THE

METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW.

APRIL, 1862.

ART. I.-METAPHYSICS OF WATSON'S INSTITUTES.

It is worthy of being noted that, while many theologians have condemned philosophy-shutting it, as they supposed, out of the region of theology, and cautioning their hearers to "beware that no man beguile them through philosophy"-their own theological system was built upon a philosophy, and permeated and tinged, in all its details, by philosophic speculation. The moment a man passes in thought from the simple, didactie utterances of Scripture, and attempts a higher generalization— the moment he commences gathering the short and pregnant sentences in which Truth is scattered almost at random over the sacred page, like pearls and gems upon a coral strand, and attempts to string them up into a theological creed, or arrange them in the cabinet of a theological system-and especially the moment he carries the profound utterances of Scripture into the system of things around him, and attempts to quadrate them with other truths taught in science or given in human consciousness, that moment he begins to philosophize. He may not have made philosophy, as taught in the schools, a subject of formal and systematic study, yet in the writings of other theologians, or floating in the atmosphere of intellectual society and converse, he has come in contact with the axioms and conclusions of philosophy, he has unconsciously inhaled them, they have found a place in his belief, and, even when he has no intention to philosophize, with a religious horror of all FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIV.-12

philosophy, they have, nevertheless, become a part of his theology.

That we may clearly apprehend the philosophic views of Mr. Watson, and fairly estimate their influence on his theology, (Theological Institutes,) it will be necessary that we glance at the systems of philosophy which were prevalent and influential in his day.

There are two schools of philosophy which may be said to have divided and given direction to the philosophic thought of the last century: the Sensational or Empirical, and the Transcendental or Rational. Their representatives respectively may be found in Locke and Kant: Locke at the head of the Sensational, Kant at the head of the Transcendental school.

The former, the Empirical school, holds that all the simple ideas existing in the human mind are the direct and only result of sensation, and that all our knowledge is derived from experience. Not only the matter of our ideas, but also their form; not merely the occasion of our ideas, but their cause, is from without. The mind itself does not supply one element of truth. It has no standards of truth within itself. Nor does it, of itself, affirm any first principles, any primitive cognitions, judgments, or beliefs which are necessary to the attainment of truth. The human mind is an empty vessel, into which our sensations a heterogeneous mixture are poured from the external world, upon which the mind itself exerts no modifying influence, does not even give a color to the liquid, but simply retains it in memory until it shall crystalize into the classifications of science. Or, to employ the favorite figure of Locke himself, the mind is a "tabula rasa"--a blank sheet of paper, void of all characters, and without any ideas, on which the external world, by a species of photography, writes its own images, and those which bear a strong resemblance naturally blend so as to form species and genera, the highest generalization becoming the apex of all science. Man, therefore, has no ideas of right and wrong, of duty, of accountability, of retribution, of immor tality, or of GOD, except as derived from without. This school of philosophy landed, as indeed it must inevitably land, in pure materialism, and numbers among its disciples, or more properly, its high priests, such writers as Hartley, Priestley, Combe, and Aug. Comte.

The Transcendental school, while it does not affirm the doctrine of innate ideas-that is, does not teach that there are some truths found in all minds expressed in formal or logical propositions, affirms that there are specific forms into which human thought must necessarily develop itself, just as a grain of wheat must necessarily develop itself into "the blade, and ear, and full corn in the ear," or an acorn develop into the majestic oak. There are fundamental laws of the human intelligence which constrain man, in view of the facts of the universe, to affirm certain necessary judgments and beliefs. Experience furnishes the material of our ideas, reason imposes the form. Experience is the occasion of their production, but their real cause is to be found in the spontaneous energy of mind itself; as warmth and moisture are the occasion of germination, the necessary condition of development, but the real cause is the mysterious vitality of the seed itself and the necessary laws of vegetative life.

