to mean that representative perception is always a "knowledge of a thing by means of something which is like the thing itself" (p. 162); whereas all Sir William intends is, that Brown's doctrine of a mediate perception of the qualities of Matter, through "external states of mind," cannot give us what is "deserving of the name of knowledge," inasmuch as the external states are not known to resemble the qualities they are assumed to give us a knowledge of; we not having, in the case of sense-perception, the previous presentative perception or direct consciousness of the things themselves, which makes a representative knowledge of them possible in memory, although impossible in sense. All this, on the part of Mr. Mill, is to reverse the fundamental principle of the Hamiltonian perception, according to which the external and independent percept is no more the cause of its being perceived than what Mr. Mill calls a "nominal" or "metaphorical object" (p. 216) is the cause of our being conscious of it. In this latter case, the object and the subject being identical, there is, by universal knowledgment, no causal relation between them. In the former, although the object and subject are, according to Hamilton, "contrary in existence," there is nevertheless no causal relation between them, but an identity in the percipient act. We could not say that we had anything "deserving the name of knowledge," of our own thoughts or feelings, if we knew them only as the causes of mental effects which in no way resemble them. As little can we, Hamilton would say, have any thing "deserving the name of knowledge" of qualities of Matter, if we know them only as the causes of effects in the mind which in no way resemble them. it appears in its passage through conscious ness. Matter would then present its positive or qualified side in our senses; and when it is in that predicament we attribute primary and secondary qualities to it. But when it ceases to be in that predicament, we have only its negative or unqualified side to deal with; it lapses as it were into unconditioned existence, from which it recovers only through renewed intercourse with a sentient and concipient mind. If this be a logical development of the implied meaning of Hamiltonism, in what except in name does it too differ from Berkeleyism? The conception of "externality" or "external objectivity" is not so easily defined as uneducated dogmatism takes for granted. Man cannot act, cannot live, without assuming an external world, in some conception of the term "external." It is the business of the philosopher to explain what that conception ought to be. For ourselves, we can conceive only-(1.) An externality to our present and transient experience, in our own possible exac-perience past and future; and (2.) An externality to our own conscious experience, in the contemporaneous, as well as in the past or future experience of other minds. Any objectivity one can positively conceive is dependent on mind; but it is not dependent on, nor indeed properly involved in, the present experience of the individual; nor is it exclusively dependent on, nor even properly involved in, his own individual mental experience, as Mr. Mill, we think, too much represents it. The tendency of the best modern ideas (so far including those of Hamilton), is towards a Reflective Realism, in which the entire spacial or external world is a unique modification (what its peculiarities are analysis has partly discovered) of conscious experience. The Universe, in this philosophy, is a universe of MINDS, which communicate with one another through sensible symbols. These symbols each mind can so modify in other minds, as that those others become conscious of the induced modifications, and are able thereby to infer their conscious causes; while all the minds, and all their sense-given phenomena, are in an established harmony under Supreme Mind. But, after all, what means this externality or objectivity proper, which, according to Hamilton, consciousness attests with regard to percepts? What is Matter when it is not perceived? What becomes of percepts when our sensations are withdrawn? How can an extended percept, for instance, continue to exist when the sensation of its colour is gone? What, moreover, do we mean when we say that what we perceive is extended or solid? Are Hamilton's solid and extended percepts only special groups of Mr. Mill's sensations, viewed in their relation to his "possibilities of sensation"? We have failed to discover a definite expression either of these questions, or of his own answers to them, in Sir William Hamilton's writings. The analogy of his philosophy would lead him to say that unperceived and unconceived Matter exists only potentially, or rather substantially; and that of this substantial existence we know nothing positively, except when contained in, and as Any external or space-filling universe that is by us positively conceivable, is in this philosophy dependent on mind, because consciousness as agent or patient, is that only of which we have experience. Our primary experience is a conscious experience. A conscious self is the only unit we can multiply in imagination. We can conceive phenomena as external in another mind, or as external to our own present mental experience; but we can not conceive them aloof from all mental experience. It is only negatively, as unconditioned, in a word, as empty abstractions, that we can speak of percepts, when they