Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/102

 own thoughts and feelings, while in both even this self-knowledge itself becomes illusory, and must fall with the original faith that has been, in both hypotheses, assumed to be deceitful.

Sir William Hamilton deals by the mental modes of this refined or egoistical idealism as Dr. Reid had dealt by the representative entities, which are not mental modes, of non-egoistical idealism. Discarding the interposition of any state of the mind as the immediate object of perceptive knowledge, or of any reflex act of mind upon its own sensations as a requisite for our first apprehension of the outer world, he maintains that certain of the qualities of matter are the direct objects of a mysterious insight, and thus that the mind is conscious of material as well as of mental qualities. On this theory we become immediately acquainted, at least in certain limited relations, with the material world that is outside and independent of us, and on the foundation of this direct apprehension of a very limited portion of its contents—to wit, its Primary Qualities—we gradually reach, in the light of our former information, by means of abstraction and reasoning aided by habit and association, that growing knowledge of its properties, which in the earlier stages of its progress collects some of the secondary qualities of matter, obtains the notions of distance and form by means of sight alone, educates the general senses to an indefinite acuteness, and rises at last to those varied and recondite properties, characteristic of the different objects, by a precise acquaintance with the nature and laws of which, the physical sciences are con