Full text of "Mind"
MIND
A QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
JONG AND PO., f J^NTEI^S,
MIND
A QUARTERLY REVIEW
OP
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
PROFESSOR IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.
VOL. IV. 1879.
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,
14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON
AND 20 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH.
1879.
ERRATA in Vol. IV.
P. 96, I.
135, 23,
144, 27,
172, ,,18,21,
39, for Canning read Channing.
came come.
porttens portents.
Whateley Whately.
376, 8,
378, 4,
441, 18,
Goodwin's Godwin's.
do. do.
Love
Lore.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME IV.
AKTICLES.
PAGE.
ALLEN, G. The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry . . . 301
BAIN, A. John Stuart Mill 211, 375, 520
BEYINGTON, L. S. The Personal Aspect of Responsibility . 244
EDGEWORTH, F. Y. The Hedonical Calculus . . . .394
GURNET, E. On Discord '22
Eelations of Reason to Beauty .... 482
HAT.T., G. S. Philosophy in the United States ... 89
Laura Bridgman . . . . . .149
HARLEY, R. The Stanhope Demonstrator . . . .192
HODGSON, S. H. On_Causation 500
JAMES, W. Are we Automata 1 ...... 1
The Sentiment of Rationality . . . .317
KEYNES, J. N. On the Position of Formal Logic . . . 362
LANG, A. Mr. Max M tiller and Fetishism . . . .453
PLUMACHER, 0. Pessimism 68
POLLOCK, F. Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy . . 47
READ, C. Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy . . . 346
SIDGWICK, A. Definition De Jure and De Facto . . .230
SIMCOX, G. A. An Empirical Theory of Free Will . . . 469
SULLY, J. Harmony of Colours 172
VENN, J. The Difficulties of Material Logic .... 35
NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.
ALLEN, G. Mr. G. S. Hall on the Perception of Colour . . 267
CAIRO, E. Mr. Balfour on Transcendentalism (with Reply) . Ill
,, The so-called Idealism of Kant . . . .557
EDITOR Dr. G. M. Beard on Experiments with Human Beings . 413
Mr. F. Galton on Generic Images and Automatic
Representation 551
vi Contents.
PAGE.
HAMILTON, E. Mr. Lewes's Doctrine of Sensibility
HBRZEN, A. The Physical Law of Consciousness .
.KEYNES, J. N. " Matter of Fact " Logic ....
MAUDSLBY, H. Alleged Suicide of a Dog ....
MEANS, D. McG. Nominalism . .
MEINONG, A. Modern Nominalism .....
READ, C. The Number of Terms in a Syllogism
SIDGWICK, A. Theoretical and Practical Logic
SIDGWICK, H. The Establishment of Ethical First Principles .
The so-called Idealism of Kant
THACKER, J. T. Prof. Clerk Maxwell on the Relativity of
Motion . 262
CRITICAL NOTICES.
ADAMSON, R. T. M. Herbert, The Realistic Assumption of
Modern Science examined . . . .570
ALLEN, G. J. J. Murphy, Habit and Intelligence . . . 274
BAIN, A. H. Spencer, The Data of Ethics .... 561
COUPLAND, W. C. E. v. Hartmann, Phdnomenologie des
sittlichen Bewusstseins .... 278
v EDITOR T. Fowler, Bacon's Novum Organum . . . .125
,, E. Renan, Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques . 132
T. Huxley, Hume 270
j/ W. L. Courtney, The Metaphysics of John Stuart Mill . 421
LAND, J. P. N. C. B. Spruyt, Proeve van eene Geschiedenis
van de Leer der Aangeboren Begrippen . 591
MAITLAND, F. W. A. J. Balfour, A Defence of Philosophic
Doubt 576
POLLOCK, F. M. C. L. Lotsij, Spinoza's Wijsbegeerte . . 431
READ, C. C. de Remusat, Histoire de la Philosophie en Angle-
terre depuis JBaconjusqu' a Locke . . .128
SIDGWICK, H. M. Guyau, La Morale d'fipicure et ses Rapports
~f. n ,avec.les Doctrines, contemporaines . ^.j. . 582
vreivAKT^J-Ji - JiiTa^k&ni , Tifrrt, 'iwtl /t fLi rti*n.<u K^*** /%*** , 3#*s
SULLY, J. G. Allen, The Colour- Sense: its Origin and Develop-
ment .....,. 415
P. Radestock, Schlaf und Traum .... 588
. , VENN, J. Ch. Sigwart, Logik, II . 426
A. Macfarlane, Principles of the Algebra of Logic . 580
Contents. vii
XEW BOOKS.
PAGE.
