, the error (as Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer agree in considering it) in his statement of the doctrine of Relativity, as bearing on the question of rational Theism, swells into immense pro- portions in Mr. Mansel's express application of the Hamil- tonian doctrine to Christian Theology. Accordingly, Mr. Mansel's whole elaboration of Hamilton's Philosophy of the Conditioned in its bearings on Religion is assailed by Mr. Mill in a separate onslaught (Chapter VIL). "He main- tains," says Mr. Mill, speaking of Mr. Mansel, " the neces- " sary relativity of all our knowledge. He holds that the " Absolute and the Infinite, or, to use a more significant ex- " pression, an Absolute or an Infinite being, are inconceiv- " able by us, and that, when we strive to conceive what is " thus inaccessible to our faculties, we fall into self-contradic- " tion. That we are nevertheless warranted in believing, " and bound to believe, the real existence of an absolute and " infinite being, and that this being is God. God, therefore, " is inconceivable and unknowable by us, and cannot even " be thought of without self-contradiction ; that is (for Mr. " Mansel is careful thus to qualify the assertion), thought of " as Absolute, and as Infinite. Through this inherent im- 252 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. " possibility of our conceiving or knowing God's essential " attributes, we are disqualified from judging what is or is " not consistent with them. If, then, a religion is presented " to us, containing any particular doctrine respecting the " Deity, our belief or rejection of the doctrine ought to de- " pend exclusively upon the evidences which can be pro- " duced for the divine origin of the religion ; and no argu- " ment grounded on the incredibility of the doctrine, as in- " volving an intellectual absurdity, or on its moral badness "as unworthy of a good or wise being, ought to have any " weight, since of these things we are incompetent to " judge." * Mr. Mill's opinion of this doctrine being that it is "simply the most morally pernicious doctrine now current," he spares no pains in denouncing and exposing it. There is probably no portion of his volume that will be read with keener popular relish, or more frequently quoted from, than precisely that which contains his attack on Mr. Mansel. It is an attack, as we have hinted, which the prevailing theology will pretty unanimously adopt, with thanks to Mr. Mill. For, however common it has been with theologians to avail themselves of a mild form of Mr. Mansel's doctrine, and, by the single averment that God's ways are not as our ways, to bar or silence rational objections to particular dogmas of Theology, yet Mr. Mansel's doctrine in full, as he propounds it, is one from which all theologians, save a few, would undoubtedly shrink. Whatever mysteries, or inex- plicabilities, or inconceivabilities there may be in Religion, few theologians would contend for that kind of mystery which should maintain that, precisely because our sole notion * Pp. 88, 89. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY, 253 of the Absolute or Deity is that of a Being respecting whom we can make no predicate whatever, or respecting whom we can only say that he unites all possible predicates, including even those that are contradictory of each other, while at the same time none of these predicates have the same meaning that they would have if applied to a human being, therefore no objection is to be made to a Religion, miraculously at- tested, on account of the intrinsic nature of any of its teach- ings. What is called Rational Theology, at all events, has never committed itself to this. Now here Mr. Mill comes to the help of Rational Theology. He does not enter on the question of the possibility that any evidence whatever could attest to us that a Revelation had come from Deity, if we had no preliminary notion of Deity whereby to be sure that the Revelation had come from Him no other notion of the source of the revelation than that it was the inconceivable home of no attribute, or of no attribute in a human sense, or of all opposite attributes simultaneously, and all in non-human senses. He confines himself to an indignant protest, in the name of reason, against the notion that such a Deity could be, on any terms, the object of the religious sentiment. Only in so far as Deity can be conceived as a Being en- dowed with those attributes (goodness, wisdom, justice, power, &c.) which we love and reverence in men, and with those attributes in the very senses in which they are predi- cated of men, albeit in Deity they are regarded as raised to the degree of infinity and in that respect are rolled beyond all grasp of our comprehension only in as. far as Religion can offer such a Deity, ought reason, or morality, or com- mon sense, or the heart of man, Mr. Mill argues, to have 254 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. satisfaction in Religion or to tolerate it in the world. But he sees nothing in the doctrine of the Relativity of Know- ledge, or Incognoscibility of the Absolute, rightly inter- preted, to deprive men of such a conception of Deity, if it can be otherwise fairly arrived at by induction from the phenomena of experience. Speaking in behalf of those " Rationalists," or believers in a " Rational Theology," against whom Mr. Hansel's arguments are principally directed, he says that they may "hold with Mr. Mansel himself the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge," and yet not be " touched by his reasoning." For they may reply to Mr. Mansel thus : " We cannot know God as he is " in himself; granted : and what then ? Can we know man as " he is in himself, or matter as it is in itself? We do not "claim any other knowledge of God than such as we have " of man or of matter. Because I do not know my fellow- " men, nor any of the powers of nature, as they are in them- " selves, am I therefore not at liberty to disbelieve anything " I hear respecting them as being inconsistent with their *' character? I know something of Man and Nature, not as " they are in themselves, but as they are relatively to us ; " and it is as relative to us, and not as he is in himself, that " I suppose myself to know anything of God. The attri- " butes which I ascribe to him, as goodness, knowledge, "power, are all relative. They are attributes (says the " rationalist) which my experience enables me to conceive, "and which I consider as proved, not absolutely, by an " intuition of God, but phenomenally, by his action on the " creation, as known through my senses and my rational " faculty. These relative attributes, each of them in an " infinite degree, are all I pretend to predicate of God. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 255 " When I reject a doctrine as inconsistent with God's nature, " it is not as being inconsistent with what God is in himself, " but with what he is as manifested to us. If my knowledge " of him is only phenomenal, the assertions which I reject " are phenomenal too." * In short, whatever theology is content to offer itself not as an ontology or science of the Absolute itself, but simply on the same terms as any other science, or as a generalization of certain phenomena in the supposition that they are the phenomena or effects of a Divine personality antecedent to all nature, is safe, Mr. Mill holds, from all injury from the doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge, as understood by true philosophy, and can only be assailed, as any other theory might be, on ordi- nary logical grounds. Such a theology has but to prove itself to be the only adequate theory or generalization of the phenomena, or of certain phenomena, of nature, to make itself good; and it is only a theology that should profess itself to be more than this, to be a revelation of the absolute or noumenal Existence underlying all phenomenal nature, that true philosophy must condemn beforehand. In all this, however, Mr. Mill has spoken only vicariously, or by way of showing the compatibility of certain views with certain denned conditions, provided they have fulfilled certain other denned conditions. What one wants to know is the final attitude in which, according to Mr. Mill's own judgment of his system of Empirical Cogitationism all in all, it ought to leave men in respect of the great religious questions. Here the last word of Mr. Mill's volume seems to be *P P . 98, 99. 