Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/395

Rh Absolute." Smart and petulant sarcasms have been pelted at Sir William'a choice of terms—his "uncouth," and "barbarous," and neologistic terminology. Nibble away, gentlemen: laugh as you please, carp as you will, be as witty as you can. Only remember, the while, that a terminology of some sort is needed, and that novel combinations of thought require new modes of expression. Even in the base appliances of the dinner-table, the terms mutton and beef will hardly suffice, in the present day, to describe in all their individual varieties and culinary nuances, the preparations ovine and bovine due to a Soyer or a Francatelli. And surely an aristocracy of transcendental ideas may be allowed a haute noblesse of titles. In such a case, the quarrel about names is a quarrel about things. Cancel the name, and, unless you provide another equally graphic, comprehensive, and precise, you cancel the thing. The new wine must have for its receptacles, new bottles; if you try to preserve it in old bottles, it is marred. Discretion is of course desirable in the selection or origination of the necessary terms. But certainly Sir William Hamilton is not pedantic or puerile enough to coin neologisms only to perplex the vulgar. It remains to be shown, that, in a field of research so emphatically his own, so many fallow parts of which he has put into cultivation, and from which he has removed so much obstructive matter, he had not a perfect, a peculiar rights to appropriate descriptive titles to the objects of his toil. As he mid the right to bestow some kind of title, so he has the ability—as a profound philosophic grammarian and philologist,—to choose such titles as would duly convey his meaning and answer the purpose of his science. Compare his terminology with that adopted by the several leaders of German metaphysics; and you find that while his innovation demands, for its ready comprehension, only such ordinary attention at starting, as every reader of metaphysical works may be supposed to bring to the subject,—on the other hand, the Hegels, and Fichtes, and Kants. require each a lexicon for himself. Depend upon it, had Sir William met with an existing system of terms which would serve to transmit accurately and completely the ideas he discusses, he would not have troubled himself to create, or us to master the novelties in question. And after all, these novelties are really few in number and mild in form. Do you object to the "Unconditioned?" If you strain at a gnat of that sort, what capacity of swallow have you for the caravan of camels troopingof German Saharas? For this particular term we happen to entertain a particular regard, because of its connexion with a metaphysical doctrine of primary value, in the elucidation and limitation of which Sir William has employed such rare gifts ofThe doctrine affects the whole question of absolute and relative knowledge. And with consummate tact Sir William shows, that as the eagle cannot out-soar the atmosphere in which he floats, and by which alone he is supported; so the mind cannot transcend that sphere of limitation, within and through which exclusively the possibility of thought is realised. Thought, he argues, is only of the conditioned, because to think is to condition: conditional limitation is the fundamental law of the