IF

CHAPTER IX.

MILL'S LOGIC CONTINUED.

If any person would have been likely to avoid notionalism (or relativism) and the wrong psychology, one would have thought that Mr Mill would, on account of his strong view of 'things' as the objects of knowledge, and of his clear observation of the difference between 'sensation' as 'consciousness' and 'sensation' as (so to call it) bodily affection'. I do not think he does avoid either of them, and the present chapter is a discussion as to his doing so the conclusion which I draw from this is, that phenomenalism, with a philosophic mind like his, will not stand alone, and if it cannot have (what seems to me) right philosophy to support it, must have wrong.

1. In speaking of an unknown and unknowable substratum of things, Mr Mill seems to me amenable to all that I said in speaking of Mr Ferrier, about the error of those philosophers who speak about things in themselves', or use any language of that kind, from a logical point of view, converting their mere logical supposition into a supposed reality. I will leave this however for a moment, and before saying more about it, will say a little about something else.

2. I think Mr Mill is inconsistent with himself in the following manner. All facts of body are ultimately facts of mind, i. e. the truth about them is capable of being reduced to truth of thought in the thinking mind. This is what I understand him to say, what I heartily agree with him in, and what seems to me the same as my saying, that the phenomenalist view is a partial one or an abstraction, and that the philosophical view, or that from the point of view of consciousness, is the comprehensive and complete one. But in this philosophical view, that which we are conscious of in the first step of immediateness is

on the one side our own feelings, on the other side something which gives occasion to them, which latter developes itself, as our intelligence goes on, into the facts of body or phenomenalism. Thus, on the philosophical view, these facts of body stand at a further remove from our consciousness, the test of certainty, than our feelings do: which Mr Mill himself seems to consider, in saying that the facts of body may be ultimately referred to feelings of mind. But then these feelings of mind ought not to be put on the same level of thought as the facts of body, as phenomena together with them, to be treated conjunctly with them, and to be considered as forming, along with them, a class of nameables in the universe. Still less ought a system of logic, formed upon the basis of the observation how we advance in the knowledge of the phenomena of body, to be applied to them, and to be considered as the instrument by which we shall advance in knowledge of them. And Mr Mill's attempting to do this seems to me inconsistent with his saying previously, that the facts of body are ultimately referrible to feelings of mind-i.e. that these latter stand at a higher stage, in the complete view, than the former. The immediate result of this logic, which I have called phenomenalist, is the denial of the existence of will, and of causation as action: i. e. as soon as the feelings of mind are professedly set by the side of the facts of body as co-phenomena, they are really subordinated to them, no longer treated as facts of mind or consciousness, but dealt with according to principles which the phenomenalist logic has given. It is quite possible that our supposed consciousness of will or activity may be a delusion: but it is possible in exactly the same manner, and at the same stage of thought, in which it is possible for our supposition of the existence of an universe independent of us, or a spatial, external world, to be a delusion. Our feeling of our activity or of our being sources of change exists by the side of, and at the level of, the entire and general feeling that there is a universe independent of us. We follow out this latter feeling into phenomenalism, and lay down (or describe) the facts of the universe: but it is not a proper course to put by the side of these facts, and to consider as phenomena analogous in any way to them, our various consciousness, or our feelings, which belong to a higher and different region. Our

feeling of there being a universe at all, upon which all phenomenalism depends, is but one of these feelings. Our feelings, viewed from the philosophical point of view or point of view of consciousness, are not phenomena of the universe or capable of standing by the side of such, but the universe, if we like to use the language, is a fact or phenomenon of them.

I do not quarrel with the looking at our feeling, so far as it can be so looked at, from the phenomenal point of view. Each one of us is a corporeal organization in the universe, filling space as a tree fills space, and sensitive more or less as a dog is sensitive. Of this sensitiveness which we share certainly with the dog, perhaps with the tree, for there may be an infinite number of degrees and kinds of it, we may, from the phenomenal point of view, have some notion: it is a fact of the universe: we may call it if we like consciousness: we may apply our individual feeling of consciousness towards the gaining this notion, so far as we can we may imagine what the dog's feeling must be, and judge from what he does, how far it is like our own: I have no quarrel with all this. All I say is, that with each one of us (if "we say 'each one'), with me, with you, the one great reality which absorbs all others is that I, you, think and feel, and we only talk of a universe because we think and feel that there is one; that our thought in this way surrounds or embraces the universe and cannot therefore be embraced by it in such a manner as to be liable to have said of it, This, or that, matter of consciousness, is inconsistent with such and such laws of the universe which we have discovered, and therefore cannot be true. We may, to a certain extent, be able to treat of our thought or feeling as embraced in the universe, as a fact of it: but we have no right to conclude that because we may do this we may conclude things about it, from its being a fact of the universe, which the thought itself, as consciousness, disowns.

