THE NORTH BRITISH REVIEW. SEPTEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1865. VOLUME XLIII. · AMERICAN EDITION. NEW YORK: 38 WALKER STREET, WEST OF BROADWAY. 1865. THE NORTH BRITISH REVIEW. No. LXXXV. FOR SEPTEMBER, 1865. ART. I.-An Examination of Sir William of undying interest, which those who have Hamilton's Philosophy, and of the princi-guided thought from the chairs of the Scotch pal Philosophical Questions discussed in universities have been conspicuously engaged his Writings. By JOHN STUART MILL. in since David Hume proposed them-an effort which cannot be long abandoned by any community without a loss of its intellectual power. London: 1865. WE cordially welcome this book, in the interest of thought and free discussion everywhere, but especially in Scotland. Its publication marks an epoch in the history of British philosophy. The very title must at once bespeak the attention of those in both parts of the island who read in order to reflect, associating as it does the greatest Scotch speculative intellect of the century with the greatest living English one, in discussions which, in the end, more than any, regulate opinion indirectly, if not directly, in morals, theology, politics, and on the methods of scientific research. It is moreover a sign that those who are anywhere seeking for a better reasoned conception of this mysterious life of ours look at present for their nourishment with a peculiar expectation to the now fully published logical and metaphysical writings of Sir William Hamilton. And in the present lull of philosophy in Scotland, which has followed his departure and that of Professor Ferrier, we, at this northern end of the island, should be grateful when one so calm and candid as Mr. Mill occupies the otherwise vacant place in the Scotch discussion of ultimate questions that has been going on for considerably more than a century. It is a place to which, by Mr. Mill's hereditary Scotch connexion, as well as on more important grounds, he is well entitled. His new book is a formidable summons to Scotland to resume, with all the advantages of its lucid exposition and criticism, that effort to re-think more deeply answers to questions Mr. Mill is now the acknowledged representative of systematic philosophy in England. He is the recognised successor, in this latter part of the nineteenth century, to the intellectual throne occupied in their day by Hobbes, and Locke, and Hartley, where he rules in a spirit of large eclectic moderation, to which Hobbes and Hartley, at any rate, were comparative strangers. Probably no other Englishman now living has been so influential, with the most influential portion of the community, in gravely determining welldefined conclusions upon the most important subjects, and in promoting a strictly scientific manner of reaching them. His writings on logic, political science, and social toleration, have been forming a new public opinion in these last twenty years. Now, for the first time, he appears as an author in metaphysical philosophy, giving to the world the results of his matured thought, at a time of life which we believe pretty nearly corresponds to that at which Locke produced his "Essay," Kant his Criticism of Pure Reason, and Hamilton his Dissertations on Reid. Mr. Mill is distinguished by obvious marks from three great men, who may be said preeminently to share with him the distinction of educating English mind in this generation. Mr. Carlyle, Mr. Tennyson, and Mr. Maurice have in common, each with a marked individuality, reflective genius of the suggestive or poetical type. Mr. Mill has scientific clearness, and a power seldom equalled, of presenting transparently revelations that are drawn, it must be added, from less spiritual depths of our being than is habitual to these contemporaries, and accompanied, too, with less of the emotional inspiration which contagiously communicates itself. His literary action, not less intrepid, is every way of a calmer and less fiery sort than Mr. Carlyle's. As an excitement to reverential love and faith, or to a Pascal-like awe in the meditation of the intellectual and moral mysteries of life, most feel, we should imagine, that his writings are less powerful than those of Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Maurice, and, we must add, those of his Scotch contemporary Sir W. Hamilton. With Sir W. Hamilton, nevertheless, Mr. Mill is to be classed as one of our two great contemporary systematic reasoners about the nature and methods of knowledge, and the laws which should regulate belief; while they are distinguished as leaders of what are commonly regarded as opposed and rival schools of philosophical doctrine. They are accepted representatives of the two contrasted methods of interpreting the world in its ultimate relation to our knowledge, which philosophy has