Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/438

Rh 418 HAMILTON incomprehensibility. In other words, no cognition is an original datum of consciousness which is not simple (i.e., incapable of being resolved into another), not held by all men as a self-evident and necessary truth, and not in itself inexplicable. Now the doctrine of the immediate knowledge of the non-ego will, Hamilton affirmed, stand all these tests. It is the simple residuum of truth in the crude and erroneous beliefs of men as to what they perceive through their senses ; it is the spontaneous conviction of all (as to this he cited as witnesses philosophers who regarded the belief as a mistake and a delusion) ; and it does not admit of being made comprehen sible. 1 That this is so can hardly be denied. Practically, indeed, all acknowledge that consciousness does intuitively affirm what he alleges it to allirm ; and, the question being one of fact, a practical acknowledgment is quite as good as a theoretical one. Here let it be remarked in passing that Hamilton s doctrine of common sense is wholly misrepresented when held up as an appeal to the belief of the unthinking multitude versus the judgment of philosophers. Rather it carries the appeal into a sphere where the philosophic and the vulgar have ceased to be distinguished ; it shows that not the mind of the philosopher, and not the mind of the vulgar, but the mind of man, is what philosophy has to deal with, and that its office is to resolve current beliefs into their elements, not satisfied till it has reached the final and absolutely pure deliver ance of consciousness. But it may be said, as it often has been said, that consciousness is not competent to affirm immediate knowledge of the non-ego, because to discriminate the non-ego from the ego is beyond its power. Hamilton s answer is that, if knowledge be, as he holds, essentially relative, self cannot be known except with and through uot-self, and that natural realism is but a corollary of the general principle of the relativity of knowledge. On that principle he held that &quot; we think one thing only as we think two things mutually and together,&quot; and that, self being inherently a relative notion, we should never interpret by it facts of our experience, if experience did not come before us under a relation that needs both terms (self and not-self) for its expression. Hamilton certainly implies, if he docs not expressly say, that, had we no knowledge of a not- self, we could never objectify self so as to know it as such at all. To him a knowledge of the ego alone would be absolute, not relative such a knowledge, that is, as he held to be impossible. But, viewing knowledge as a relation between an existing subject and an existing object, he saw no reason why the object should not be what it is known as sometimes a mode of self, sometimes a mode of not- self, and why consciousness of the ego should not include also that which stands in relation with it. 2 But that there has been so amazing an amount of misconcep tion on the point, it might seem hardly needful to say that Hamilton did not hold that in perception we know the thing-in- itself. His doctrine of relativity included phenomenalism, though it was more than phenomenalism ; and not only his oft-repeated assertions that there can be no such object of knowledge, but the whole tenor of his philosophy, are directly against this interpreta tion. In passages where he speaks of &quot;the thing&quot; as directly known, the word is obviously used, not for noumenon or the thing in itself, but for the real as opposed to the ideal in phenomena. There can be no doubt that he held the object in sense-perception to be a phenomenon of the non-ego ; and arguments that proceed upon a different suppisition are of no effect against his theory. The relativity of perception on that theory is, indeed, not open to doubt. According to him, we perceive phenomena alone, such alone as we have faculties to apprehend, such alone as stand in relation to our organs of sense ; and we perceive only under the contrast of self and not-self. There is thus in every act of perception a twofold relation (1) between the thing and the organ, manifested in sensation being a condition of perception, and (2) between self and not-self, manifested in consciousness and perception being different names for the same thing. This of itself should show that he cannot be expected to state definitely what is the object in per ception, as it has often been said that he does not do, or docs differ ently in different places. The object of intuition or perception does not admit of being definitely stated. For individual objects cannot as such be conceived, still less named, till knowledge has risen above the intuitive or perceptive stage. On this, as on all points relating to perception, Hamilton s mature and carefully expressed view is to be found in his dissertations appended to Reid s works. There he divides the qualities of body into three classes, primary, secondary, and secundo-primary. lie shows that sensation and perception proper, though up to a certain point inseparable, are not only dis tinct, but above that point actually in the inverse ratio of one another ; that sensations proper (identical with the secondary qualities) are merely subjective affections of the animated organism, and afford no knowledge of external reality ; that in perception proper the material organism, which is to be regarded as an external reality, is presented under those relations which constitute its extension, i.e., we know its primary qualities ; and that in sensation Reid t Works, 742 sg. ; lec.ts., ii. 347-349 ; Disc., 54, 85-86, 95. and perception together we know the secundo-primary qualities, i.e., objects external to the body become known, as directly related, through various modes of resistance, to the organism in motion. The object in perception is, then, according to him, a primary quality of the organism, or the quasi-primary phase of a secundo- primary quality. It is a fundamental point of Hamilton s doctrine that the organism is differently related to the ego in perception proper and in sensation proper. In his own words &quot;the organism is the field of apprehension to both, but with this difference, that the former views it as of the ego, the latter as of the non-ego, that the one draws it within, the other shuts it out from, the sphere of self.