An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy

mistake altogether the true conditions of psychological investigation, when, instead of proving a belief to be an original fact of consciousness by showing that it cannot, by any known means, have been acquired, they conclude that it was not acquired, for the reason, often false, and never sufficiently substantiated, that our consciousness cannot get rid of it now.

Since, then, Sir W. Hamilton not only neglects, but repudiates, the only scientific mode of ascertaining our original beliefs, what does he mean by treating the question as one of science, and in what manner does he apply science to it? Theoretically, he claims for science an exclusive jurisdiction over the whole domain, but practically he gives it nothing to do except to settle

as to make the separation unimaginable, may surely create an impossibility of belief, not local or temporary, but as durable as the experience which gave rise to the association.

Mr. Spencer, who is almost willing to rest the claims of inconceivability as a test of truth on its expressing "the net result of our experience up to the present time," has given an excellent exposition of this point. He sees clearly that the difference between the two kinds of inconceivable is only one of degree-the degree of strength of the cohesion between the two ideas. The proposition "the ice was hot" he justly classes as not unimaginable, but merely unbelievable; the unbelievableness, however, arising from a difficulty, though not amounting to an impossibility, of combining the two ideas in a representation. "The elements of the pro"position cannot be put together in thought without great resistance. "Between those other states of consciousness which the word ice connotes, "and the state of consciousness named cold, there is an extremely strong "cohesion-a cohesion measured by the resistance to be overcome in "thinking of the ice as hot." (Spencer, p. 543.) The merely unbelievable is thus distinguished from Mr. Mahaffy's unimaginable, not by a generic difference, but by a minor degree of unimaginability. And the seeming incredibility is strictly proportioned to the degree of difficulty in combining the two thoughts in one representation.

With regard to Mr. Mahaffy's assertion, that nothing unimaginable has ever been "proved true, or even possible;" the point would have been more effectually maintained if he could have said "nothing which seemed unimaginable;" for whatever has been "proved true" or even "possible" has thereby become imaginable. People had much difficulty, and most people have some difficulty still, in representing to themselves sunrise as a motion not of the sun but of the earth; but no one has called this notion of sunrise either inconceivable or unimaginable after knowing it to be the true notion. Let us first, then, state the question correctly Has anything which seemed unimaginable been proved true, or possible? It is hardly practicable to give such an answer to this question as will silence the retort, that what was called unimaginable was really no more than incredible; for since unimaginableness, as I have said, exists in

the relations of the supposed intuitive beliefs among themselves. It is the province of science, he thinks, to resolve some of these beliefs into others. He prescribes, as a rule of judgment, what he calls "the Law of Parsimony." No greater number of ultimate beliefs are to be postulated than is strictly indispensable. Where one such belief can be looked upon as a particular case of another-the belief in Matter, for instance, of the cognition of a Non-ego-the more special of the two necessities of thought merges in the more general one. This identification of two necessities of thought, and subsumption of one of them under the other, he is not wrong in regarding as a function of science. He affords an example of it, when, in a manner which we shall hereafter characterise, he denies to Causation the character, which philosophers of his school numerous degrees, graduating from a slight difficulty to at least a temporary impossibility, there is no definite line of demarcation between the absolutely unimaginable (if there be such a thing) and the totally incredible, nor even between what is unimaginable by a given person, and what is merely incredible to him. Most of the questions which lie on that border land are still disputed. For example: is a creation a nihilo, or Matter capable of thinking, unimaginable, or only incredible? Both the one and the other are habitually ranked among the most unimaginable of all things. Yet the one is firmly believed by all Materialists, and the other by all Christians. Every Materialist, therefore, and every Christian, may be called as a witness that things which are unimaginable are not only possible but true. To take another instance-an event without a cause. Is that unimaginable, or only incredible? All who regard the category of Cause and Effect as a necessity of thought, including Sir W. Hamilton, and Mr. Mahaffy himself, maintain it to be unimaginable. Yet most of these believe it to be both possible and true in the case of human freewill. Not only therefore what to one man seems unimaginable, another believes to be true, but the same man believes to be true what to himself seems unimaginable: witness the whole Philosophy of the Conditioned.

Dr. M'Cosh thinks that antipodes were unbelievable, not in consequence of an association, but because (p. 240) “the alleged fact seemed contrary "to a law of nature established by observation. A gathered experience "seemed to show that there was an absolute up and down, and that heavy "bodies tended downwards." Of course it was the apparent experience that generated the association. But if there had been no more in the matter than an intellectual conviction, the conviction would have given way as soon as any one made the remark that the experience was confined to a region in which the direction of down coincided with direction towards the earth. It is because our intellectual convictions generate temporarily inseparable associations, that they give way so slowly before evidence.

have commonly assigned to it, of an ultimate belief, and attempts to identify it with another and more. general law of thought. This limited function is the only one which, it seems to me, is reserved for science in Sir W. Hamilton's mode of studying the primary facts of consciousness. In the mode he practises of ascertaining them to be facts of consciousness, there is nothing for science to do. For, to call them so because in his opinion he himself, and those who agree with him, cannot get rid of the belief in them, does not seem exactly a scientific process.* It is, however, characteristic of what I have called the introspective, in contradistinction to the psychological, method of metaphysical inquiry. The difference between these methods will now be exemplified by showing them at work on a particular question, the most fundamental one in philosophy, the distinction between the Ego and the Non-ego.