256 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. simply what is implied in the very quotations in which he has spoken vicariously. It is a reiteration of what we have seen him assert in his article on Comte's Philosophy to wit, that, so far as is yet visible, true philosophy (/. e. Empirical Idealism or Empirical Cogitationism) may fairly leave these questions open. The most explicit statement to this effect, in his own name, occurs, I think, in the chapter in which, after expounding his idealistic or cogitational theory of Matter, he considers how far the same theory is applicable to Mind. It had been objected by Reid to the idealistic theory that it left no evidence of the existence of our fellow- creatures, and no evidence of the existence of God. We have seen how Mr. Mill disposes of the first part of the objection to wit, that the theory would leave us without evidence of the existence of other created minds or senti- encies besides our own. This part of the objection disposed of, Mr. Mill proceeds to answer the second part. " As the " theory," he says, " leaves the evidence of the existence of " my fellow-creatures exactly as it was before, so does it " also with that of the existence of God. Supposing me to " believe that the Divine Mind is simply the series of the " Divine thoughts . and feelings prolonged through eternity, " that would be, at any rate, believing God's existence to be " as real as my own. And, as for evidence, the argument " of Paley's Natural Theology, or, for that matter, of his " Evidences of Christianity, would stand exactly where it " does. The Design argument is drawn from the analogy of " human experience. From the relation which human " works bear to human thoughts and feelings, it infers a " corresponding relation between works more or less " similar, but superhuman, and supernatural thoughts and RE CENT BRITISH PHIL SOPHY. 257 " feelings. If it proves these, nobody but a metaphysician " needs care whether or not there is a mysterious substratum " for them. Again, the arguments for Revelation undertake " to prove by testimony that, within the sphere of human " experience, works were done requiring a greater than "human power, and words said requiring a greater than " human wisdom. These positions, and the evidences of " them, neither lose nor gain anything by our supposing " that the wisdom means only wise thoughts and volitions, " and that the power means thoughts and volitions followed " by imposing phenomena." * The result of all which is that, if Theism will consent that the Divine Mind, for whose existence it contends, is knowable only as our own minds are knowable to wit, as a series of thoughts and feelings, but these thoughts and feelings transcendently hyper- physical or Divine, or, again, as a thread of conscious- ness, but that consciousness transcendently hyperphysical or Divine then Theism may remain an open question. And so, on the same terms of consistency with the mode of thought of Empirical Cogitationism, other questions of the supernatural, of similar moment, may also remain open questions. Now, without returning on objections previously urged against the reconcileability of Mr. Mill's Idealistic Theory with any knowledge of the existence of other created sen- tiencies or threads of consciousness tantamount to that which we have of our own existence (which objections, however, if valid in that connexion, would be as valid now against the reconcileability of the theory with the required knowledge of the existence of a Divine Mind *>., the *Pp. 210, 211 R 258 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. knowledge of such a mind as more than a mere notion or conception of our own), let me simply say that I can see no interpretation of Mr. Mill's fundamental principle of Empiri- cism according to which those questions of a Supernatural which he would keep open ought not to be, at once and for ever, closed questions. Empiricism, so far as I can see any meaning in it, leads inevitably at last to Zero, Absolute Nihilism, or the resolute non-conception of an ultimate any- thing. It must either stop there, or transmute itself at that point, for the nonce, into an enormous all-including Trans- cendentalism. Unless as the name for the determining eternal ci priori whence all else has proceeded, and has inherited law, structure, form, necessity, through every stage of the evolution, I can see no meaning whatever for the word Deity. If Mr. Mill vindicates the belief in such a Deity as compatible with true philosophy, well and good. Only how he can then assert that the true philosophy is that which supposes that every notion, belief, faculty, or power of the human mind is entirely generated out of experience, without the coefficiency of any innate or structural tendency, form, capability, necessity, or determination, passes my comprehension. I cannot conceive anything as resulting from the experience of a zero ; and, unless I start with a human mind definable as zero, I must allow a very definite amount of a priori bequest in that human mind wherewith to grasp and mould experience. Or, if Empiricism pushes the dispute farther back, and, allowing that bequest, under- takes to resolve // into prior experience, still, at every stage, the assertion recurs, " We are not yet at zero ; something is a priori, something structural and predetermined, even here." Or, if at last, somewhere behind the Nebula, we do RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 259 reach Zero, or Nothingness, what becomes of Deity? Is Deity at the back of the original zero or nothingness out of which all else has been evolved or convolved empirically ? Then either Zero would have remained such, and there would have been no evolution whatever, or else the true origin .of the whole evolution is not zero but Deity. But, on this last supposition, what meaning, such as that claimed for it, remains in the principle of Em- piricism ? Waiving this objection, however, and allowing Mr. Mill's reservation of the question of Deity and other cognate questions as open questions in philosophy to be perfectly consistent with his interpretation of the principle of Empiri- cism, let me look farther at that notion of Deity for which Mr. Mill insists that a space is open in his philosophy. Let us look at it in its connexion with his cosmological theory of Idealism or Cogitationism. Here, I think, there are curious results. For what is the Deity or Divine Mind whose exis- tence then remains an open question ? A Divine, or trans- cendent, superhuman, thread of consciousness, or series of thoughts and feelings. Ex hypothesi, no other Deity is allowed than a Deity conceivable according to the sublimed analogy of our experience of our own minds. Now, what I say is, not that such a Deity of Idealism may not be a suffi- cient Deity for all the needs of religion or the human mind, but only that there seems to be an interesting consequence of such a notion of Deity, which Mr. Mill's Cogitationism implies, but which he has left undeveloped. Was it not involved in Mr. Mill's theory of the human mind as a thread of consciousness or series of feelings, that there must have been a crude period in the history of that consciousness or 2 60 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH F. series of feelings, when as yet it had not worked out the notions of the Ego and the Non-Ego, but existed only as a confused neutrum of both ? Is this analogy to be transferred to the Divine Mind ? If so, what do we end in ? In what but the Absolute Idealism, or Absolute Identity-system, of Schelling and others, which supposes an aboriginal Absolute Neutrum, of which the universe as a whole is to be con- ceived as the external forthrushing or Non-Ego, and Deity personally as the self-consciousness, or Ego, accompanying the forthrushing ? Yes, that final alternative to which we seem to be led up by all other modes of purely speculative thought seems to be also the alternative to which Mr. Mill's Cogitationism leads us up. It is the alternative of Nihilism or Summation in an Absolute. The choice between these alternatives seems to be the question that is left open. But to say that it is left open at all is, I apprehend, the same as saying that one has to choose, now as heretofore, between Empiricism and Transcendentalism in philosophy. This, it seems, though with the scope and meaning of the two terms mar- vellously enlarged by science, is still the essential distinction. Logically, Empiricism seems to have its only termination in Nihilism, while Absolute Identity seems to be but the modern form of the principle of Transcendentalism reasoned back to its uttermost. Are we here in that predicament where it is only an act of faith, an impassioned throe of the soul obeying its own structural necessity, that can effect the solution ? Are we in presence of the last and most gigantic possible form of that difficulty which is said to lie at the root of all our thinkings about anything whatsoever, and to be the very law of our thinkings the perpetual balance of RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY, 2 6 1 two propositions, mutually contradictory, and both incon- ceivable, yet one of which must necessarily be true ? Or where is the logic, Hegelian or any other, that shall really dare the stricter solution of uniting the two extremes, by showing how in one organic beat or swing of thought there may be comprised the whole arc between Nothingness and Absolute Being ? 