presented throughout its history, and the discussion of which has been said to be its history. Whether this ought to be said we shall consider by and bye. Here, at the outset, we note distinctive marks in the aims of the two leaders whose respective answers to the principal questions of all philosophical inquiry are in this volume placed side by side and compared. These marks may be pondered by those who want to appreciate the human interests which this otherwise purely intellectual discussion concerns; for it is their broadly distinguishable intention, as much as their metaphysical formulas, which gives to such systems power. The spirit which seeks to conserve faith in God, free-will, and other supersensible realities, is to be found working in Sir W. Hamilton, amid a crowd of learned references to the grand historic past of speculation, and by means which have for their avowed end the promotion of intellectual activity as in itself a good thing. Mr. Mill, on the other hand, is inspired with the hope of intellectual progress in the future, and on this behalf he struggles for present freedom of thought from the bondage of assumptions imposed as necessary by the past. In Hamilton a reverential intellectual conservatism animates a series of discussions, dogmatically confined round a centre of supposed necessary principles or intuitions, which are assumed to be given originally to our weak, because finite intelligence. Mr. Mill encourages intellectual movement in any direction to which we are conducted by experience, consolidated by in. variable mental associations, and animated by expectancy. With Hamilton the most important questions are assumed to be finally foreclosed. With Mr. Mill all questions are always open questions; what is yet to happen may modify our answers to them; the human race is on a hopeful voyage of discovery-any whither. The Hamiltonian starts with propositions, believed by him to be universally necessary; the disciple of Mr. Mill declines to admit the claim of any proposition to eternal universality or necessity. And yet each writes in large letters, on the very front of his philosophy, that whatever knowledge can be attained by or attributed to man is essentially finite and relative. Of these two tendencies, which, it may be asked, is likely to regulate the future among men, or, especially and more immediately, among Englishmen and Scotchmen, in mat ters of physics and politics, art and education, morals and theology? Which is even now regulating it? On what side should we range ourselves in this contest? These questions are sometimes put in a spirit which betrays entire ignorance of what philosophy is. It is not certainly as leaders of opposite sects, for one of which we seek a party triumph, that we are now about to look at Sir W. Hamilton and Mr. Mill, and to hear what each says on matters which thinking persons are trying from age to age to think over again, and to express more truly, but at each stage with a large remainder of error and indistinctness. We regard them, on the contrary, as strong individual thinkers, full of speculative curiosity, who are struggling to attain each for himself the good point of view for amending or harmonizing common, inarticulate, and unreflective opinion, but whose very individuality and individual environment of circumstances occa sions that one-sidedness of mental vision from which none of us is free. The history of all genuine philosophy is the history of a discussion, cessation from which is the collapse of intellect and of social progress, while its immediate result always leaves plenty of room for a fresh effort to think more clearly and express more felicitously. It is the history of a continued controversial dialogue, by which the mental vitality of society is sustained, but in which every man, and every nation, has a way of thought and expression different from every other. We do our part, now and here, if we help to keep the discussion going, taking our own, however subordi nate, place in its perennial course; and, if it may be so, contributing something to correct the thought or expression of preceding interlocutors, by help of the sides of a common truth which respectively they hold up to view. It is in this zigzag course that truth in any department has gradually moved forward, and that it has been assimilated in each new age or different nation, by the imperfect faculties and languages of men. cessors in Germany had introduced into modern thought, propositions then very strange to British philosophical controver sialists, but which his power has since put into wide circulation. And now Mr. Mill appears.