Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/495

 is not that usually supposed to be philosophic: it is not calm or serene or dignified; but it clearly expresses his meaning, and it is graphic, living, and leaping. He shows everywhere great acuteness, and the shrewdness of one who is not to be taken in by show and pretension, or awed by authority. No man is quicker in starting an objection, which, however, may be of a surface character, and not penetrating into the heart of the subject. I can not discover in his speculations the calmness of one who is waiting for light, or the comprehension of one who goes round the object examined and views it on all sides.

Mr. Darwin has elected and proclaimed Professor Huxley as the philosopher of his school, and this when many would place Herbert Spencer above him. I treat and criticise him as such. Most of the members of the school are not professed metaphysicians; but, like the man in the French play who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, there is a metaphysic underlying their reasonings; and this metaphysic, without their being aware, is very much that of Mr. Huxley. I venture not to urge objections to his biology, of which he is a master, and to be reviewed only by a master in his department. But he is not so formidable as a metaphysician, and one with but a sling and stone may cast him down, and the philosophy of his admiring host, by a few facts as clearly revealed to our inner consciousness as the facts of physiology are to the external senses.

I am in this paper to develop first, one by one, the positions of Hume, then the modifications of these by Huxley. In proceeding, I will show how the negative positions of both are to be met. In the close, I will show what kind of knowledge agnosticism admits and what it denies, and estimate the influence it is likely to exercise upon the present age, and especially upon young men liable to be drawn into its vortex:

1. According to Hume, what is commonly called mind starts with Impressions. This is a very misleading term. Taken literally, it implies three things: a thing impressing, say a seal; a thing capable of receiving an impression, say wax; and a figure, say of a head, impressed. Applied, it ought to denote an external thing ready to impress itself, a mind to be impressed, and an impression, say a perception, made upon it. The language is unfortunate; but, carrying out the similitude, we might have a psychology containing much truth: a thing perceived, a perceiving mind, and a perception. But according to Hume, followed by Huxley, we have none of these things. We have in our exercise of what are commonly called the senses no perception of anything, no mind to perceive, and no object to be perceived. We have simply a succession of passing states, and these states of nothing permanent.

This is the avowed doctrine of Hume. Huxley adopts it. He amends it by classifying the into—A. Sensations; B. Pleasure and Pain; and C. Relations. Let us confine our attention for the present to the first two, to Impressions, A. Of Sensation, and B.