to be of the same nature as in the case of which | Self or Not-self in the first sensation that I have experience, and which is in all respects we experience, nor until after considerable similar, I bring other human beings, as pheno- experience of the recurrence of sensations, mena, under the same generalizations which I know by experience to be the true theory of according to fixed laws and in groups. But my own existence. And in doing so I conform where, we ask, does Sir W. Hamilton, say to the legitimate rules of experimental inquiry. that we are awakened to a necessary belief We know the existence of other beings in a Self or a Not-self, in the "first" sensaby generalization from the knowledge of our tion that we experience? What does he say own; the generalization merely postulates that inconsistent with the supposition that this what experience shows to be a mark of some- conception and belief mysteriously rises up thing within the sphere of our consciousness, only after a series of sensations has been exmay be concluded to be a mark of the same The belief in Self perienced without it?

thing beyond that sphere. As this theory leaves the evidence of the existence of my fellow-creatures exactly as it was before, so does it also with that of the existence of God. Supposing me to believe that the Divine Mind is simply the series of the Divine thoughts and feelings prolonged through eternity, that would be at any rate believing God's existence to be as real as my own. As for evidence, the argument of Paley's Natural Theology, or, for that matter, of his Evidences of Christianity, would stand exactly where it does. The design argument is drawn from the analogy of human experience. From the relation which human works bear to human thoughts and feelings, it infers a corresponding relation between works more or less similar, but superhuman, and superhuman thoughts and feelings. If it proves these, nobody but a metaphysician needs care whether or not it proves a mysterious substraAs to Immortality, it is precisely as easy to conceive that a succession of feelings, a thread of consciousness, may be prolonged to eternity, as that a spiritual substance for ever continues to exist; and any evidence which would prove the one will prove the other" (pp. 208-11).

tum for them.

We shall not now examine the intended meaning of the doctrine of Hume which suggested to Reid the objection thus criticised by Mr. Mill. Reid, at any rate, supposed it to involve a denial of that belief in Self, which Mr. Mill, in the remarkable passage already given, presents as "the final inexplicability." If Mind be merely a series of feelings, of "impressions and ideas," without any lawful belief in a personal identity involved in them, we cannot infer more than this of "other" successive feelings. We cannot represent as external what is not to be believed even as internal. The very words, "I," "self," "myself," "other selves," etc., must be abolished. Existence is analysed into phenomena, orderly it may be, but unconnected by any vital bond of Self, that "ultimate inexplicability."

rises inexplicably, Mr. Mill himself allows. The belief in the spacial or material Not-self is partly explicable, as we say, in agreement so far with Mr. Mill, but not with Sir W. Hamilton.

We need not ask what either Sensation or Self is, before the sentient becomes selfconscious. We can have sensational experience without any definite conception of what this experience involves; we can feel before we are able to give an accurate definition of our feeling. Our growing ability to distinguish and define the things of which undefined original experience is made up, is simply our intellectual growth; which turns on the pivot of Self, and consists in a deepening and truer interpretation of phenomena dependent on, yet distinguished from Self, and which are symbolic or interpretable, in their relations to one another, and to other Selfs with their dependent phenomena.

Nor can we allow that either sensations or percepts produce this conception of Not-self merely from something in themselves per se and not from their order and groupings, or from the established harmony of the sensegiven portion of each person's experience with that of other persons. Imagination and other purely internal experience in each of us might reveal externality to what we are at any moment feeling in our own conscious history, and might also reveal phenomena existing in other minds, if this internal experience were organised like our external intelligible relation with the entire cosmical system, and could, as it were, be experienced simultaneously by ourselves and others in common. This is assumed to be the case, in a degree, in supernatural dreams and visions, which involve an intercourse of a mind with other minds, through what is usually internal experience.*

One word as to the date of the commence*Professor Masson asks, with reference to Mr. ment of our properly conscious experience. Mill, "How can I predicate the existence of other Mr. Mill (p. 214) conceives Sir W. Hamil-minds in the same sense as I can predicate my own?" ton to be wrong in his statement that a "self (Recent British Philosophy, p. 355.) Why not at and a not-self are immediately apprehended least when we add what Mr. Mill says about Self to his definition of Mind? We have a specimen in in our primitive consciousness." "He thinks our own consciousness (however" inexplicable") of that we have probably no notion of either a Self that is conscious of sensible and other phe