262 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. ADDITIONAL CHAPTER. SKETCH FROM 1865 TO 1877. THE increase of attention to Speculative Philosophy in the British Islands during the last twelve years is very remark- able. The protests against our insular neglect of Philosophy, made by Hamilton and Mill about the year 1835, but already antiquated in great measure before 1865 by the intermediate efforts of these thinkers themselves and others, are now certainly quite past date. Even the word Meta- physics, which we had to report as so much out of favour among us in 1865 that it needed some boldness then to use it, has been voted back, as we ventured to hope it might be, to its just British honours. Thinkers who had previously abjured it have found it impossible to get on without it, and have recanted their abjuration ; and the public have acquiesced more rapidly than might have been expected in such a matter. Of this increase among us since 1865 of interest in Philo- sophy in all its forms there may be proof to the eye in the following Bibliographical Conspectus. Though it has been made as complete as the materials at hand would allow, there must necessarily be omissions in it, and perhaps some RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 263 that are important ; and it is to be understood also that the conspectus is bibliographical merely, and that I do not pro- fess to be myself acquainted with all, or named:- I^J, LITERATURE K . ^ V& CONSPECTUS OF BRITISH PHILOS( Since March, 18 I. WRITERS NAMED IN PREVIOUS CONSPECTUS, PP. I2-l8. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON: In proof of the continued posthumous influence of this thinker, it may be mentioned that his Discussions have reached their third edition, his Lectures on Metaphysics their fifth, his Lectures on Logic their third, and that his edition of Reid's works, with Notes and Dissertations, which appeared in an incomplete form in 1846, and contains perhaps the densest results of his thinking, has had a large sale in the complete form in which it was stereotyped in 1863. MR. JOHN STUART MILL (ob. 1873) : A third and revised edition of his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, with notices of some of the criticisms on the first edition, appeared in 1867; in which year also appeared his Rectorial Address to the University of St. Andreivs, and a third volume of his collected Dissertations and Dis- cussions. In 1869 appeared a new edition, in two volumes, of Mr. James Mill's "Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind," with Notes by Professor Bain, Dr. Andrew Findlater, and Mr. George Grote, the whole edited, with Additional Notes, by Mr. John Stuart Mill ; and in the same year was published the essay entitled The Sub- jection of Women. A fourth volume of collected Dissertations and Discussions has been published; and two very important publications after Mr. Mill's death were his Autobiography in 1873, and nis Three Essays: Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism, in 1874. His System of Logic reached its eighth edition in 1872 ; his Political Economy, accessible in a "People's Edition" since 1866, has had a large circulation in that shape ; there have been several new editions of his Utilitarianism and other separate essays; and his Auguste Comte and Positivism, 264 RECENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. originally published in 1865 in the Westminster Review, has been reprinted more than once in book-form. DR. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN : Most notable in this place among Dr. Newman's publications since 1865 is his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, which appeared in 1870. Miss HARRIET MARTINEAU (ob. 1876) : Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, "with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman, 1877. REV. F. D. MAURICE (ob. 1872): Conscience: Lectures on Castiistry, 1868 ; Social Morality, 1869 ; new edition of History of Philosophy, 1873- PROFESSOR DE MORGAN (ob. 1871) : A Budget of Paradoxes, 1872. PROFESSOR JAMES F. FERRIER: A posthumous publication of Pro- fessor Terrier's, in 1866, was his Lectures on Greek Philosophy, and other Philosophical Remains, edited by Sir Alexander Grant, Bart., and Professor E. L. Lushington. This and Professor Ferrier's other writ- ings form together a collective edition of his Philosophical Works in three volumes, 1875. DR. WILLIAM SMITH (of Edinburgh) : A new edition of his Translation of Fichte's Popular Works, with Memoir, appeared in 1873. MR. G. H. LEWES : The fourth edition of his History of Philosophy appeared in 1874 ; and a work of Mr. Lewes's designed to set forth more expressly his own speculative views is his Problems of Life and Mind, of which Vol. I. was published in 1874, and Vol. II. in 1875. A Sequel to these volumes is The Physical Basis of Mind : being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind, 1877. PROFESSOR MANSEL (ob. 1871): The Philosophy of the Conditioned, with Remarks on Mill's Examination of Hamilton, 1866; Letters, Lectures, and Reviews (posthumous), 1873. HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE : Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works, edited by Helen Taylor, 1872. REV. DR. JAMES M'Cosn (now President of New Jersey Hall, Princeton, U.S.): An Examination of Mr. J. S. MilFs Philosophy, being a Defence of Fundamental Truth, 1866 (second edition announced); Philosophical Papers, 1 868, consisting of (i) An Examination of Sir RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OS O PHY. 265 William Hamilton's Logic, (2) A Reply to Mr. Mill's third edition, (3) An Account of the Present State of Moral Philosophy in Great Britain ; The Laws of Discursive Thought, being a Text-Book of Formal Logic, 1870; Christianity and Positivism, 1871; The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, and Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton, 1874. PROFESSOR HENRY CALDERWOOD : Article in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review for April, 1866, entitled The Sensational Philosophy: Mr. y. S. Mill and Dr. M'Cosh; Inaugural Lecture in the University of Edinburgh, 1868, entitled Moral Philosophy as a Science and as a Discipline; third edition of The Philosophy of the Infinite in 1872; Handbook of Moral Philosophy, 1872. PROFESSOR ALEXANDER BAIN: Third edition of The Senses and the Intellect, 1868 ; third edition of The Emotions and the Will, 1875 ; Mental and Moral Science, a Compendium of Psychology and Ethics, 1868 ; Logic, Deductive and Inductive, in two volumes, 1870 ; Mind and Body : Theories of their Relation, 1874. PROFESSOR A. C. ERASER : Article on Mr. Mill's Examination of Hamilton in the North British Review for September, 1865; Clarendon Press edition, in four volumes, of the Works of Bishop Berkeley, with Prefaces, Annotations, his Life and Letters, and an account of his Philosophy, 1871 ; Selections from Berkeley, 1874. PROFESSOR JOHN VEITCH : Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, 1869; Lucretius and the Atomic Theory, 1875; various contributions to Periodicals. MR. HERBERT SPENCER : Mr. Spencer's System of Philosophy, as expounded in the successive instalments of his main work, is now represented by his First Principles, second edition, reorganized and farther developed, 1870 (now in its fourth thousand), his Principles of Biology (two volumes), 1864-7, his Principles of Psychology, second edition, reorganized and greatly enlarged (two volumes), 1870-2, and Vol. I. of his Principles of Sociology, 1876. Separate publications of his since 1865 are The Study of Sociology ', 1873, and a third series of reprinted Essays, 1874, added to a rearranged and somewhat enlarged edition of the first and second series. Also to be noted here is the large work, still in progress, in folio parts, entitled Descriptive Sociology; 266 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. or, Groups of Sociological Facts, classified and arranged by Herbert Spencer, compiled and abstracted by David Duncan, M.A., Professor of Logic, or., in the Presidency College, Madras, Richard Scheppig, Ph.D., and James Collier. Of this work there have appeared the following portions : i. "English"; 2. "Types of Lowest Races, Negrito Races, and Malayo- Polynesian Races"; 3. "Ancient Mexicans, Central Americans, Chibchas and Ancient Peruvians"; 4. "African Races"; 5. "Asiatic Races." DR. JAMES HUTCHISON STIRLING: Sir William Hamilton : being the Philosophy of Perception an Analysis, 1865; Handbook of the History of Philosophy, by Dr. Albert Sc/nvegler, translated and anno- tated, 1867; Supplementary Notes to the same, 1868; Materialism in Relation to the Study of Medicine, 1868; As regards Protoplasm, in relation to Professor Huxley's Essay on the Physical Basis of Life, 1869 (new and enlarged edition, 1872); Lectures on the Philosophy of Law f together with "Wheivell and Hegel" and "Hegel and Mr. IV. R. Smith'' a Vindication in a Physico- Mathematical Regard, 1873. DR. JOHN WILLIAM DRAPER (American, but publishing also in England) : History of the Conflict betiveen Religion and Science, 1875. MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE : Short Studies on Great Subjects, (three series) ; Calvinism : an Address at St. Andrews, 1871. SIR J. FITZJAMES STEPHEN : Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1873. MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD -.Essays in Criticism, 1865 ; Culttire and Anarchy, 1869; St. Paul and Protestantism, 1871; Literature and Dogma, 1873 ; God and the Bible, 1875 ; Last Essays on Church and Religion, 1877. II. ADDITIONAL WRITERS (arranged alphabetically). PROFESSOR ROBERT ADAMSON (Owens College, Manchester) : Roger Bacon: Philosophy of Science in tJu Middle Ages, 1876 ; various articles in the current edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ; and con- tributions to