are not perceived or conceived by us, or of phenomena when they are out of our conscious experience -unless, indeed, we conceive them, as in the conscious experience of another. It is this conception of "externality," "materiality," and "spacial reality," to which the profoundest and most comprehensive modern reflection is now converging. It was dimly approached, under other forms, in ancient speculation. Nor can it be said truly that it is a mere assertion, unsupported by proof, and which proceeds on principles that disable us from ever working our way to a legitimate belief in anything beyond the charmed circle of our personal sensations and other feelings. Reflective Realism is only a change in the unanalytic manner of thinking about objects; a thinking them in a less abstract, because more comprehensive way. Let us look at some more of what it has to plead in its behalf. It can plead, in the first place, that analysis has succeeded in resolving our experience of Space into an experience of unresisted locomotion, and of solid Matter into an experience of resisted locomotion. For nearly two centuries, but especially since the publication of Berkeley's Theory of Vision, reflective analysis has been gradually resolving our spacial and solid conscious experience into an experience of successive non-resistances and resistances to motion, associated with the visual experience of contemporaneous modifications of colour by which the former is symbolized. In a late number of this Journal we discussed all this.* We there translated the abstractions Space and Extension into a peculiar sort of experience of which we are conscious in the senses of touch and sight. The conception of the remoteness of an object, for example the sun, is the conception of a locomotive experience by us which could not be finished for thousands of years. The spacial vastness of the universe is the possibility of indefinitely protracted *See article on Berkeley's Theory of Vision, in North British Review, for August, 1864, in which visual phenomena are proved to be a system of symbols, and visual extension a language of contemporaneous signs, significant of our successive experiences of active resistance and locomotion, with which they are arbitrarily connected. The visual theory of Berkeley, by implication, analyses the conception of Space into a modification of the conception of Time; and in its doctrine of arbitrary but regular connexion of sensible signs anticipates the philosophical conception of physical causation as an established uniformity or association, the actual relations in which are discoverable through experience. locomotive experience which it presents to us. Extension and space cease to be conceived as huge entities, independent of what we are, have been, or may be conscions of; they begin to be conceived of as possibilities of an experience that is familiar in consciousness. Extension and space are analysed into time, and time into consciousness of changes. All sensible phenomena, but especially visual, become a system of signs,-a language, significant of other conscious experience, not now actual, but which has been, or may be come actual. Reflective Realism can thus plead that, in its doctrine of Matter, it is only a higher expression of the now common scientific conception, that nature is a language, our scientific and practical knowledge of Matter, so far as it goes, being an interpretation of the immediately sensible signs which constitute that language. In short, Matter is Mind embodied in and signified by senseexperience of minds. Reflective Realism can plead, in the second place, that it has no practical evidence of any other sort of externality than what resides either in our own past and future sensible experience, or in the present, past, or future sensible experience of other minds, i.e., externality in time, or else externality in another spirit. What Matter is, out of all relation to human experience, is surely a frivolous dis cussion. We want to know, not about this mere abstraction, but about sensible Matter; as either contained in our actual conscious experience, or as inferrible from that experi ence, in the form of actual and possible conscious experience, pleasant or painful, in ourselves or others. When Matter is conceived as a system of regularly ordered sensible signs, by means of which we can foresee the sense-experience of ourselves and others, all that we have practically to do with it, or that we can positively conceive about it, is represented in the conception. Sensations, percepts, or whatever else we please to call them, are then phenomena in consciousness, which have this peculiarity, that they are reliable signs of other sensible phenomena, or groups of sensible phenomena, of which we are not existence and action of other conscious agents. now sentient; and also reliable signs of the What proof have we of more than this in what we call Matter? Have we any evidence of an existence which should continue in the death of all conscious life, created and Divine? Can we mean anything at all when we speak of the continued existence either of space or time after the annihilation of all consciousness? It is surely only through an illusion that any one supposes he can; at least we must continue so to believe until we are helped first to put meaning into the words, and then to find evidence for the reality of | ferred, it implies actual sensations, treated as what they mean. After