A question may here be suggested. Is the | sciousness" (p. 153, etc.). In short, the quesactual universe ultimately referable to a Self? tion discussed by Hamilton, under cover of a Is there no higher form of existence than this defence of natural realism, is the question of of phenomena dependent on Minds which the infallibility of universal postulates, assumed maintain inter-communion through their sen- to be given as facts in consciousness. Our sible phenomena? As a self-conscions expe- belief in the independent externality of what rience seems to rise mysteriously out of blind, we are conscious of, when we are conscious of unself-conscious sensation, may self-conscious- solid and extended phenomena, is taken as a ness, in its turn, advance into what is higher? specimen, a fortiori, of this kind of infallibilty.

It is now more than time to proceed to the second of the three groups of metaphysical questions which we arranged at the outset. Mr. Mill's criticism of the Hamiltonian Realism, from which we have tried to draw some contributions towards a Reflective Philosophy of Space, Externality, and Reality -is itself a cover for a discussion which is even deeper, or at least more comprehensive. The metaphysical question about Matter, and about the difference between Not-self and Self, Mr. Mill indeed characterizes as "the most fundamental question in philosophy." But all through his answers to it, he hears the uuder-tones of another debate, between what he calls the Introspective and the Psychological-or, as we should say, the Dogmatic or Abstract, and the Tentative or Experientialmethods of metaphysical inquiry. He discusses "the most fundamental question in philosophy," mainly in order to illustrate the difference between these two methods; and in order to meet in the face Sir W. Hamilton's summary manner of settling it,-by a dogmatic appeal to an assumed "testimony of consciousness," as an absolute standard. All philosophers who proclaim a different origin of our belief in the externality of matter, or who give a different account of what matter and externality mean, are charged by Sir William with the grave offence of "playing fast and loose with the testimony of con

Are there any universal truths which we are originally obliged to believe, or which we originally know to be true? Sir W. Hamil ton is supposed to answer this question in the affirmative, and Mr. Mill in the negative. Let us contemplate its significance, which is said by many to be immense.

Is there an infallible voice within us? Have we, in the last resort, an absolute standard of truth for determining anything at all! Or is all beyond transient sense-objects not properly knowledge, but only probability; generated historically and by experiment, and excluding any intuition of universal truth latent in our own deepest and truest being? If even our belief in the special externality of Matter is a belief due to a particular kind of changeable conscious experience, and is not a direct infallible revelation, it may be asked, Where have we any absolute truth at all, which we know that no future evolution of experience shall reverse or modify? If there is no direct infallible revelation of externality in sense, we are apt to say there can be no infallible revelation about anything at all— no "inspiration of the Almighty" for regulating the understanding and life of man.

The confused fight about "consciousness of matter" which we have been trying to disentangle, is in fact felt, by one party, in respect of its human interest, to be a fight against scepticism, on behalf of reality, infallibility, and absolute truth, and by another as a fight against dogmatism on behalf of liberty nomena. Can we not infer the existence of other and progress. It is in one of its aspects the similar units inductively, from their sensible signs, old and ever-during struggle between Faith while we cannot intelligibly infer abstract Matter! and Scepticism; and in another, the struggle, Mr. Masson also seems to think (p. 357, etc.), also perennial in human nature, between Dogthat what he calls Mr. Mill's "cosmological idealism," is severely tested by the modern geological matism and Inquiry, struggles which have disclosure of the Pre-Adamite, and even pre-sen- given life to philosophy and theology in all tient existence of our planet. But length of time the living ages of their history,—in Greece, does not increase the difficulty. If the pre-sen- in medieval times, in modern Europe, and tient planet was "created," say a million of years before any individual sentient, this would mean never more earnestly than now. On the that if any of us, now sentients, had been awaken-battle-field of metaphysics, "Platonic ideas," ed into consciousness at some definite time in the "innate ideas," "connate ideas," 99 66 common course of that million of years, we should have sense,' had the sense-experience which Science, reasoning "testimonies of consciousness," are a few of common reason," "intuitions," and inductively from present geological phenomena, is able to attribute to that supposed time; but that the watchwords of the combatants on the if, on the other hand, we had become conscious be- one side; and "experience," "sensation," and fore the million of years commenced, i.e., before "mental association," are a few of the watchthe planet was "created," we should have had no words on the other. sense-experience at all-its quasi-externeity not having, ex hypothesi, at that date commenced, so far as our sense-experience would be concerned.