Periodicals. MR. PATRICK PROCTOR ALEXANDER: Mill and Carlyle: an Examination of Mr. John Stuart Milt's Doctrine of Causation in relation to Moral Freedom, with an Occasional Discourse on Sauerteig by Smel- fungus, 1866 ; Moral Causation : or Notes on Mr. Milts Notes to the RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 267 Chapter on Freedom in the third edition of his Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, 1867 (second edition, revised and extended, 1875). MR. GRANT ALLEN : Physiological ^Esthetics, 1877. VISCOUNT AMBERLEY (nat. 1842, ob. 1876) : An Analysis of Religious Belief, 1876. THE DUKE OF ARGYLL : The Reign of Law, 1867 ; Primeval Man, 1869. MR. ALFRED BARRATT -.Physical Ethics: or the Science of Action, 1869. MR. THOMAS SQUIRE BARRETT : A New Vieiv of Causation, 1871 ; Introduction to the Study of Logic and Metaphysics, 1875. DR. HENRY CHARLTON BASTIAN : The Modes of Origin of Lowest Organisms, including a Discussion of the Experiments of M. Pasteur, 1871 ; The Beginnings of Life: being some account of the Nature, Modes of Origin, and Transformations of Lower Organisms, 1872; Evolution and the Origin of Life, 1874. DR. LIONEL S. BEALE : The Mystery of Life: an Essay in Reply to Dr. Gulfs Attack on the Theory of Vitality, 1871 ; Lif e- Theories : then- Influence on Religious Thought, 1871. PROFESSOR THOMAS RAWSON BIRKS (Cambridge) : First Principles of Moral Science, 1873 5 Modern Physical Fatalism and the Doctrine of Evohition, including an Examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer's First Principles, 1876. PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE : Four Phases of Morals Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism, 1872. MR. M. P. W. BOLTON : Inquisitio Philosophica : an Examination of the Principles of Kant and Hamilton, 1 866; Examination of the Principles of the Scoto- Oxonian Philosophy, revised edition, 1869. MR. F. H. BRADLEY : Ethical Studies, 1876. MR. JOHN HENRY BRIDGES, MR. FREDERICK HARRISON, PRO- FESSOR E. S. BEESpfrAND DR. RICHARD CONGREVE : Translation of Comtek System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, instituting the Religion of Hiimanity : Vol. I., "General View of Positivism, and Introductory Principles" (by Mr. Bridges), 1875; Vol. II., "Social Statics, or the Abstract Theory of Social Order " (by Mr. Harrison), 268 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 1875 J Vol. III., " Social Dynamics, or the General Theory of Human Progress " (by Professor Beesly, and others), 1876; Vol. IV. "Synthesis of the Future of Mankind " (by Dr. Congreve), with an Appendix of Comte's " Early Essays " (by Mr. H. D. Hutton). The last advertised as ready. PROFESSOR EDWARD CAIRO (Glasgow) : Contributions to Periodi- cals, including one on Grote's Plato in the North British Review, 1865 ; Article Cartesianism in the Encyclopaedia Britannica ; A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, with an Historical Introduc- tion, 1877. DR. WILLIAM B. CARPENTER : Principles of Mental Physiology, 1874; Mesmerism, Spiritualism, 6., 1877. PROFESSOR WM. K. CLIFFORD : Lectures and Contributions to Periodicals. Miss FRANCES POWER COBBE: Studies, new and old, of Ethical and Social Subjects, 1865 ; Dawning Lights, an Inquiry, 1868 ; Dar- winism in Morals, 1872; Hopes of the Human Race, 1874. MR. EDWARD W. Cox : Mental Philosophy and Psychology, 2 vols., J873-4. REV. JOHN CUNNINGHAM: New Theory of Knowing and Known, 1874. REV. WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM : Influence of Descartes on Meta- physical Speculation in England, 1876. MR. CHARLES DARWIN: Besides the successive editions of his Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (which had reached the " Sixteenth Thousand" in 1876), we may note here his Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871 (" Tenth Thousand" in 1876), and his Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Lower Animals, 1872 ("Ninth Thousand" in 1876). DR. JOHN DRYSDALE : The Protoplasmic Theory of Life, 1874. REV. A. M. FAIRBAIRN : Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and History, 1876. MR. JOHN FISKE (American, but publishing also in England) : Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, based on the Doctrine of Evolution, 1874; The Unseen World, and other Essays, 1876. REV. PROFESSOR ROBERT FLINT (Edinburgh) : TJie Philosophy of RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. 269 History in France and Germany ', 1874; Theism: the Baird Lecture for 1876 (advertised). PROFESSOR THOMAS FOWLER : Elements of Deductive Logic, 1867 ; Elements of Inductive Logic ; 1870. MR. JOHN S. STUART GLENNIE : In the Morningland : or the Law of the Origin and Transfiguration of Christianity, Vol. I., 1873. MR. WILLIAM GRAHAM i Idealism: An Essay, Metaphysical and Critical, 1872. SIR ALEXANDER GRANT, Bart. (Principal of the University of Edinburgh): The Ethics of Aristotle, Illustrated with Essays and Notes: second edition, 1866; third edition, revised and partly re- written, 1874. MR. WILLIAM RATHBONE GREG : Litei'ary and Social Judgments, 1868; Enigmas of Life, 1872; Rocks Ahead, or the Warnings of Cassandra, 1874. MR. JOSEPH HENRY GREEN (ob. 1863) : Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the teaching- of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge : edited, with a memoir of the author's life, by John Simon, 1865. MR. T. H. GREEN and MR. T. H. GROSE : New editions, with Preliminary Dissertations and Notes, of Hume's Philosophical Works, "Treatise on Human Nature and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion" in 1874, and " Essays" in 1875. MR. GEORGE GROTE (nat. 1794, ob. 1871) : Plato, and the other Companions of Socrates, 1865 ; Revie^v of the Work of Mr. John Sttiart Mill entitled Examination of Sir W, Hamilton 's Philosophy, 1868 ; Aristotle (posthumously edited by Professor Bain and Professor Croom Robertson), 1872 ; Minor Works (with critical remarks on his intellec- tual character, writings, and speeches, by Professor Bain) ; Fragments on Ethical Subjects, 1876. PROFESSOR JOHN GROTE (ob. 1866): Exploratio Philosophica : Rough Notes on Modern Intellectual Science, 1865 ; Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy, 1870; Treatise on the Moral Ideals, 1876. MR. GEORGE HARRIS : A Philosophical Treatise on the Nature and Constitution of Man, 1876. MR. JAMES HAIG : Symbolism : or Mind, Matter, Language, as the 2 7 o RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. Elements of Thinking and Reasoning, and as the Necessary Factors of Human Knowledge^ 1869. MR. SHADWORTH H. HODGSON: Time and Space : a Metaphysica Essay, 1865; The Theory of Practice : an Ethical Inquiry, 1870. MR. THOMAS HUGHES : The Ideal World of Berkeley and the Real World, 1865 ; the Human Will : its Function and Freedom, 1867 ; Economy of Thought, 1875. PROFESSOR W. A. HUNTER : Systematic and Histoiical Exposition of Roman Law, 1876. MR. RICHARD HOLT HTJTTON : Essays, Theological and Literary, 1871 (second edition, 1876). PROFESSOR THOMAS H. HUXLEY : Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, 1870 ; Critiques and Addresses, 1873 > and other writings. REV. GEORGE JAMIESON : Causality, or the Philosophy of Law Inves- tigated, 1872. REV. ROBERT JARDINE : Elements of the Psychology of Cognition, 1874. PROFESSOR W. STANLEY JEVONS : The Principles of Science: a Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method, 1874. REV. B. JOWETT : The Dialogues of Plato translated into English, with Analysis and Introduction (4 vols.), 1871. REV. T. P. KlRKMAN : Philosophy without Assumptions, 1876. PROFESSOR SIMON S. LAURIE (Edinburgh) : On the Philosophy of Ethics: an Analytical Essay, 1866; Notes, Expository and Critical, on Certain British Theories of Morals, 1868. PROFESSOR THOMAS LAYCOCK (ob. 1876): Mind and Brain ; or, the Correlation of Consciousness and Organization, second edition, 1869. MR. W. E. H. LECKY : Second, third, and fourth editions of his History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe ; History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 1869 (two editions since). REV. PROFESSOR THOMAS M. LINDSAY (Glasgow) : Translation, with notes, of Ueberweg's Logic. PROFESSOR JAMES LORIMER (Edinburgh) : The Institutes of Law; a Treatise on the Principles of Jurisprudence as determined by Nature, 1872. RE CENT BRITISH PHIL SO PHY. 271 SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, Bart.: Prehistoric Times, 1865; The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man, 1870. REV. DR. J. G. MAC VICAR: A Sketch of a Philosophy, in 4 parts Parti., "Mind and its Capabilities, and its Relation to Matter," and Part II., "Matter and Molecular Morphology," i$68; Part III. "The Chemistry of Natural Substances," 1870; Part IV., "Biology and Theodicy, a Prelude to the Biology of the Future." PROFESSOR JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY (Dublin) : Translation of Kuno Fischer's Commentary on Kant's Kritik, with an Introduction, 1866; Kant's Critical Philosophy for English Readers, Vol. I., Part I., 1872 ; II. 1873 5 HI. 1874 ; Vol. Ill: Kanfs Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic, 1872. SIR HENRY SUMNER MAINE : Several editions of his Ancient Law : its Connection with the Early History of Society, and