what has been said, we need hardly add, as a third item in the pleading, that we have no practical need for the extra-conscious existence of anything that we apply language to; provided that, in whole or in part, it appears in and disappears from the current of consciousness in a calculable manner. The peculiar calculableness of these sensuous appearances and disappearances, not being due to us, does indeed suggest the very conceivable inference, that what causes them must be a conscious cause, able to calculate. And if we look with a human eye, and from a sympathetic heart, upon the sensible universe, can we avoid the conviction that, in being conscious of Matter, i.e., of sensible order, we are constantly conscious of the signs of Mind-not indeed immediately conscious of any mind except our own, but immediately conscious of what we cannot but interpret as signs of other minds, more or less like our own, and of Supreme, Allpervading Mind? Into this conception, according to our manner of thinking, even Sir W. Hamilton's sense-given Matter ultimately resolves itself, when reflective analysis is applied to Extension and Solidity. And to this result, at any rate, we are largely helped by the three singularly interesting chapters of Mr. Mill's "Examination," which we have already named. Yet Mr. Mill, we think, has not fully availed himself in these chapters of the philosophical resource against Egoism, which his own view of Self partly affords. At the end of his three chapters, we feel inclined to ask why he does not regard himself as the external universe, or rather the external universe as a general term expressive merely of the order in which a large portion of his own conscious experience appears and disappears -i.e., the sensational portion of it; and those "possibilities," as he calls them, of which actual sensations are the signs. What is an "external" world of this sort other than a part of his own associated ideas, which, to a certain extent, he is able to foresee, but which provide no way to any other externality than the one which has its seat in himself, as he is to be, or has been? If this be so, is he not the universe? Must he not logically profess Egoism, the doctrine which Fichte is supposed at one period of his life to have believed? Let us see. "Matter," says Mr. Mill," may be defined a Permanent Possibility of sensation" (p. 198). This is his conception of the externality and substantial reality of the universe that is transiently presented to our senses. As presented, it is actual sensation. As in signs, and interpreted to mean other sensations, or groups of sensation, not actually felt, but inferred to be conditionally certain, in the future sensible experience of the percipient. These conditionally certain masses of possible, past or future, sensations, of which actual sensations are the signs, and in which actual sensations were, so to speak, wrapped up, constitute Mr. Mill's conception of External Object or Material Substance. Our power to infer this sort of objectivity or material substance is, according to Mr. Mill, the physical result of laws of conscious experience "not contested by Sir W. Hamilton and other thinkers of the Introspective school."-(P. 190.) They are these twoour expectant faith; and the tendency of all invariable association to generate belief. Place one, he virtually says, with these two tendencies, in an orderly succession of sensational experiences; in other words, let a succession of sensations be excited in a sentient having these two tendencies; and let the sensations be so related, individually or in groups, that an immediate consciousness of one proves to be a sign of the future possible experience of others, or of a group of others, without a single instance to the contrary, and we are so constructed that we become not only unable to imagine their separation, but obliged to believe them inseparable. All that we can say in explanation and vindication of this constitutional tendency and its resulting belief or assumption, is, that it is natural, and that the belief is verified by every action, and by every result of action. This perception theory of Mr. Mill, essentially Berkeleian, differs in two respects, at least, from the corresponding part of Ha miltonism-(1.) According to Sir William Hamilton, the sensations introduce into, or rather reveal as already present in consciousness, something that is not sensational at all, viz., percepts or primary qualities of matter. The object of which we are sensibly conscious is, with him, not a sensation dependent upon a sentient, but an external percept independent of the percipient, and invested with qualities of extension and solidity which are not attributable to the percipient at all. According to Mr. Mill, our conscious experience in sense is exclusively of sensations, which are dependent upon the sentient; while they are, he would say, causally (ie., invariably and unconditionally) connected with other possible sensations, of which they are signs. (2.) Sir W. Hamilton's percept, in the absence of a percipient, becomes unconditioned-being disengaged, as it were, from the kind of consciousness which constitutes what we mean by the terms 66 exten sion" and solidity. The actual sensation of | Matter or Material Substance. This external Mr. Mill, on the other hand, on the with- world is merely a conditional certainty in drawal of the sentient, becomes part of a my own personal history. It is the latent