* Mr. Mill recognises in the works of Hamilton the most powerful agency on the conservative or conformist side of British philosophy, and thus naturally they have more than any others on that side attracted his candour and courage. The Hamiltonian he regards as the latest form of the Reidan theory; and "by no other of its supporters has that theory," he thinks, "been so well guarded, or expressed in such discriminating terms, and with such studious precision. Though there are a few points," he adds, "on which the earlier philosopher seems to me nearer the truth, on the whole it is impossible to pass from Reid to Sir William Hamilton, and from Sir William Hamilton back to Reid, and not be struck with the immense progress which their common philosophy has made in the interval between them" (p. 107).† We have spoken of Mr. Mill as, in this book, virtually an interlocutor in the controversial dialogue in which certain Scotchmen, of a more than European range of influence, have been engaged for more than a century -to the benefit of Scotland and the world, as it may be hoped. This Scotch discussion in philosophy-on a wide scale, and with European consequences at any rate-was set agoing by David Hume in 1738. In him this part of the island first took its place among the manifestly intellectual communities of Europe. Subsequent Scotch philosophical discussion, as indeed German too, is an attempt to crack the hard nuts of Humism, or to protest against its conclusion that when cracked they are all found to be empty of real knowledge within. Thomas Reid was the first among us to undertake this task. The sagacious Glasgow professor spoke on Mr. Mill explains that the subject of his the side of conformity to unanalysed com- book is not properly Sir William Hamilton, mon conviction, and in opposition to Hume, but "the questions which Sir William Hamilwho had spoken for philosophical dissent ton discussed." And he justifies his undertakfrom unreasoned beliefs in things of ever- ing by expressions regarding the importance. during interest. This earnest and energetic of these questions, which, as coming from a expression of the common consciousness, by man of affairs, and not an academic pedant or Reid and his associates, was, however, so monastic recluse, may carry weight among little critical, that it looked like an interpola- those who would drown the voice of "metation by unreflective opinion in a great philo- physics" and its perplexing questions by the sophical debate. Hume made Reid and his din of daily human life. "England," says friends suspicious of Locke, and frightened Mr. Mill, "is often reproached by Continental them into a misunderstanding and reversal thinkers with indifference to the higher philoof the still more subtle philosophical teach-sophy. But England did not always deserve ing of Berkeley, from all which we are only now recovering. After Reid and Stewart, the next to take a conspicuous part, speaking from a new point of view, was Thomas Brown, the Edinburgh Professor of Moral Philosophy, whose early death cut short a career of brilliant promise, but in whose comparatively crude fragments, consisting of pamphlets and of rapidly written and posthumously published lectures, we find traces of a more ingenious conception than Reid's of Hume's critical questions, along with less of the modest wisdom for which Reid is admirable. The succeeding great interlocutor in the zigzag, alternative course of this Scotch philosophical dialogue is Sir W. Hamilton, contemptuous of the fences which Brown tried to set up against some results of the phenomenalism that he received so largely into the working premises of his A comparison of Dr. Priestley's "Examination" philosophy, and ready to transfer for discus- of the Philosophy of Reid, Beattie, and Oswald sion into the Scotch arena the principal pro- Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy (London, 1865), sugi (London, 1774), with Mr. Mill's "Examination" of positions which Kant and his greatest suc-gests a similar remark. this reproach, and is showing, by no doubtful symptoms, that she will not deserve it much * Since this was written, critics of Sir W. Hamilton, as well as of other late and living 'British philosophers, have been crowding in. Professor Massyn's Recent British Philosophy (London, 1865) places its author, already eminent in literary critito guide metaphysical opinion. The Exploratio cism, among those in this country who are entitled Philosophica of Professor Grote (Cambridge, 1865) affords rich and fresh philosophical feeding, in a volume over whose pages one breathes the pure love of truth, and is attracted to sympathy with Hamilton or Ferrier, Mr. Mill or Dr. Whewell, or intellectual enterprise, whether conducted by our countryman, Professor Bain of Aberdeen, and which we especially welcome as an emanation from the University of Cambridge. And Mr. Stirling, whose Secret of Hegel (London, 1865) has suddenly revealed a strong man watching and working among us, now threatens Hamiltonism with war to the knife. |