its Relation to Modern Ideas, originally published in 1861 ; Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, 1875. REV. DR. JAMES MARTINEAU : Essays, Philosophical and Theolo- gical, 1866 ; and other writings. PROFESSOR HENRY MAUDSLEY : The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, 1867 (second edition, 1868, third and revised and enlarged edition of "The Physiology," 1877) ; Body and Mind : an Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, 1870. PROFESSOR ST. GEORGE MIVART : Contemporary Evolution : an Essay on some Recent Social Changes, 1876 ; Lessons from Nature as manifested in Mind and Matter, 1876. MR. W. H. S. MONCK -.Space and Vision, 1873; Introduction to the Critical Philosophy, 1874. MR. JOHN MORLEY -.Critical Miscellanies, 1871 j Voltaire, 1872 ; Rousseau, 1873 > and other writings in periodicals. MR. GEORGE S. MORRIS (American, but publishing also in Eng- land) -. Translation of Ueberwegs History of Philosophy from Thales to the Present Time, with additions by the Translator, and also one on "English and American Philosophy" by the REV. DR. NOAH PORTER. PROFESSOR MAX MULLER: Introduction to the Science of Religion, 1873- 272 RECENJ BRITISH PHIL OSOPPIY. MR. JOSEPH JOHN MURPHY : Habit and Intelligence, 1869 ; Scientific Bases of Faith, 1872. MR. H. F. O'HANLON : A Criticism of John Stuart Mill's Pure Idealism, and an Attempt to S/ICKV that, if logically carried out, it is Ptire Nihilism, 1866. REV. J. ALLANSON PICTON : The Mystery of Matter, and other Essays, 1873. REV. FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON, of Brighton (nat. 1816, ob. 1853) : His Life and Letters, by the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke. PROFESSOR GEORGE GROOM ROBERTSON (University College, London) : Articles Analysis, Association, Axiom, in Encyclopaedia Britannica ; and contributions to Periodicals. PROFESSOR J. R. SEELEY : Ecce Homo, 1865 ; Lectures and Essays, 1870. MR. NASSAU WILLIAM SENIOR (nat. 1790, 03. 1864): Historical and Philosophical Essays, 1865. MR. JOHN CAMPBELL SHAIRP (Principal of St. Salvator's and St. Leonard's, St. Andrews): Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, 1868; Culture and Religion in some of their Relations, 1870. MR. THOMAS SHEDDEN : Three Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 1866. MR. RICHARD SHUTE : A Discourse on Truth, 1877. MR. HENRY SIDGWICK : The Methods of Ethics, 1874. DR. THOMAS COLLYNS SIMON : Hamilton versus Mill: a Thorough Discussion of each Chapter in Mr. John S. Milt's Examination oj Hamilton' s Logic and Philosophy Part I., 1866; Part. II., 1867. MR. WILLIAM SMITH (nat. 1808, ob. 1872) : New editions of his Thorndalem& Gravenhurst, 1876. MR. LESLIE STEPHEN : History of English Thought in the Eigh- teenth Century, 1876; and other writings. PROFESSOR BALFOUR STEWART (Owens College, Manchester), and PROFESSOR P. G. TAIT (University of Edinburgh) : The Unseen Universe: Physical Speculations on a Futtire State, 1875 (now in the sixth edition). MR. JAMES SULLY : Sensation and Inflation, 1874 ; and Contribu- tions to Periodicals. RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 273 REV. DR. C. R. TEAPE -^Berkeleian Philosophy, 1870. MR. W. T. THORNTON : Old-fashioned Ethics and Common-place Metaphysics, -with some of their Applications, 1873. DR. HENRY TRAVIS: Moral Freedom Reconciled with Causation by the Analysis of the Process of Self- Determination, 1865 ; Free-will and Law in Perfect Harmony, 1868. REV. DR. JOHN TULLOCH (Principal of St. Mary's College, St. Andrews) : Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, 1872 ; and other writings and lectures. MR. EDWARD B. TYLOR : Researches in the Early History of Man- kind and the Development of Civilization, 1865; Primitive Cultiire : Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 1871. PROFESSOR JOHN TYNDALL : Scientific Use of Imagination: an Address before the British Association at Liverpool, 1870; Address before the British Association at Belfast, 1874 ; and other writings. REV. JOHN VENN : On some of the Characteristics of Belief , Scientific and Religions: being the Hulsean Lecture for 1869 ; Logic of Chance, second edition, 1876. MR. ALFRED RUSSELL WALLACE : On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism : three Essays, 1875* MR. WILLIAM WALLACE -. The Logic of Hegel Translated from the- Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, with Prolegomena, 1874. DR. R. S. WYLD: The World as Dynamical and Immaterial, and the Nature of Perception, 1868 ; Physics and Philosophy of tJu' Senses, 1875. III. ARTICLES IN PERIODICALS. While most of the writers that have been named have contributed papers of a philosophical kind to Reviews, Magazines, or Weekly Jour- nals, and not a few of the books that have been mentioned grew out of such contributions, there has been a large quantity of Philosophical Writing in British periodicals since 1865 of which there is no represen- tation whatever in the foregoing lists. To supply this defect, one would have to examine files of all our chief periodicals, popular or scientific, 274 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. for the last twelve years, taking note of all articles of real philosophical interest, over and above those of which the lists may afford a recollection. In declining that labour, it is a partial consolation to be able to name now one British journal, the first of its kind, expressly and exclusively devoted to Psychology and Speculative Philosophy. MIND : A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY, begun in January, 1876, under the editorship of Professor Croom Robertson, has now reached its sixth number. The following is an alphabetical enumeration of the contributors to it so far ; and it is interesting to observe that so many of the representatives of contemporary British Philosophy in this journal are men who appear in the same character in our independent lists : Professor Robert Adamson ; Professor Alexander Bain ; Mr. F. H. Bradley; Professor Henry Calderwood; Mr. W. C. Coupland; Rev. W. Cunningham; Rev. W. G. Davies ; Mr. T. Y. Edgeworth ; Pro- fessor Robert Flint; Dr. W. R. Cowers; Mr. T. H. Green ; Professor Helmholtz; Mr. J. Scot Henderson; Mr. Shad worth H. Hodgson; Professor Stanley Jevons; Professor Land, of Leyden; Mr. Arthur Bolles Lee ; Mr. G. H. Lewes ; Professor Thomas M. Lindsay ; Mr. J. T. Lingard ; Professor J. G. M'Kendrick, of Glasgow; Rev. Dr. Macvicar ; Professor J. P. Mahaffy ; Mr. Alexander Main ; Mr. \V. H. S. Monck ; Mr. C. J. Monro ; Professor Max Miiller ; Mr. Joseph John Murphy ; the Hon. Roden Noel ; Dr. Mark Pattison ; Mr. J. F. Payne ; Mr. Frederic Pollock ; Professor Croom Robertson ; Mr. Henry Sidgwick ; Mr. Herbert Spencer; Mr. J. A. Stewart; Mr. James Sully; Dr. Henry Travis; Mr. Edward B. Tylor ; Professor John Veitch ; Rev. John Venn ; Mr. James Ward ; Professor Wundt, of Leipsic. In this conspectus, as in the previous one, we have a seemingly very heterogeneous medley. Psychology proper, Logic, Ethics, Jurisprudence, Theology, Politics, even Archaeology, History, and the Biological sciences, are all included. What we have to attend to is the essence of purely metaphysical speculation diffused through these diverse forms of recent philosophical inquiry, whether RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. 275 consciously on the part of the several groups of inquirers, or only as it may be discerned by those surveying them and their labours in the common interest of Metaphysics. Nothing is more notable than the extent to which Philo- sophy of late has passed into mere Cosmology, the mere science of the Physical Universe. It is not only that there has been a continuation since 1865 of that influx of new scientific conceptions upon Philosophy, modifying the forms and nomenclature of its problems, which we found to have been going on so powerfully for a long while before; it is that the scientific conceptions themselves have sought to become the substitute for Philosophy, displacing or exploding all that does not consist in their own sum-total. Philosophy, with many, is now simply correct Cosmology, correct Physics. To know as much as we can, and as accurately as we can, of the beginnings of the Physical Universe, and of the gradual formation of that portion or shred of the whole which we call the Solar System ; then to know of the history of our own Earth during those long aeons when it was but preparing itself to be a theatre of life, and of the mode or modes of the advent of life upon it, through the cruder and inferior forms, till there was nerve and brain, with Humanity for their highest exemplar; farther to be able to trace the course and discipline of this animal paragon, Man, from the remotest savagery in which he can be found, on to the suc- cessive civilizations of recent record, and the present state of the earth's nations and institutions ; to acquire all such knowledge, with attention especially to those generalizations which seem to give it coherence and explanation, and may be called certainly or probably laws of the Cosmos ; then on this knowledge to build rules of conduct for ourselves and 276 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH ) '. others, and frame the best possible economy for the future of