The human intelligence is configured and correlated to eternal principles of order, and right, and good as they exist in the Infinite Intelligence. Man is the offspring and the image of God. And when a principle or an act is apprehended by the understanding, the mind passes a judgment upon the relation of that principle or act to these laws of order and right and good. Through the understanding, or notion-forming power, we obtain conceptions of all objects of perception, internal and external, as event, body, succession, the condition, the finite; the reason gives the necessary ideas which are the logical antecedents of these facts of perception, as the ideas of cause, space, time, the unconditioned, the infinite; and the judgment, or logical faculty, affirms the necessary relation between these understanding conceptions and these ideas of pure reason. Thus, for example, the understanding gives us the conception of "an event"—that which had a beginning, which now has a dependent existence, and which may have an end; the reason gives,, as the logical antecedent of an effect, the idea of cause;" and the judgment affirms the necessary relation of the two-"every event must have a cause." Hence the scientific accuracy of that distribution of all the necessary intuitions of the mind adopted by McCosh, namely: 1st, "primitive cognitions," the necessary forms of the understanding concepts; 2d, "prim

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itive beliefs," the necessary ideas of the reason; 3d, "primitive judgments," the necessary affirmations of the logical faculty. This school of philosophy, therefore, affirms that man is so constituted by the great Architect of his mental being-God has imposed upon his intelligence such laws of thought as determine him to form the idea of God, of right and wrong, of duty, and, of accountability.

So much being premised, we have now no difficulty in determining Mr. Watson's relations to the prevailing schools of philosophy. Unquestionably he attaches himself to the system of Locke; he was a disciple of the Empirical school. In the absence of more direct evidence this might safely be presumed. The system of Locke was the over-towering and allpervading philosophy of his country, especially of his day. In the English universities and schools of learning his imperial name ruled supreme. Kant had not then exerted, nor even now does he exert, any controlling and determining influence on the current of speculative thought in England. True, the leading and fundamental principles of his "Critique of Pure Reason" were incipient in the Scottish philosophy. The aim of Kant and Reid was identical; the starting-point in each system was the same; they both sought to determine whether there are any "first truths" given in the human intelligence, and they both commenced by asking, "What are the fundamental principles of the reason?" So, also, the philosophy of Hamilton, the disciple and annotator of Reid, is virtually the philosophy of Kant;* while Hamilton has not departed from, but more perfectly developed the method of his Scottish master. But while there is internal evidence in the "Institutes" that Watson had studied the writings of Reid, and was acquainted with his method, he was not, he could not, as we shall presently see,

* It is matter of astonishment that many persons who have eagerly embraced the philosophic views of Sir William Hamilton are vehement in their denunciation of "the transcendental nonsense of Kant," when any one acquainted with the writings of these two distinguished men must know that the philosophy of Hamilton is essentially the philosophy of Kant. The denial of the possibility of a philosophy of the "unconditioned" is common to both; the "antinomies" of Kant are the "contradictions" of Hamilton; that our knowledge is relative, that it is of phenomena and not of things in se, is the doctrine of both; and they are agreed in pronouncing the ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God as insufficient, and in resting solely on the psychological.

be a disciple of the Scottish school. That Watson was, in philosophy, a Sensationalist, must, we think, be evident to every discriminating mind furnished with even a very slender acquaintance with the history of modern philosophy. A careful perusal of the chapters "On the Presumptive Evidences" in Part I, the chapter "On the Existence of God" in Part II, and the first chapter of Part III, "On the Moral Law," will be decisive of this question in every intelligent mind. He affirms, with earnestness and emphasis, that we have no idea of God, of right and wrong, and of immortality, except as derived from without by instruction and verbal revelation; that, indeed, we have no faculty of knowing on any of these subjects, except faith.

Accordingly, on page 274, vol. i, we read, "We are all conscious that we gain our knowledge of God by instruction... we owe our knowledge of the existence of God and his attributes to revelation ALONE;" and at page 272 he quotes, with approval, the words of Ellis, and adopts them as his own: "God is the only way to himself; he cannot be in the least come at, defined, or demonstrated by human reason." At page 10, vol. i, he asserts "that nothing appears in the constitution of nature, or in the proceedings of the Divine administration, to indicate it to be the will of God that the appetites should be restrained within the rules of sobriety, except that, by a connection which has been established by Him, the excessive indulgence of these appetites usually impairs health." There is, therefore, no "law written upon the heart" indicating that intemperance and licentiousness are criminal and wrong, and the human intelligence can reach no other conception of virtue than that propounded on Paley's "selfish theory" of morals. The design of the whole of this chapter ii is to prove "that the rule which determines the quality of moral action must be presumed to be matter of [oral] revelation from God." In relation to the doctrine of Immortality, he remarks, at page 11, vol. i, "All observation lies directly against the doctrine of the immortality of man. He dies! and the probabilities of a future life which have been established upon the unequal distribution of rewards and punishments in this life, and the capacities of the human soul, are a presumptive evidence which has been adduced only by those to whom the doctrine had been transmitted by tradition, and who were, therefore, in