&quot; On this distinction is partly founded his doctrine of the twofold character of space, as at once an a priori conception and an a posteriori perception. He held with Kant that space is a necessary condition of thought, and as such not derived from experience ; but he at the same time held that through sense we have a perception of something extended, i.e., of extension. Now the cognition of extension is a cognition of relations, properly therefore realized by a simple energy of thought ; but the facts that sensation is an essential condition of this cognition, and that what is known as extended is the organism, which is as much ex ternal to the ego as any other part of the material world, seemed to him to justify these relations being regarded not as subjective but as objective. 3 Hamilton s doctrine of the conditioned relates to the second group of primary truths or original data of consciousness. Rela tivity, as a general condition of the thinkable, he asserts, is brought to bear under three principal and necessary relations : the first (subjective) the contrast of self and not-self, the second (objective) quality, and the third (objective) quantity. Quality is realized under the twofold aspect of substance and phenomenon. Quantity has three phases : time (protensive), space (extensive), degree (intensive). Now the doctrine of the conditioned is (1) that under these relations specially those of quality and time we must think everything ; (2) that the unconditioned as such is either the un conditionally limited the absolute, or the unconditionally un limited the infinite ; (3) that, under the necessary relations of thought, ve are unable positively to conceive either unconditional limitation or unconditional illimitation ; e.g., an absolute whole or part of existence in time or in space or in degree is inconceivable, so is infinite increase or division ; absolute quality is inconceivable, quality infinitely undetermined is so equally. 4 Thus this doctrine claims to demonstrate the limited range of positive thought, by showing that the mind is tossed from the one to the other of two contradictory extremes, unable to conceive either, yet compelled to believe that one or other is actual. The kind of inconceivability of the two extremes is indeed different, and it may be regretted that, in his expositions of this part of his philosophy, Hamilton did not more explicitly recognize that fact. It seems true that to combine the absolute with existence regarded quantitatively, i.e., in time or in space or in degree, or the infinite with existence regarded qualitatively, is impossible, not only as beyond but as against thought, i.e., as involving a contradiction ; and therefore that, in respect of one of the two extremes, the mind is not simply impotent, seeing it, rejects it as that to which there can be nothing answering in actual existence. But then it does so only to find itself face to face with an alternative which, while it must be inferred to be actual, can by no effort be realized in thought. So that, even if this objection be allowed, the doctrine still remains intact as a demon stration how limited is the sphere of human thought as compared with that of existence, and how little human powers of conception are to be made the measure of truth. Its significance becomes still more apparent in the original and ingenious application made of it by Hamilton to the solution of such philosophic problems as the origin of the principles of cause and effect, substance and phenomenon, &c. That the sum of exist ence of one set of modes has passed into another mode is, according to him, what we mean by saying that an event had causes. Con sciousness is a knowledge of existence only as conditioned in time, and we are impotent (it matters not how) to conceive the forms of existence within our experience as having had an absolute com mencement ; therefore we conceive them as having existed in other forms, in other words, as caused. Thus it is in order to escape from the necessity of thinking an absolute beginning for existence in time that we view all things as a series of causes and effects. In like manner, it is because we can think neither that which exists in and for itself nor that which exists merely in and through some thing else that we recognize all objects under the double aspect of substance and phenomenon, knowing nothing but the latter, yet always supposing the former. 5 Having showed that the original data of consciousness, how ever different in other respects, are alike in this, that they are as 3 Rei&amp;lt;fs Works, 104, 247n, 809, 816-888; Lefts., i. 136-156, ii. 129-132, S22; Disc., 54, 639 ReitFs Works, 743, 934 ; Lectt., ii. 366-374, 523-538; iii. 98-105; Disc., 12-15. 28-30, 5%-G04. 5 Reid s Works, 935-937; Letts., ii. 376-413, 538-541 ; Disc., 604-617.
 * Le&amp;lt;-ti,l.5M; Disc., 61,599.