humanity as long as it may last ; but, all the while, to be aware that that future itself is limited, and that the same laws which have regulated the universal evolution on to the present juncture and manifestation of things point surely to the evanescence of what seems nearest and most solid to us in the manifestation, to the collapse of all ongoings on this Earth and even of the Solar System itself, and to a sweep of the energies of existence elsewhither, backwards or forwards, beyond our ken : this, I say, is what offers itself now as all Philosophy. Hence the enormous activity now on special biological problems, such as that of the origin of life, the nature of nerve-function, &c. ; and hence, in general or systematic treatises on Philosophy, so large a following of that plan which Comte adopted in his great work viz., a resolution of the entire business of Philosophy into a suc- cession of discourses on the principles of the sciences taken in some suitable order, Astronomy leading to Terrestrial Physics and Chemistry, these to Biology, and History or Sociology coming last. Now all this, we repeat, is simply Physics or Physical Cosmology ; and the question is whether necessarily, as many hold, this is Philosophy at all, or the whole of Philosophy. For, though many hold that it is, many others hold that it is not ; and among these latter are some who are among the most eminent and assiduous culti- vators of Physical Science as it has just been sketched, and even believers in those generalizations, still in debate, which have determined the form and language of the sketch. With all their devotion to their researches and conviction of their grandeur and importance, they regard themselves so far as Physicists and nothing more ; they do not deny the possibility RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 277 of a Philosophy as something over and above; nay, they either desiderate such a Philosophy, or already possess such a Philosophy in private, as a spiritual background and relief from their Physics. It may be well, then, to distinguish a little farther the prevailing conceptions of Philosophy in respect of their different relations to that correct Cosmology, or extensive and thorough Science of the Physical Universe, which all hold to be desirable on its own account, whether it will by itself amount to a sufficient Philosophy or not. I. A CORRECT COSMOLOGY, ACCOMPANIED BY A META- PHYSICAL NIHILISM. This is, at least, a possible view of Philosophy. It would consist in voting Physical Science, or a knowledge of the Phenomenal Universe, extended and systematized to the utmost, with whatever direction there may thence come for the conduct of human life, to be all Philo- sophy and the only Philosophy, positively rejecting and deny- ing every hypothesis of an Absolute, of a Supernatural First Cause, Force, or Substance, originating, determining, or under- lying, the Phantasmagory. Inasmuch as the First Cause? Force, or Substance, in the language of those who affirm an Absolute, is generally called God or Deity, such Metaphysical Nihilists as we are here imagining might fairly be called Atheists, and would probably accept the name. It may be doubted, however, whether there are many, or even any, such now actually among us. The positive assertion that there is and can be no Absolute or Supernatural at all is such a needless audacity of the human spirit, such a mere brag- gartism of negation where negation is intrinsically absurd, and silence would answer all practical purposes, that fewer 278 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL O SO PHY. and fewer every day, I think, are disposed to rank them- selves in this extreme class. II. A CORRECT COSMOLOGY, ACCOMPANIED BY META- PHYSICAL AGNOSTICISM. This conception of Philosophy is very popular at present. As in the last, the utmost and most exact knowledge of the Phenomenal Universe, and of all things and processes within it, with the application of such knowledge to the conduct of life, is prescribed as a duty, while for the rest the assertion is, not that there is no Absolute behind and beyond the Phenomenal, but only that, if there is, it is unconceivable and unknowable, and our proper behaviour therefore is to say so at once, and abstain from all speculation about it, and all notion that such speculation is possible or necessary in Philosophy. There are, at least, two varieties, however, of this theory of Metaphysical Agnosticism. (i) There is an Agnosticism which declines even the question whether there is an Absolute or not, declaring that question to be equally insoluble by the human intellect, equally irrelevant in Philosophy, as any further question about the nature of the Absolute that might follow an assumed affirmative. This Agnosticism, so far as phraseo- logy is concerned, may be said to be that of Barnardine in Measure for Measure, as defined for him by the Duke. It is avowedly a Philosophy That apprehends no farther than this world, And squares one's life according. But, though some who hold a Philosophy definable strictly in these terms may be morally no better specimens of RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 279 humanity than Barnardine was, to what heights and ranges beyond Barnardine's brutalism, and repudiating and execrat- ing that or any other brutalism, may the Philosophy rise, and has it risen, by nobler and severer interpretations of the terms ! To " apprehend no farther than this world " ; yes, but also accurately, loyally, laboriously, perseveringly, to apprehend all that is within this world, and thence to draw the rules for the " squaring " of life ! What a difference that makes ! So may exclaim justly many of our modern Agnos- tics of the class now under consideration, resenting, as they are entitled to do, as mean and malicious, any attempt, through mere terms, to associate them with the fictitious Barnardine or any of his copies and belongings. Are there not all the Positive Sciences, each with its precious body of truths, and each with its glorious training ; do they not, in their series and their aggregate, form a sufficient possession, and a sufficient discipline ; what more can one want ? Is not this a platform large enough and splendid enough on which to walk to and fro, without straining the neck everlastingly into the vacuity on either edge, and sending cries into a boundlessness from which there can be no response ? By due walking to and fro on this platform may there not be at once an ample satisfaction to all the cravings of the human spirit, all its sympathies with what is great and noble, and also ample instruction and communication of power for the regulation of the individual and the social life? May there not be a high Ethics and a high Politics, a training in all the virtues of integrity, self-denial, and philan- thropy, with scope for the human will, under the government both of sure knowledge and of sound conscience, to fashion the future to its own liking, wherever the laws of outward 2 8o RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. nature do not impose their iron shackles, but leave room for man's own arrangements and devices ? May there not be Ideals, Poetry, the exercise of Hope and Imagination ? Nay and here it is the Agnostics of the Comtist school that are most precise in their offer may there not be that con- summation of reverence for a supreme Ideal which is called a Religion ? May not Humanity itself, past, present, and future, become the adequate object of an ideal worship ; and so may not all other Religions give place to a Religion of Humanity, for which there may be provided, to any required extent, an organization, a ministry, and a ritual ? (2) There is an Agnosticism which differs from the last very materially, inasmuch as it affirms most positively an Absolute, or Universal and Ultimate Power behind all appearances, and confines itself to the simple denial that this Absolute can be known, imagined, or anyhow featured, by the human intelligence. This is now, in an especial manner, the Agnosticism of Mr. Herbert Spencer, though his exposi- tion of it may seem but an extension and stronger definition of the doctrine previously put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel. Mr. Spencer begins with belief in an Absolute, in the qualified sense of a Non-Relative necessarily implied by the Relative, as incumbent universally on human reason, and noway to be thrown off he assumes the belief as pro- foundly permanent throughout ; and he now and then explicitly recurs to it, to prevent mistake. Always, however, as resolutely he proclaims this Absolute and Infinite Reality to be unknowable and inconceivable by any effort of imagination or of reason; and so the Unknowableness of the Absolute becomes, in a sense, the foundation of all his Philosophy. For, though he would maintain that the Abso- RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH V. 2 8 1 lute itself, and no such miserable deputy for it as M. Comte's Total of Humanity, is the only fit object of an ideal reverence worthy to be called a Religion, and though he expressly recognises the prodigious discipline there may be for the human spirit in perpetual straining after this Unknow- able Object, the constant formation of symbols of it, and