or reminiscence of an actually supposed life, in an infant or mythologic state of the intelligence. And when the members or portions of the universe, the greater portion of them, have ceased to bear to us, as viewed by our intelligence, the sort of fraternal relation which belongs to a similar life, they come, a great many of them, to bear to us another. In the development of our activity, and our imagination, without which our activity would be nothing, we very soon become constructive: from using our hands as instruments to move matter, we begin to use them as instruments to put it together or to make. It is with the first awakening of the constructive impulse that begins what corresponds to the neuter gender, the true notice and distinguishment of things. A 'thing' is what we may use or make, or if not we, what others may use or have made. Our notice of things is in this way from the first what I have above called interested: what makes them individualities or things to us is originally a supposed relation to ourselves.

It may really be called a life which this relation to ourselves, or interest, puts into the universe as we have sensation of it. It is not a life such as our infant intelligence supposes, like our own, but it is a life to our intelligence: the idea of the relation to ourselves soon dies away, like that of actual life, but there is left what is the soul of thought, namely, the supposition of meaning or reason of things being what they are. But to this we shall come soon.

The subjective sensation or feeling, though it accompanies the bodily communication, cannot properly be said to correspond to it, for this reason: that while it is highly likely that there are portions of the communication which have no counterpart in the feeling, it is certain that there is much in the feeling which has no counterpart in the communication. It is this latter, when philosophers use such language, which is understood by the form of the sensation, or the form superadded upon the sensation, so that sensation as consciousness or knowledge is something different from what it would be, were it simple attention to the communication. The word 'form' is as ambiguous as 'sensation'. We may understand the meaning of it best perhaps in this way: that the relation of shape to matter as concretely and rudely understood (stone, clay, &c.), is taken as

a type, figure, or suggestion of the relation of something (the metaphysical form which we want to understand) to incondite or confused material (so to call it) of any kind. As the sculptor or modeller gives shape to his clay, so is something given to the unmeaning and unsuggestive feeling—which, if we merely felt, as we feel a prick or a pinch, what is going on in our retina and the other sensive portions of our body, would be all that there would be-to make it the meaning and suggestive feeling which the real subjective sensation is. This, which is given, is the form of the sensation.

A result of the fact, that our subjective sensation has thus, in comparison with the bodily feeling and any mere feeling of that, a form given to it, is this, that we consider ourselves to be knowing or feeling, not, as in the phenomenal fact, something in ourselves, but something beyond ourselves: and when I said some time back, that at the same time we both have a sensation of a thing, and form an idea of it, I might have expressed the same by saying that the special character of the sensation, as having the form that it has, is that it is something the mind does not rest in. The mind makes out of it something which it rests in. The sensation passes away, yielding to the next sensation : but it has done something and it has left something: and this is expressed by saying that we have formed an idea.

Our sensations give form to each other, and the early and great sensation, that which we have of space, goes some way, in the manner which I have mentioned, in giving form to all the sensations which follow it. But it does not do everything.

I hope to make what I have said upon these subjects clearer by comparing it with what has been said by others.

CHAPTER IV.

FERRIER'S INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.

It is possible that the view which I have endeavoured to exhibit here will be better understood if I make a few remarks on one or two of the most important English works of our time on Psychology and Logic, showing how far they fall in with the distinction which I have endeavoured to draw between the phenomenalist and the philosophical or logical view, and how far they offend against it. I do this with no care for criticizing or controverting the works which I shall name, but simply because I think such a course is the best illustration which I can give of my own view.

The books of which I shall speak have been mentioned in the Introduction, as well as the principle of their selection and arrangement, and the first which comes is Professor Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic.