group of possible or potential sensations; part of those patent trains of actual assoand that group of possible sensations is the ciated sensations which make up my indivi"object" of bis-merely mediate-percep- dual sentient life. This is not an actual, but tion, and the cause (in Mr. Mill's meaning of only a potential externality; and potentially cause) of any of the actual sensations, which external only to my present sense-consciousotherwise lie, as it were, latent in the group ness, not to my personal conscious life. until they become actual. When I see an apple, for instance, part of the qualities of the apple (its colour, etc.) are in actual, and the others (its hardness, odour, taste, etc.) only in conditionally certain sensation. In short, Mr. Mill's object of mediate perception is much in the predicament in which, according to Sir W. Hamilton, our states of consciousness are when they are what he calls latent; or rather, in which chairs and tables are, according to Berkeley, when they are not perceived. They exist potentially, which amounts to this, that they exist practically, and appear when we expect them. But Sir W. Hamilton, Mr. Mill says, "did believe in more than this" about matter; while Reid, Stewart, and Brown, whatever they may have themselves supposed, did not. Sir W. Hamilton, he thinks, believed in a "perdurable basis of sensations, distinct from the actual and possible sensations themselves" (p. 198). And what, we may ask, is this "perdurable basis" other than "unconditioned existence," which is only a synonyme for the unknown? Externality proper is more than this, as indeed Mr. Mill seems to imply in his enumeration (pp. 206-7) of the marks (third mark) by which permanent possibilities of sensation are distinguished from "permanent possibilities of feeling." It has its seat in another self. It involves the conception of actual sensations and percepts, dependent on other conscious agents, as ours are on us, and contemporaneous with our own conscious experience. It is only as we are able to infer this conceivable externality, that we reach the complex conception of ourselves existing and being conscious in a universe, that is not merely dependent on and relative to ourselves. The working conception of and belief in externality implies the discovery, that we are not alone in this strange life; that we have recognised the sensible signs of companions who are living other lives like ours, and who are able to communicate with us, as we with them, through the medium of our respective sense-experiences. We have more than a prevision of conditionally certain sensations, which may hereafter be exThe "perdurable basis" of Sir W. Hamil-perienced by ourselves, but which are not ton-his substantial matter-we shall have to refer to when we are considering what he and Mr. Mill say about the Unconditioned. The "permanent possibilities" of Mr. Mill himself we cannot regard as adequate to express all that we mean, when we conceive sensible reality, matter, space, and externality. Mr. Mill's externality is, as it appears to us, an externality that must be confined to his own conscious history, and its possibilities in the past and in the future; unless he is willing to admit, as an essential part of his definition, the externalizing or projecting efficacy, as we may call it, of other conscious beings like ourselves. Otherwise, each of us may say that this externality amounts sim- Consciousness of phenomena as dependent ply to a conditional certainty that my sensa- on a Self is thus the basis of human science tions have been, might have been, or may and belief, the groundwork or flooring, become such and such. For sensations, beneath which we cannot go in our analysis. apart from other conscious Selfs, are not It is that unity in our conscious experience actual externally to me. As far as this quasi which admits of being multiplied, and thus externality goes, I am the universe-that externalized in imagination and belief. Mr. universe being composed of my actual sensa-Mill himself seems to feel that he has not tions, and other feelings, and my mediately given enough of prominence to the concep perceived possibilities of being sentient- tion of Self in his definitions of Matter and these possibilities, as quasi external to my Mind. These are defined by him as if the actual sensations at any given time, being true conception of the Universe were that of yet actual in us. There is also a mediate perception or reasonable belief in sensations, and other conscious experience, now going on, contemporaneously with our own, in other conscious beings like ourselves. There is not merely, as with Mr. Mill, conditionally certain externality in time, but there is also actual externality in spirit; and these two combined convert a not-self, given or implied in all self-consciousness, into the not-self which daily enlarges and defines itself in our conceptions, under the accumulating inferences of science. That can only be a sham externality which leaves us in solitude, among associated sensations. VOL. XLIII. N-2 66 a series of mere feelings, inclusive of sensations, so grouped and related to one another that an actual experience of one of the sensations is reasonably followed by belief in a great many others not then actual. Matter he defines as we have said, as a Permanent Possibility of Sensation," and, Mind as "a Permanent Possibility of thoughts, emotions, and volitions as well as sensations." If these definitions were all that he had to say about Matter and Mind, Mr. Mill's last word in philosophy, as he now interposes in the Scotch debate, would be nearly the same as David Hume's first word in the same debate a hundred and thirty years ago. But all that Mr. Mill says is not comprehended in his definitions of Matter and Mind. He goes far to provide the bridge which we have to employ when we realize an actual as well as possible externality, in the following passage, which we regard as philosophically the most important in his book: as a series. The truth is that we are here face to face with that final inexplicability at which, as Sir W. Hamilton observes, we inevitably arrive when we reach ultimate facts."