Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/324

 312 EOSMINl'S ORIGIN OF IDEAS, II. occur sooner. Dwelling on this void and blank Beingness, is much like the fakir's dwelling on ' Om '. However, this elaborate elimination of all other possible sources is the " demon- stration" that it is "innate" in us, and that it is in fact the very umbilicus of all our thinking and of our intellectual being. When we gaze on it, we gaze on our own spiritual navel. Let us see what comes of this concentration, since according to Rosrnini all our ideas come of it. " All our acquired ideas are a compound of matter and form," and their " twofold cause is the idea of being and sensation ". " Pure ideas," again, " take nothing from sense," and simply issue from the innate intuition, as for example, the principle of non-contradiction, because when reduced to its simplest terms, it is no more than to say, " Being cannot at the same time not be," and possibility cannot be impossibility ! From this, " Causation " follows, because " To say that which does not exist, operates, is a contradiction ". Of course, " substance and accident " are simply " cause and effect " taken statically. " Operation "of an agent rather than invariable antecedence or concomitance, is with Rosmini the essential fibre of causation, and his attitude, here as always, is ontological and scholastic. It is easy, therefore, to see, that from feelings felt he will infer a subject, soul or Ego feeling them, refuting Hume, and " body as the proximate cause of our external sensations," refuting Ber- keley. But all this appears to be only a very learned and ela- borate repetition of Reid and his school, for whom Rosmini has the sincerest respect and gratitude. In his treatment of the ideas of Time, Motion, and Space, which he, in contrast with the finding of Kant, finds to be only abstract and acquired ideas, there is much speculation that is curious and interesting about the discontinuity of Time and Motion. The continuity and infinite divisibility of Time is an illusion, because " All that happens must happen by instants," though it is difficult to see how there can be room for anything to happen in an absolute instant, or how the instant itself can effect a footing in Being without duration. The most absolute barest instant must at least last an instant. That " the real con- tinuity of motion is an absurdity" is, of course, an inference from the real discontinuity of Time. What remains of the book some 150 pages is taken up with the psychology of Sense-perception, but we fail to find in it any valuable contribution to the science of the day. On the whole, Vol. ii. is a disappointing one, and at the end of it, we do not find ourselves carried, in matters of genuine philo- sophical import, much beyond where Vol. i. left us, and must wait for some clearer light to come in the third and last volume, with the patience of hope. J. BURNS-GIBSON.