99 66

Let us consider the true relation of our two philosophers to this second group of questions.

In reference to the first group, we have described the Hamiltonian philosophy as a dogmatic yet partly reflective dualism, and the philosophy of Mr. Mill as an analytic selfconscious phenomenalism. Our consciousness, from the date of its awakening, and all through this earthly life of ours, is, according to the one philosopher, interpenetrated, as it were, by an inexplicable belief attested by consciousness, in the polar opposition of two realities, Mind and Matter, Ego and Non-ego, with the qualities of each of which it is in conscious relation, while out of that relation they are both unknown or unconditioned. Our consciousness, when it is awakened, is, according to Mr. Mill, inexplicably aware of itself as past and future, and gradually defines an external world, which in our early conscious history is a dim and vague correlate of the hardly developed conception of an Ego, but which, step by step, becomes, through our associative tendency, and also through what Mr. Mill calls the principle of expectation, and Sir W. Hamilton the principle of philosophical presumption, the system of physical conceptions for which language provides names, and which are further corrected and enlarg

ed in science.

merely on consciousness as the scene of a set of phenomena,-takes its place on the conservative side in the battle about "necessary truths." Mr. Mill, proclaiming freedom from all inexplicable assumptions except that of a self-consciousness of phenomena, which are presented in orderly co-existence and succession, in an associative and expectant mind, is ready to believe in any way that the coexistent and successive phenomena of our ever enlarging experience require.

More earnest debate has circled round this than perhaps round any other high specu[lative question. It has been described as the one question in metaphysics, which, as decided by each generation for itself, gives the tone to the whole opinion and mode of thought in that generation. We confess to thinking that not a little misconception and exaggeration are commonly mixed with what is said as to this battle about "necessary truths," this controversy between a priori and a posteriori philosophies-between the reason and the understanding.

Take Sir W. Hamilton as a representative of the philosophy of necessary truths, and Mr. Mill as a representative of the opposed philosophy. More favourable types on either It is at this point that the two systems side could not be found. Do we find a hardiverge. Sir W. Hamilton who has already bourage for certainty and infallibility in the recognised, in this foundation of his system, teaching of the one, and an exposure to hopetwo beliefs for which he says no explanation less doubt when we try to place ourselves at can be given, explains the construction of the point of view of the other? It is not our mediate knowledge, in all its ramifica- so. According to both, there are beliefs tions, by means of other universal but inex- which we are obliged to form about the pheplicable beliefs,- -some positively and others nomena of which we are conscious, and their negatively conceived,-which we are origi- meaning. In both, we find a way open, on nally obliged to have, while we cannot fully which, in the form of reasonable belief, we may comprehend them. Mr. Mill, on the other expand the narrow area of our transient but hand, postulates no such universal beliefs; direct conscious experience. But then the and regards the growth or extension of our beliefs which Hamiltonism declares that we knowledge, in the remotest ramifications of are obliged to assume are universal, and supscience, as due to the same principles of ex- posed to be secure against all possible future pectation and association which set it agoing experience; while the beliefs that Mr. Mill at the commencement, afterwards aided by recognises as legitimately formed, are due to artificial language, and by artificial forms of the experience through which we have passreasoning. Sir W. Hamilton proclaims the ed, and may be modified by the experience presence of universally applicable intellectual through which we are still to pass. The one necessities, of which he can give no account; accepts principles which are assumed to be and he assumes these as the framework of absolutely universal for us; while they are our intellectual being. Mr. Mill accounts for ultimately inconceivable by us, because conall the intellectual necessities or universal sciousness is only of the finite, and their obtruths which regulate our beliefs and actions, jects disappear at both ends in the Eternal or by the kind of experience through which Infinite. The other accepts principles which (self-conscious and endowed with the asso- are discovered to be universal, as far as exciative and expectant tendency as we are) we perience can carry us towards universality, pass, in this our life-intercourse with pheno- and which as such are the natural basis of mena. Hamiltonism, grounded on, and con- our secular life, but which, as our experience solidated throughout its structure by neces- is limited, become the "open questions" of sary truths of the common sense or common an endless experience. Both systems, it reason,-grounded on consciousness as a wit- must be added, are grounded on and animatness to a set of universal principles, and noted by a faith or trust in what we cannot

in fact reach, by their respective routes, the same goal, so that Mr. Mill is ready to indorse, as experimentally proved, all the real propositions which Sir William Hamilton assumes without proof as part of our origi

nal intellectual stock?

