statement by the side of the other, because, besides knowing the object of knowledge, we do know the fact or phenomenon (the first and greatest of all phenomena) of knowledge, and upon this knowledge, in the higher philosophy, many important conclusions depend. But this is only saying that the object of knowledge may be, if for a particular purpose we choose to make it so, the fact of knowledge itself. Sir William Hamilton seems to me to make all knowledge, even as knowledge, mediate.

We know the external world by our feeling ourselves something, which I have called phenomenal beings: the fact being, that we feel, consider, imagine (however we may describe it) ourselves in communication, not merely with a formless nonego, but with a regular and various universe independent of us, by means of a part of that universe which we call our bodies, with which part also, in various manners, we consider our feeling associated. Of some portions or characters of this universe (secondary qualities) our feelings are only suggestive: some (primary qualities) they directly measure: some (the composition and order in the universe) they identify themselves with or entirely appropriate.

With what reason we think or feel all this, is the problem of what is commonly called 'Ontology'. Upon this I will not enter now, nor upon the question, whether there is reason in proposing such a problem.

This being so, calling our knowledge of the particulars of the universe 'perception', are we to consider it immediate or mediate, presentation or representation?

The answer to this really depends on what we mean by the word 'thing' or on what we consider, in perception, to be the object of knowledge.

I described some time since the two kinds of words by which, in most languages, knowledge has been expressed. One chief particular of the difference between the two, is our placing ourselves in imagination, when speaking of knowledge, lower or higher upon the scale of sensation.

Knowledge of acquaintance with things is the notion of knowledge which is suggested by the lower portion of the scale. of sensation, where are the secondary qualities of matter: (the

primary qualities enter both into this and as we shall see into the other kind of knowledge, most specially perhaps and necessarily into this). This is kenntniss, connaissance: the type of it is usually taken to be the sense of sight, which embodies both secondary and primary qualities: hence the philosophical name of it is intuition', 'anschauung': and hence the great tendency in the term 'representation', &c., as applied to it, to give the notion of an actual image. It would have saved some confusion of thought, at the expense of some picturesqueness, if instead of words referring to the sense of sight to express notions of this kind, we could have used or coined some referring to the sense of touch (in the double character of feeling and handling, nervous and muscular perception), such a word e. g. as 'betouchment'; the term 'apprehension' and words of this kind have something of the character which I mean: here, however, there would have been danger of confusion too: for whatever sensive power (even the simplest) we refer the term we use to, the reference to the sensive power will be something of a metaphor, for we mean to express something more general, more abstract than the reference to the sensive power would imply, though something which the sensive power suggests to us. Any feeling distinctly attended to is more or less of an intuition, and any recurrence of such feeling, similarly attended to, is more or less of a representation.

If we take knowledge of acquaintance, or by way of intuition in this use of the term, for the type of knowledge, and mean by the word 'thing', as is its real meaning, 'the object of our knowledge', then of course our perception or knowledge of things is immediate: the words intuitive and immediate in this sense will mean the same thing. The 'thing' in this view is what we see, handle, smell, taste. I have expressed the fact this way as the way in which it would be expressed, and to shew how many philosophical disputes arise from mere inattention to language. Is here expresses a relation of co-extensiveness or identity: it does not mean that what follows it is a predicate or part of the description of that which goes before. The proposition is true converted: what we see, handle, smell, taste, is the thing. Even so it is not absolutely safe from misapprehension and it is this misapprehension which gives rise to

:

the notion of something mysterious contained in the word what. What is it we see, handle, &c. people will ask: with some reason we shall see presently, though not with the reason they sometimes think. What is the substratum or substance of which these qualities which we perceive, seeableness or colour, handleableness or shape, taste, smell, &c. are attributes? The answer is, there is, in the sense you mean, none such: the thing itself is really, so far as knowledge is concerned (on this view of knowledge as acquaintance), determined by these particulars which you perceive about it, which are really therefore the elements or constituents of it. But because you do not know how many of these constituents there are (and for another reason too, which we shall see) you choose, in thought or language, to suppose the thing itself unknown, and to call all these things qualities or adjuncts of it. In reality, on this view of knowledge, there is nothing more to be known than the sum of these qualities.