We shall first examine what Sir W. Hamilton has done by his method, and shall afterwards attempt to exemplify the use which can be made of the other.

* The "Inquirer" (p. 54) thinks that Sir W. Hamilton demanded, as evidence that a supposed fact of consciousness is not acquired, but original, not only that it should not be reducible to a generalisation from experience, but that it should lie "at the root of all experience;" which the "Inquirer" understands to mean "that no experience is possible unless this belief, this mode of thought, is already present with us." If Sir W. Hamilton meant this, he took no pains to show that he meant it. The authority quoted is a passing expression (Lectures, i. 270): "Whenever "in an analysis of the intellectual phenomenon, we arrive at an element "which we cannot reduce to a generalisation from experience, but which "lies at the root of all experience, and which we cannot, therefore, resolve "into any higher principle, this we properly call a fact of consciousness." The idea of the words in italics is no further developed; it is omitted from the definition in the next page, "A fact of consciousness is thus, that "whose existence is given and guaranteed by an original and necessary "belief" (unless the idea is supposed to be implied in the word "original"); and Sir W. Hamilton never, as far as I am aware, recurs to it in his attempts to prove the originality of a belief. This is the more remarkable, because Kant makes a continual and obtrusive use of this criterion; we are always hearing from him that this or that mental element cannot be the product of experience, because its pre-existence is required to render experience possible; which goes far to show that Sir W. Hamilton's abstinence was intentional, and grounded on a sense of the extreme difficulty of proving, in any of the disputed cases, what Kant so confidently affirms. It is not unusual with Sir W. Hamilton to adopt, from other philosophers, single expressions of which the full meaning forms no part of his own mode of thought.

CHAPTER X.

SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S VIEW OF THE DIFFERENT THEORIES RESPECTING THE BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL WORLD.

SIR W. HAMILTON brings a very serious charge against the great majority of philosophers. He accuses them of playing fast and loose with the testimony of consciousness; rejecting it when it is inconvenient, but appealing to it as conclusive when they have need of it to establish any of their opinions. "No philosopher has ever openly thrown off allegiance to the authority of con"sciousness." No one denies "that † as all philosophy "is evolved from consciousness, so on the truth of con"sciousness, the possibility of all philosophy is depen"dent." But if any testimony of consciousness be supposed false, "the truth of no other fact of consciousness can be maintained. The legal brocard, Falsus in uno, "falsus in omnibus, is a rule not more applicable to other "witnesses than to consciousness. Thus every system "of philosophy which implies the negation of any fact "of consciousness is not only necessarily unable, without "self-contradiction, to establish its own truth by any appeal to consciousness; it is also unable, without self'contradiction, to appeal to consciousness against the "falsehood of any other system. If the absolute and universal veracity of consciousness be once surrendered, every system is equally true, or rather all are equally "false; philosophy is impossible, for it has now no in"strument by which truth can be discovered, no standard "by which it can be tried; the root of our nature is a "lie. But though it is thus manifestly the common "interest of every scheme of philosophy to preserve Ibid. p. 283.

* Lectures, i. 377. + Ibid p. 285.

"schoolmen and the ancients, I am only aware of a single 'philosopher before Reid, who did not reject, at least in "part, the fact as consciousness affords it.

"As it is always expedient to possess a precise name "for a precise distinction, I would be inclined to de"nominate those who implicitly acquiesce in the primi"tive duality as given in consciousness, the Natural "Realists, or Natural Dualists, and their doctrine, "Natural Realism or Natural Dualism." This is, of course, the author's own doctrine.

"In the second place, the philosophers who do not accept the fact, and the whole fact, may be divided and "subdivided into various classes by various principles of "distribution.

"The first subdivision will be taken from the total, or 'partial, rejection of the import of the fact. I have previously shown that to deny any fact of conscious"ness as an actual phenomenon is utterly impossible." (But it is very far from impossible to believe that something which we now confound with consciousness, may have been altogether foreign to consciousness when this was unmingled with acquired impressions.) "But "though necessarily admitted as a present phenomenon, "the import of this phenomenon-all beyond our actual "consciousness of its existence-may be denied. We "are able, without self-contradiction, to suppose, and consequently to assert, that all to which the phenomenon of which we are conscious refers, is a decep"tion;" (say rather, an unwarranted inference ;) that for example, the past, to which an act of memory refers, is only an illusion involved in our consciousness "of the present-that the unknown subject to which every phenomenon of which we are conscious involves a reference, has no reality beyond this reference itself, "—in short, that all our knowledge of mind or matter "is only a consciousness of various bundles of baseless appearances. This doctrine, as refusing a substantial "reality to the phenomenal existence of which we are "conscious, is called Nihilism; and consequently, philo

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