the constant rejection of these symbols as futile and inadequate, yet he does not himself favour this kind of mental exertion nearly so much as Hamilton and Mansel, who were in fact vehement theologians despite their Agnosticism, but rather comes back always to the " Unknowableness " as the all- important predicate, the conclusive and imperative indication to the human reason of the true walk for its energies. What is that ? Not ever-baffled speculation about the inscrutable Absolute itself, but a contented, and inquisitive, and earnest forthgoing among its manifestations. Hence Theology, except as a matter of History, has hardly any part in Mr. Spencer's Philosophy, and his Philosophy resolves itself, almost as distinctly as M. Comte's, into a correct Cosmology in the widest sense of that term, as including not only the sciences of Inorganic Nature, but also the sciences of Life and of Human Order and Progress. The Principles of Biology ', The Principles of Psychology, The Principles of Sociology, The Principles of Morality : such are the divisions of Mr. Spencer's systematic work on Philosophy, after his preliminary treatise entitled First Principles; and he explains that the omission of an intermediate Dissertation on the Principles of the Inorganic Concrete Sciences, Astrogeny and Geogeny (due logically in his scheme, as in M. Comte's), has been a mere matter of personal convenience. Mr. Spencer's conception of Philosophy, therefore, equally with 282 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OS OPH\ '. M. Comte's, is that it consists of a synthesis of accurate generalizations from the entire Science of the Cosmos, with applications of the same ; but this conception differs from M. Comte's inasmuch as it always remembers the pre- supposed Unknowable Reality behind appearances, and treats the generalizations of the sciences as the prin- ciples discernible through the manifestations of this Absolute. What generalizations Mr. Spencer himself offers physical, biological, psychological, and sociological, or universal and all-pervading and how far they are right, and how far controvertible, is a large and separate question. They form the substance of his Philosophy, and we are con- cerned here only with his conception of Philosophy. Only one of his generalizations perhaps is of such a nature as to be bound up with his very conception of Philosophy, so that the two must stand or fall together. It is that supreme generalization of " The Law of Evolution " on the definition and exposition of which he has bestowed so much pains that it has become identified with his name. According to this law, the entire history of the total Cosmos, from its first emergence from the imperceptible on to its ultimate disappear- ance into the imperceptible again, is a natural process, of which the scientific formula can be given, and in which no miracle, no interposition from the realms of the extra-mun- dane, is to be supposed. The one all-inclusive Mystery or Miracle is the Absolute Unknowable Existence transcending the Cosmos, and manifested through it; the manifestation itself goes on, a vast rhythm or periodicity within the bosom of that Unknowable, regulated once for all, so as to contain its own self-regulation and to need no farther import from any hyperphysical shore or jetty by the way. Mr. Spencer, RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. 28$ it is to be added, is a decided Natural Realist, as decidedly such as Sir William Hamilton was, but on grounds, as he thinks, of surer proof. He accepts the Cosmical ongoing of phenomena as a flow of solid objective realities not, of course, the crude realities of immediate perception, but real effects of a real cause, transfigured out of resemblance to the cause in their passage to the human consciousness ; and he makes war upon every form of the Idealistic hypothesis,, which would resolve the phenomena of the Material World into mere affections or motions of the subjective. Indeed, he holds that, wherever Idealism obtains a footing, the doctrine of Evolution must vanish. While we have cited Mr. Spencer as the chief British representative of that conception of Philosophy which makes Philosophy to consist in completely unified knowledge of the phenomena of the Cosmos, or a synthesis of generaliza- tions from all the Sciences, backed by the belief in an Abso- lute and Transcendent Existence, which is in itself utterly unknowable, we have done so because it is he that has laboured most both to inculcate this view of the business of Philosophy and to provide a Philosophy of the sort by actually taxing the range of the sciences for generalizations- to suit. But a good many other British thinkers hold sub- stantially the same conception of Philosophy, i.e., are Agnostics as regards the Absolute, assuming it or affirming it (though few with such intensity as Mr. Spencer), but pro- nouncing it Unknowable, and therefore letting it alone, and devoting their strength to positive Cosmological investiga- tion. With some, such investigation takes the form of research in one or other of the departments of what is usually regarded as Cosmology proper, and may be called Inorganic 284 RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. Cosmology, -e.g., in Physics, Chemistry, or Biology, their science only passing into Philosophy in so far as it leads to general ideas ; with others, the assiduity is more in those so- called Intellectual and Moral Sciences Psychology, Logic, Ethics, ^Esthetics, Politics, c. amid which, from time immemorial, the matter of pure Philosophy has been sup- posed to be more expressly distributed. No one can avoid noticing the number of really fine and original treatises in some of these latter sciences, in distinct kinship with those of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Bain, that have been recently added to our Philosophical Literature. III. A CORRECT COSMOLOGY, IRRADIATED BY META- PHYSICAL INFERENCES FROM ITSELF. Agnosticism as regards the Absolute is a creed from which many revolt, and with which the majority will never be satis- fied. Acknowledging that the Eternal Cause of Things is and must always be in a sense Unknowable, there are thousands who will not consent to be drawn away from the contemplation of this Unknowable, regard such contempla- tion as the highest duty of Man, and will insist that, though the Unknowable can never be adequately featured, it may be featured so far truly, and that the featuring of it to the utmost is far more the essence and soul of Philosophy than any Cosmology that may be the appendage or accompaniment. And of these not a few trust still to those inferences as to the Absolute from the Cosmos itself which compose, in the language of Theologians, the evidence a posteriori. There is, first, the Argument from Design, or from the very constitution of the Cosmos, as that argument was elaborated RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. 285 by Paley, or has been reinforced of late by subtler sugges- tions beyond the range of Paley's Physics, giving rise to Natural Theism, or the conviction of a Creator of the Universe, endowed with certain attributes of power, wis- dom, and goodness, and to be reverently conceived, by all the aid of human analogies, as veritably existing and possessing these attributes, though with confession that the conception does not reach the Reality, but is only a something valid and legitimate even in its imperfection. Thus, for all who abide by this reasoning, the Absolute passes into a Divine Personality, inferred and featured from the constitution of the Universe which He has Himself created. But then there is the argument from the alleged evidences of an actual Revelation of Himself by this Divine Being to mankind in the course of actual and historical time, whether that Revelation is regarded as having been intermittent and dispersed among divers lands and nations, or as having been continuous for a while in one national dis- pensation and completed for the whole world in Christianity. This argument also, inasmuch as it depends on the strictly objective evidence of historical testimony, is an inference a posteriori from certain facts of the Cosmos itself as to what transcends the Cosmos. But what a force, what a breadth, depth, and certainty, Revealed Theology, where it is accepted, adds to mere Natural Theology ! No longer are we in the vague; no longer need we be timid as to the validity of analogies from the human to the divine ; the Absolute himself, Deity himself, commands us so to feature Him, intimates to us how, with our finite natures, we may feature Him most truly, and what is His scheme with the world and ourselves, and what futurity we shall inhabit when 2 86 RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. the present life ceases and even the Cosmos itself is dis- solved. Assurance of the doctrine of Immortality, of a life to succeed that of the present Physical Phantasmagory the collapse of which is predicted by science, this is the great gift of Revealed Religion to the hesitancies of mere Natural Religion. But, suppose either Religion possessing a mind, or suppose the two united in any mind, and how can the conception of Philosophy entertained by such a mind con- sist any longer only in a