Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/559

Rh COUSIN 527 illegitimately assumed, and arbitrarily developed, are equally useless as bases of metaphysics. This led Cousin, still holding by essential knowledge of being, to ground it in fin analysis of consciousness, in psychology. ton s The absolute or infinite the unconditioned ground and m * source of all reality is yet apprehended by us as an im mediate datum or reality ; and it is apprehended in con sciousness,- under its condition, that, to wit, of distinguish ing subject and object, knower and known. The doctrine of Cousin was, as is well known, criticised by Sir W. Hamilton in the Edinburgh Review of 1829, and it was animadverted upon about the same time by Schelling. The latter Cousin calls the greatest thinker, and the former the greatest critic of the age. Hamilton c objections are as fol lows. The correlation of the ideas of infinite and finite does not necessarily imply their correality, as Cousin sup poses ; on the contrary, it is a presumption that finite is simply positive and infinite negative of the same, that the finite and infinite are simply contradictory relatives. Of these &quot; the positive alone is real, the negative is only an abstraction of the other, and in the highest generality even an abstraction of thought itself.&quot; A study of the few sentences under this head might have obviated the trifling criticism of Hamilton s objection which has been set afloat recently, that the denial of a knowledge of the absolute or infinite implies a foregone knowledge of it. How can you deny the reality of that which you do not know 1 The answer to this is that in the case of contradictory statements, A and not A, the latter is a mere negation of the former, and posits nothing ; and the negation of a notion with positive attributes, as the finite, does not ex tend beyond abolishing the given attributes as an object of thought. The infinite or non-finite is not necessarily known, ere the finite is negated, or in order to negate it ; all that needs be known is the finite itself ; and the con tradictory negation of it implies no positive. Non-organized may or may not correspond to a positive, i.e., an object or notion with qualities contradictory of the organized ; but the mere sublation of the organized does not posit it, or suppose that it is known beforehand, or that anything exists corresponding to it. This is one among nany flaws in the Hegelian dialectic, and it paralyzes the whole of the Logic. Secondly, The conditions of intelligence, which Cousin allows, necessarily exclude the possibility of know ledge of the absolute, they are held to be incompatible with its unity. Here Schelling and Hamilton argue that Cousin s absolute is a mere relative. Thirdly, It is objected that in order to deduce the conditioned, Cousin makes his absolute a relative ; for he makes it an absolute cause, i.e., a cause existing absolutely under relation. As such it is necessarily inferior to the sum total of its effects, and dependent for reality on these in a word, a mere potence or becoming. Further, as a theory of creation, it makes creation a necessity, and destroys the notion of the divine. Cousin made no reply to Hamilton s criticism beyond alleging that Hamilton s doctrine necessarily restricted human knowledge and certainty to psychology and logic, and destroyed metaphysics by introducing nescience and uncertainty into its highest sphere, theodicy. m The attempt to render the laws of reason or thought impersonal by professing to find them in the sphere of spontaneous apperception, and above reflective necessity, Dn. can hardly be regarded as successful. It may be that we first of all primitively or spontaneously affirm cause, sub stance, time, space, &c., in this way. But these are still in each instance given us as realized in a particular form. In no single act of affirmation of cause or substance, much less in such a primitive act, do we affirm the universality of their application. We might thus get particular instances or cases of these laws, but we could never get the laws themselves in their universality, far less absolute impersonality. And as they are not supposed to be mere generalizations from experience, no amount of individual instances of the application of any one of them by us would give it a true universality. The only sure test we have of their universality in our experience is the test of their reflective necessity. We thus after all fall back on reflec tion as our ground for their universal application mere spontaneity of apprehension is futile ; their universality is grounded in their necessity, not their necessity in thei:- universality. How far and in what sense this ground of necessity renders them personal are of course questions still to be solved. But if these three correlative facts are immediately given, it seems to be thought possible by Cousin to vindicate them in reflective consciousness. He seeks to trace the steps which the reason has spontaneously and consciously, but irreflectively, followed. And here the question arises Can we vindicate in a reflective or mediate process this spontaneous apprehension of reality 1 The self is found to be a cause or force, free in its action, on the ground that we are obliged to relate the volition of consciousness to the self as its cause, and its ultimate cause. It is not clear from the analysis whether the self is immediately observed as an acting or originating cause, or whether reflection working on the principle of causality is compelled to infer its exis tence and character. If self is actually so given, we do not need the principle of causality to infer it ; if it is not so given, causality could never give us either the notion or the fact of self as a cause or force, far less as an ultimate one. All that it could do would be to warrant a cause of some sort, but not this or that reality as the cause. And further, the principle of causality, if fairly carried out, as universal and necessary, would not allow us tu stop at personality or will as the ultimate cause of its effect, voli tion. Once applied to the facts at all, it would drive us beyond the first antecedent or term of antecedents of voli tion to a still further cause or ground, in fact, land us in an infinite regress of causes. The same criticism is even more emphatically applicable to the influence of a not-self, or world of forces, corres ponding to our sensations, and the cause of them. Starting from sensation as our basis, causality could never give us this, even though it be allowed that sensation is impersonal to the extent of being independent of our volition. Causality might tell us that a cause there is of sensation somewhere and of some sort ; but that this cause is a force or sum of forces, existing in space, independently of us, and corresponding to our sensations, it could never- tell us, for the simple reason that such a notion is not supposed to exist in our consciousness. Causality cannot add to the number of our notions, cannot add to the number of realities we know. All it can do is to necessitate us to think that a causa there is of a given change, but what that cause is it cannot of itself inform us, or even suggest to us, beyond implyingthat it must be adequate to the effect. Sensation might arise, for aught we know, so far as caus ality leads us, not fro:n a world of forces at all, but from a will like our own, though infinitely more powerful, acting upon us, partly furthering and partly thwarting us. And indeed such a supposition is, with the principle of causality at work, within the limits of probability, as we are already supposed to know such a reality, a will in our own con sciousness. When Cousin thus set himself to vindicate those points by reflection, he gave up the obvious advantage of his other position that the realities in question are given us in immediate and spontaneous apprehension. The same criticism applies equally to the inference of an absolute cause from the tvv-o limited forces