But of these qualities of the supposed thing there is one of transcendant importance, which is its thinghood or reality, which is really the same notion as that of the relation of its parts to each other, and of itself to what is about it. In the view of knowledge as acquaintance with things, this is not to be treated as a mysterious substratum of the qualities, but is a quality itself, only the most important, and the particulars of which we are always endeavouring to discover. I have mentioned, that all the discussion about things in themselves seems to me to arise from the treating as two different portions of knowledge what are really two different views of the same knowledge. The cardinal quality of a sensible object of knowledge, which is what I have called its 'reality' or 'unity' vanishes out of the field of knowledge of acquaintance with things, for this reason, that it belongs to a higher part of the scale of sensation and thought than that knowledge will really apply to.

It is possible however, that we may take acquaintance with things, instead of being the type of knowledge, to be no knowledge at all, and to resolve all intellect at bottom merely into a sort of habit or familiarity: just as from passing a tree every day we might know, entirely without intellectual exercise, every branch and leaf of it, or might know to little purpose every

line on the face and every button on the coat of a man whom we meet every day, but to whom we had never spoken. We may take for type of knowledge the knowledge of facts about things, judgment.

This is the logical notion of knowledge, and it is because it is so that, in the manner which I have mentioned, knowledge or acquaintance, in order to enter into thought and language, is put into this form, and the thing we make acquaintance with is split into substance and qualities, to which correspond, logically, subject and possible predicates.

Knowledge, when the former type is taken of it, is a matter of communication, the suggestion of which is given by the communication between our body and the external universe: when this latter type is taken, it is a matter of question and answer, of dissection and analysis: we stand as it were behind the great web of reality, of which we do not, so far, see the face; or rather, seeing the face, we endeavour to get behind it.

Of knowledge of this type there are continually varying actual objects, which are the facts we know about things: these facts put together make up in this view the thing, and we are said to have a conception of the thing, as distinct from an intuition.

Truth, in the intuitive view of knowledge, is simply undisturbedness or purity: in the conceptive, it is thinking rightly or as we should about things: the highest notion of truth altogether is perhaps the accordance of the two descriptions of knowledge, or the agreement of the results of the one with those of the other.

CHAPTER VII.

SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON-CONSCIOUSNESS OF

MATTER.

IN the last Chapter but one I have made some general remarks on Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, but have as yet made little or no quotation from him.

I shall probably have occasion, in a later Chapter than this', to refer to his philosophy again: in the present Chapter I will try to exhibit the part of it with which I am most concerned in his own words as well as the proof which he gives of it.

Upon this part of his philosophy, our (supposed) consciousness of matter, I have myself written, I fear, with some confusion (and I must apologise for it) in this way: I have done my best to enter into Sir William Hamilton's view, by putting it to myself in various ways, and have seemed to myself thus to come to see it more clearly-it is probable that what I have written will bear the traces of this effort. But certainly, the more I seem to myself to understand it, the less do I agree with it.

I should almost be disposed to consider it the master-confusion, the 'temporis partus maximus' of mis-psychology—but we will see.

I have myself not the slightest objection to say that we are conscious of matter, if these are the terms we like to use, in this way. Matter is a thing we know, and whatever we know we may be said to be conscious of, if we talk of consciousness of things: all our knowledge, even all our thought, is consciousness, as I have said myself as strongly as I can: what we know then, and not only that, but what we imagine, what we conceive, what we remember, we are conscious of: this very simple fact, or rather manner of expression seems to me to be all the substance of many pages of Sir William Hamilton, where he proves that the different faculties, by which, in the language of some philosophers, we are said to do these various 1 In the next part.