synthesis of the generalizations of all the cosmical sciences ? Or, if in such a synthesis, then what facts start out of the synthesis as outblazing all the others, the Deity that has been inferred or revealed, His inferred or revealed relations to the Cosmos, the connexions of the present life with that other and unimaginable life of which there is a felt assurance ! A Cosmical Astronomy, a Cosmical Physics, a Cosmical Chemistry, a Cosmical Biology, a Cosmical Psychology and Logic, and a Cosmical Science of History and Society, may still subsist and afford splendid exercises for the intellect ; but they will, all and each of them, sink into a certain secularity or inferiority, unless in so far as they are dominated and irradiated by Theology itself, with its theory of the origin, reasons, and terminus, of that Cosmos which they all investigate. That there is an ample representation among us yet of this view of Philosophy will have been proved from our list of recent Philosophical Writings. Many of our ablest philoso- phical writers, it will have been observed, are still our Church- men, or Theologians of one Christian denomination or another ; and, however these may differ among themselves as to the standard of Theological Orthodoxy, there is an RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPHY. 287 agreement among them all that the world has not been left to Metaphysical Agnosticism, and that Philosophy has to recognise and digest that fact. Strangely enough, to this special Anti-Agnostical cluster there has attached itself, though but by posthumous declara- tion, and as it were tentatively, and with the independence of an interspace as wide as between the lowest star in Orion and his belt, the yet shining spirit of Mr. John Stuart Mill. From all we saw of this thinker before 1865, or even to his death in 1873, it would have been enough to add to the main description of him, with reference to his Psycho- logical Theory and his Cosmological Conception together, as an Empirical Idealist, the farther statement that, meta- physically, or with reference to his notions of anything beyond the Cosmos, he was an Agnostic. He was not, indeed, even then, so pronounced an Agnostic, metaphysic- ally, as Comte ; whom he rebuked for being too dogmatic in his Agnosticism, and not leaving " open questions " where questions might fairly be left open. Still, with all this senti- mental willingness to let Theism and Theology remain on the field and plead for themselves, if they would conform to certain strict conditions, utter Agnosticism as to the Meta- physical seemed really his own state of mind. His posthu- mous Three Essays on Religion, however, beget a doubt whether that opinion can now be retained as correct. In some respects, they are the most interesting of his writings, the most intimate revelation of drifts and meditations in his very peculiar mind that had long been secrecies and silences even to himself. Now, within limits, they are a pleading for Metaphysical Gnosticism, not only for the liberty of Metaphysical Gnosticism, but for something more. 288 RE CENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH \ '. He still, in these Essays, avows that Metaphysical Agnosti- cism might be a perfectly endurable mode of thinking, perhaps even the best ; he recognises Man's present life as, with all its miseries and drawbacks, a sufficient exercising- ground and pleasure-ground for those who use it rightly, and thinks the time may come when the Buddhist desire of cessation of being after death, rather than the desire of pro- longation of being, may be the common sentiment ; and he repeats his belief that Humanity itself might be found a sufficient object for the idealizing passion and habit, and so that Comte's non-supernatural Religion of Humanity might serve well enough for a good many. But, in the interests of Hope and Imagination, he thinks we are bound to make the most of any probabilities that may be afforded by the facts and analogies of the Cosmos itself, according to that a pos- teriori mode of reasoning which alone he regards as scien- tific, in favour of Theism and a Religion of the Supernatural. His report on the subject is that he does find some evidence of the kind, insufficient for proof, but " amounting to one of the lower degrees of probability" ; and, in the special matter of a Deity, he gives a most extraordinary account of the result he himself would arrive at by a favourable manipulation of this evidence. Nature, the present Cosmos, the present system of things, apart from Man, is, he says, with whatever streaks of beauty and beneficence in it, such a mass of murder, cruelty, perfidy, in the main of all those acts and dispositions that in human courts of law are called criminal and execrable that the advice to man to follow Nature, to make Nature his model, is worse than absurd, is positively immoral, and indeed he ought to be told that most of the good he can do in the world will be by reso- RECENT BRITISH PHIL OSOPH Y. 289 lately opposing Nature, thwarting Nature, fighting with Xature. To infer a Deity all-good and at the same time omnipotent from such a Cosmos is, therefore, impossible. Hut from the Cosmos as it is, with Man as a part of it, it might be competent to infer that the present order of things was a modification of prior material by an Intelligent Mind, determined to such an act of creation, and meaning well by His proposed creatures on the whole, of great powers but far from omnipotent, and obliged therefore to adjust His designs to His material. Here, certainly, is not the Deity of Christian Theology ; and it is one of the curiosities of litera- ture that in our day such a thinker should have offered us such a Deity as the best he could come at, doing his best to find any a Deity struggling with Chaos or some vast cir- cumambient Diabolism in His creation of the world, and succeeding only in producing a world partially representing Himself, but with fragments of the primeval Chaos and Diabolism mixed up with it inextricably. But it is all done with perfect seriousness ; and equally serious, equally inspired by a wish to do justice to theological beliefs, though with the same result of an enormous interval between his most favourable findings and Theological Orthodoxy, are his reasonings on the historical evidence for Revelation and the evidence for the doctrine of Immortality. These latest speculations of Mr. Mill will probarMy retain no permanent place in British Philosophy, but will be remembered only as interesting exhibitions of the eccentricities of a most remark- able individual intellect. It is memorable, however, that Mr. Mill should, at the end of his life, have thus deliberately given at least his casting-vote against a too conclusive Agnosticism. T 290 RECKXT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY. IV. A CORRECT COSMOLOGY, IRRADIATED BY AN a priori METAPHYSIC OF FAITH OR CONSTITUTIONAL POSTULA- TION : Against Theists and Theologians of the ct posteriori school, typically represented by Paley, and declared by Mr. A Fill to be the only Theists and Theologians right in their method of reasoning, it has always been a contention with many, including not a few of the most earnest and fervid among Theists and Theologians themselves, that the a pos- teriori method of proof by itself is comparatively inefficient, if indeed at all competent in the case of such tran- scendent objects as are dealt with, and that the main trust must be in the proof a priori, or the structural necessi- ties of the human soul and conscience. Those who take tin's view, and are at the same time Agnostics as regards the Absolute, Sir William Hamilton conspicuous as a recent British example, find the kind of cl priori rescue they want in that act or necessity of the mind, called Faith, in contra- distinction from Knowledge, which has been recognised not only by a famous series of Theologians in all countries, but also by Kant and many other metaphysicians. The mind of man, it is averred, must believe, is required to believe, a threat deal that it cannot know, the warrant for such beliefs lying in the necessities of its own structure. " If this fail, the pillared firmament is. rottenness/' exclaims the poet, after a burst of eloquent assertion of a great moral axiom : " If it is not so, God is a deceiver, and the root of our being a lie" was a not unusual form of speech with Sir William Hamil- ton when he would affirm some cardinal belief from the logical demonstration of which he was precluded by his meta- physical Agnosticism. And so, through this potency of \V. WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. WORDSWORTH, SHELLEY, KEATS, And other Kssays. Second Edition. Croxvn 8v<>, (.'loth. Trice 5-r. CHATTERTON: A Story of the Year 1770. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price $s. THE THREE DEVILS: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's ; with other Kssays. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 5-r. . DRUMMOND OF HA WTHORNDEN: 'i'he story of his Life and Writings, with Portrait and Vignette engraved by C. H. Jeens. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price io.r. 6J. MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 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