Whatever demerits Professor Ferrier's book may have, it has what I, having given the view which I have given, cannot but regard as a very great merit, namely, that it is free, I should think entirely, from the confusion of thought which much which I have written is directed to prevent. He has invented or adopted the term 'epistemology' for the logical or philosophical exposition which he has given of the nature of knowledge, and has, it seems to me, in a manner of which there are not many examples, kept in mind throughout the assumptions with which he has started, without changing his point of view, or introducing alien and unwarranted considerations. I do not attach much importance to the show of demonstration which his Euclidic method exhibits, for which, I think, the subject is not adapted. In fact, he has omitted from it that most important preliminary, the definitions and axioms, and

that this omission is important, may appear from the fact that his first proposition, from which all the rest are supposed to follow, and which is treated as almost self-evident, Mr Herbert Spencer, whose book I shall speak of shortly, totidem verbis denies'. Till axioms then are agreed upon, representing a ground common to various thinkers on the subject, the most perfect consecution in the demonstration is not important. Nor do I agree with Mr Ferrier's notion of the relation of the epistemological view which he gives to the view, in general, which, with great clearness and vigour, he gives as contrasting with it. He describes this latter partly as 'psychology', which with him is a term of great opprobrium, and more generally, as 'ordinary thinking', and something which it is the business of philosophy to correct. This ordinary thinking represents in the main what I have called the phenomenalist view (with a mixture indeed of the 'logical' which I hope at a future time to notice), which, it seems to me, is as valid within its large province as epistemological thinking is in its province, the business of the latter being not to correct or simply to oppose the former, but to prevent the misapplication of it. A good deal, no doubt, of 'ordinary thinking' is simply the philosophy of bad philosophers: but the mass of it, as represented by language, is not.

It is not, I think, so much in the direct line of Mr Ferrier's thought as in the incidental remarks, and the whole manner of thought which they exhibit, that the value of his book consists. For his direct argument, I can hardly think that his saying, so repeatedly and so barely (this repetition without explanation is due, it is to be observed, to his method of demonstration) that we cannot think or know an object without thinking or knowing the subject (ourselves) or a subject (ourselves as the type) with it, is a sufficient account of what I should call the feeling which we have, that what we know could not have been known by us unless there had been in it something making it possible to be known, or fit to be known, or the possible matter for future knowledge, or however we like to express ourselves. And in the same manner when he tells us that it is not the object of our knowledge, but ourselves as

1 Psychology, page 44, et passim.

knowing or apprehending that object, that we know, he seems too much to forget that he has got to give an account of the second knowing which he speaks of, or the apprehending, which at least must be of the object without an apprehended subject going with it.

Whether then Mr Ferrier has thrown any fresh light upon this question by the particular language in which he has chosen to speak about it, I am doubtful; but he seems to me, as I have said, to have the very great merit of seeing the problem clearly.

The examination of the nature of knowledge, when we start from the logical or philosophical point of departure, may very conveniently take the form of an observation or consideration of the difference between what on the one side is known, and what on the other side is unknown-not merely as a matter of fact, because we do not happen to know it--but unknown on account of something in its own nature, or unknowable. For the observation of the difference, we may suppose this latter; and we may then add to it in thought what suggests itself to us as necessary in order to convert that which cannot be the matter (or in this sense 'subject') of knowledge into that which can. The simplest expression of this is to say, that for anything, whatsoever it is, to be possibly the subject (in this sense) of knowledge, it must have definite qualities or properties, and definite relations to other things, and must be such that one and another thing may be said or predicated intelligibly about it. What is then not possibly the subject of knowledge in this sense is what does not possess the above character. And the tracing the difference between this and that which on the other hand is subject (in this sense) of knowledge, is the transforming, in thought and by successive steps, a something supposed of the latter kind into the universe or system of things as we know it.

Mr Ferrier has in very clear and vigorous language distinguished between this with its analogous processes and the misapprehensions of them which are very probable, and are chiefly of two kinds: the one that this process of logic or thought is an actual, historical (imagined) production on our part of things from nothing, a creation: the other that in such processes, alongside of our thought, we are to suppose things already existing as we know them. Both these misapprehen