our provisional conceptions, by collision with our moral and physical experience, which leaves us unable at any time, or in any philosophical system, to offer a final and exhaustive list of universal postulates, but which, systematically pursued from age to age,-each individual and each generation self-corrected, by the comparison of its conceptions with present and preceding expe

We cannot here either find an essential difference. We cannot name any real question, soluble on the method of a priori criticism, that is not solved, in its own character-rience,-developes universal postulates, that, istically tentative way, by the method of by successive modifications, become better logically criticised experience; while we adapted than preceding ones to throw light know no question left open to controversy over ourselves and our phenomenal world, by the latter method, which can be saved in our life-voyage with our companions from controversy by the former. If a de- through the surrounding darkness of the bated universal proposition is assumed to be unknown. The world may continue to extrue independently of experience, and to be pect a demonstrated and final system of implied in and by reasoning, this very as necessary truth; our real philosophy, in its sumption, and its legitimacy, becomes itself growth, can only be a system of assumptions the question. Instead of a controversy about or hypotheses, increasingly accommodated the probability of the proposition, we have a to the real experience, moral and material, controversy about the probability of its being through which we are passing. Yet this a priori or necessary-but no irenicon. We philosophy may employ the language of cannot infallibly know what is not pheno- Wordsworth in his immortal ode on Immor menally in consciousness, and we can know tality; or it may even occupy the Platonic that infallibly only while it is in conscious- point, and view each physical discovery as ness. All beyond makes a demand, in some the disclosure of an overlooked but estaform or other, upon Trust or Faith. Every blished harmony between Divine ideas in our universal proposition about realities reposes minds, and Divine ideas symbolized in naon belief; and while it implies an act of con- ture; or it may describe our conceptions as sciousness it is only one of mediate conscious-gradually corrected by experience, as human ness. In short, we can have no real generalizations of the understanding which do not involve a reasonable faith; and no faith is reasonable which cannot be translated into the language of the understanding, or faculty which judges according to external and internal sense. They are the two sides of the same shield, and any theory which confines itself exclusively to either is a mere abstraction and not a philosophy. We have an unphilosophical phenomenalism, which abstracts from the conscious mind, or an unphilosophical metaphysics which treats of forms and faculties in abstraction from their real objects. Philosophy itself is reflection upon both in their living union.

The answers of philosophy to the second group of questions are not to be found in an uncritical acceptance of the universal, and, as they are called, the natural persuasions of men--in Reid's uncritical common sense, which it is the very object of philosophy to enlighten and correct by reflective analysis. As little are these answers to be found in an abstract and verbal criticism of universal propositions which we are assumed to be obliged to believe and conceive; or in uncritical generalizations of portions, especially the merely sensible portions, of our conscious experience. They are to be sought for in that constant tentative correction of

science advances in its tentative career, and, adopting the language of Bacon, who has been called our British Plato, see in true philosophy, not the doctrine of an individual or of one age, but the slow and never-ending birth of time. The " necessary truths" of philosophy, untested by experience, are only plausible conjectures, although, when they are the imaginations or ideals of genius, they prove powerful forces for our intellectual advancement. The high ideals of modern thought are sometimes only the revival of forgotten truths, already tested by experience, but which, in intervening periods of unreflection, had fost their meaning, and are now re-suggested with all the power of new discoveries. It is not easy to refute the theory that all universal postulates were at first tentative and hypothetical, when it is conceded that some of them have been so early and so superabundantly verified, that we have been in consequence unable to avoid feeling them to be necessary in all thought and action recorded by memory.

What is important to note on each side, in this memorable controversy, is the mode in which each treats the propositions, whose authority, by common consent, warrants belief or trust. The advantage of Mr. Mill's mode is, that it insists upon having them translated into the language of experience;