-(Pp. 21213.) This passage, so far as our passive or sensational, as distinguished from our volitional experience is concerned, contains all that we care for as true in the Hamiltonian, or in any other doctrine of consciousness. It concedes an inexplicable consciousness of Self. This implies a not-self, but not necessarily either the material not-self, or the spiritual or conscious not-self, these being gradually discovered in experience. To the "inexplicable belief" about Self, which Mr. Mill says is required to complete the conception of what Mind is, there is no analogue in sense-given phenomena viewed in abstraction from a consciousness. The only radical synthesis we can point to either among them, or among the feelings and thoughts and volitions which make up, according to Mr. Mill, our purely mental experience, is their common dependon Selfs to which they are all alike consciously present. Mr. Mill condemns Dr. Reid (p. 207), for alleging, against Hume's famous resolution of Mind into a mere series of feelings, that that deprives us of all evidence for the external existence of conscious fellow-creatures, God, and immortality: "By what evidence," he asks, "do I know, or by what considerations am I led to believe, that there exist other sentient creatures; that the walking and speaking figures which I see and hear have sensations and thoughts, or, in other words, possess minds? The most strenu "Besides present feelings, and possibilities of present feeling, there is another class of pheno-ence mena to be included in an enumeration of the elements making up our conception of mind. The thread of consciousness which composes the mind's phenomenal life, consists not only of present sensations, but likewise, in part, of memories and expectations. Now what are these? In themselves they are present feelings, states of present consciousness, and in that respect not distinguished from sensations. They all resemble, moreover, some given sensations or feelings of which we have previously had experience. But they are attended with the peculiarity that each of them involves a belief in more than its own present existence. A sensation involves only this; but a remembrance of a sensation, even if not referred to any particuous intuitionist does not include this among the lar date, involves the suggestion and belief that things I know by direct intuition. I conclude a sensation, of which it is a copy or representa- it from certain things, which my experience of tion, actually existed in the past; and an ex- my own states of feeling proves to me to be pectation involves the belief, more or less posi- marks of it. I conclude that other human betive, that a sensation or other feeling to which ings have feelings like me, because, first, they it directly refers will exist in the future. Nor have bodies like me, which I know, in my own can the phenomenon involved in these two case, to be the antecedent condition of feeling: states of consciousness be adequately expressed and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and without saying that the belief they include is, other outward signs, which in my own case I that I myself formerly had, or that I myself, know by experience to be caused by feelings. and no other, shall hereafter have, the sensa- I am conscious in myself of a series of facts tions remembered or expected. The fact be- connected by an uniform sequence, of which lieved is, that the sensations did actually form, the beginning is modifications of my body, the or will hereafter form, part of the self-same middle is feelings, and the end is outward deseries of states or thread of consciousness, of meanour. In the case of other human beings, I which the remembrance or expectation of those have the evidence of my senses for the first and sensations is the part now present. If, there- last links of the series, but not for the intermefore, we speak of the Mind as a series of feel-diate link. In my own case, I know that the ings, we are obliged to complete the statement by calling it a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future; and we are reduced to the alternative of believing that the Mind or Ego is something different from any series of feelings or possibilities of them, or of accepting the paradox that something which, ex hypothesi, is but a series of feelings, can be aware of itself first link produces the last through the intermediate link, and could not produce it without. Experience therefore obliges me to conclude that there must be an intermediate link, which must either be the same in others as myself, or a different one: I must either believe them to be alive or to be automatons; and by believing them to be alive, that is, by supposing the link |