There seems to me, in all this attempt to apply phenomenalist logic to the consideration of thought and feeling, to be the same confusion of two views which I have all along been noting. We are, for physical and physiological study (which is what I call phenomenal) one species of animal upon the earth, the highest that we know, with communicative tongues and constructive hands, so that we can make all sorts

of things and combine together, with common and mutual understanding, to make them, and talk about them, and talk in our own minds about them-we may study the facts of our own nature, including our thought and feeling to the extent I have mentioned above, in our place in the universe, as we may study any facts of any nature, phenomenally. But we are, and we cannot help really feeling ourselves, for purposes of philosophical and moral study, not this, but something different-what I should call, 'higher'. We feel with, and we feel ourselves as having, a free consciousness, a disposition to look at things generally, a curiosity, or love of knowing, a disposition to do things for a purpose and to try to do them well, all which with kindred feelings besides, makes us occupy, own view, the position, not of animals, however high, in the universe with a sphere and environment, and with our own existence subordinated to that, but of observers of the relation between ourselves and this universe, with its existence subordinated to ours, believing in it not because we are inferior to it but because we think it, judging about it as well as studying it, and when we are settling upon our action, thinking, from this free point of view, what is worth doing, what wants doing, what it is well should be done; not simply considering that our experience in the universe as the animal man, is to guide our action in the same way as a dog's experience or instinct as the animal dog guides his, which is what he cannot help.

in our

I have put this a little strongly just to mark how it is at the point of human nature and human action that we must take care that we keep the views distinct. I have been noticing, throughout what I have been saying now, the confusion, as it seems to me, of the two views, in reference to philosophy or the study of knowledge: Mr Mill, in respect of the application of his logic to knowledge, does not much fall into it, but he does when he thinks to apply his logic to social science and to morals. Because for these, in my view, we must start, not from phenomena, but from consciousness, in the same way as we start for the higher philosophy of knowledge. I have just tried to describe what I mean by this. The putting our feelings as co-phenomena with the facts of the uni

verse is the bringing them from a higher level to which they do belong to a lower to which they do not. It is analogous in a different application of thought, to the want of clearness of view in setting before ourselves the question whether we are thinking of ourselves as corporeal and local, or whether we are considering how we gain the knowledge, or conceive the notion, of corporealness and locality.

From what I have said as to the extent to which our feelings may be treated phenomenally it will be understood that I do not wish to deny the possibility of much valuable result from this line of thought-but it must be kept within its proper limits for this, and must be subordinate, as a logic of philosophy and morals, to the logic of the higher point of view which I have mentioned. Whereas Mr Mill considers, and I believe has influenced many to consider, that by what he has said he has opened the way to a new and better method, promising much advance, in respect of social science for instance and morals. This I think is mistaken.

I should perhaps have said, that for the phenomenalist study of human nature and morals, we have now, at this stage of the world's life, something beyond physics and physiology, in the facts of the history of human society. All this I most fully allow, and the very valuable results which may result from the study of these facts or phenomena. But even these, though phenomena if we like to call them so of a higher order, do not alter what I have said, that our starting point must not be from them. All that man has done, whatever aid it may give, can never teach us what man should do or what it is best for him to do, any more than the facts of the universe can.

Before however proceeding further on the logic of the moral sciences, which is what comes last in Mr Mill's book, I had better finish what I have to say about the 'unknowable substratum' of things, and mention one or two points in which there seems to me confusion.

3. I am not at all now criticizing Mr Mill, which could not be properly done except at much greater length than I wish here to go to, and without going into details which would interfere with the general view which I want to give. I take