Adamson, R. On the Philosophy of Kant .... 602
Allen, G. TJie Colour-Sense : its Origin and Development . 144
Arnoldt, E. Kant's Prolegomena nicht doppelt redigirt . . 448
Bain, A. Education as a Science 136
Barach, C. S. Excerpta e Libro Alfredi Anglici " De Motu
Cordis" $c 141
Barenbach, F. v. Prolegomena zu einer anthropologischen
Philosophic . . . . . .141
Barzellotti, G.The Ethics of Positivism (trans.) . . .139
Berg, H. Die Lust an der Musik ...... 449
Bray, C. Psychological and Ethical Definitions, fyc. . . 599
Butler, S Evolution, Old and New 440
Byk, S. Die Physiologic des Schdnen 143
Calderwood, H. The Relations of Mind and Brain . . 445
Cantoni, C. Ernanuele Kant, I 601
Clifford, "W. K. Lectures and Essays 596
Combe, G. Education, its Principles and Practice (Ed. W. Jolly) 598
Conway, M. D. Demonology and Devil-Lore .... 441
Courtney, W. ~L.The Metaphysics of John Stuart Mill . . 289
Descours di Tournoy, G. Sull' Educazione, $c. . . .601
'Edwards, T. Notes on MUTs "Elimination, $c." . . .599
Erdmann, B. Irani. Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft . . 447
Kant's Kriticismus in der ersten und in der zweiten
Auflage der ' Kritik der reinen Vernunft' .
Espinas, A. Des Societes Animates, (2nd Ed.). . . .140
Eucken, K. Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie . 143
Ferri. L. Sulla Dottrina psicologica dell' Associazione . . 294
Ferrier, D. The Localisation of Cerebral Disease . . .137
Fischer, K. Geschichte der neuern Philosophic, L 1. (3rd Ed.). 292
Fiske, J. Dancinigm and other Essays 599
Flint, R. Antitheistic Theories 598
Fouillee, A. L'idee modeme du Droit en Allemagne, en Angle-
terre et en France 141
Histoire de la Philosophic (Xouv. Ed.) . . 600
Fraser, A. G. Selections from Berkeley 286
Frohschammer, J. Monaden und Weltphantasie . . . 294
Gore, G.The Art of Scientific Discovery . . . .136
G*ote,'S.SnovideniakakPredmetnaout8chnagoAnali.sa . 144
Guthrie, }!. On Mr. Spencer's Formula of Evolution . . 602
viii Contents.
PAGE,
Guyau, M. La Morale d'Epicure et ses Rapports avec les
Doctrines contemporaines . . . .140
,, La Morale Anglaise contemporaine . . . 446
Hartmann, E. v. Phcinomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins . 142
Herbert, T. M. The Realistic Assumptions of Modern Science 145
Herzen, A. Analisi fisiologica del Libero Arbitrio Umano . 294
Hinton, J. Chapters on the Art of Thinking . . . . 289
Hoppe, J. J. Die Schein-Bewegungen 293
Janet, P. Final Causes (trans.) . . . . . .139
Janitsch, J. Kant's Urtheile uber Berkeley .... 601
Knight, "W. Studies in Philosophy and Literature . . . 597
Lea, H. C. Superstition and Force. ..... 290
Lefevre, A. Philosophy: Historical and Critical (trans.) . 288
Lewes, G. H. The Study of Psychology, its Object, Scope, and
Method 443
Liard, L. La Science positive et la Metaphysique . . .291
Lotze, H. MetaphysiJc 293
Lowndes, K. Rene Descartes 138
./ Macfarlane, A. Principles of the Algebra of Logic . . . 443
Maudsley, H. The Pathology of Mind 439
Miloslavsky, P. Tipui sovremennoi filosofskoi muisliv Germanii 143
Morell, J. D. Philosophical Fragments 138
Noire, L. Max Muller and the Philosophy of Language . .442
Penjon, A. Etude sur la Vie et les (Euvres philosophiques de
G. Berkeley . . . ... . .292
Eibot, T. La Psychologic Allemande contemporaine . . 445
Saint-Hilaire, J. B. De la Metaphysique .... 446
Schellwien, R. Der Wille, die Lebensgrundmacht, I. . . 602
Sigwart, Ch. Logik, II 143
Spencer, H. Education: Intellectual, Moral, $c., (Cheap Ed.) 137
The Data of Ethics 444
Strieker, S. Studien uber das Bewusstsein . . . .293
Symon, C. The Principles of Human Knowledge (Berkeley's) . 137
Taine, H. De I' Intelligence (3rd Ed.) 290
"Waldstein, C. The Balance of Emotion and Intellect . . 287
Paradoxical Philosophy . . . . . . . .136
Petit Traite de Morale a V usage, des Ecoles primaires laiques . 291
. MISCELLANEOUS 14G, 295, 450, 603
No. 13.] [January, 1879.
MIND
A QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
I. ARE WE AUTOMATA ?
EVERYONE is now acquainted with the Conscious- Automaton-
theory to which Prof. Huxley 1 gave such publicity in his
Belfast address ; which the late Mr. D. A. Spalding punctiliously
made the pivot of all his book-notices in Nature ; which Prof.
Clifford fulminated as a dogma essential to salvation in a lecture
on " Body and Mind" 2 ; but which found its earliest and ablest
exposition in Mr. Hodgson's magnificent work, The Theory of
Practice? The theory maintains that in everything outward we
are pure material machines. Eeeling is a mere collateral product
of our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more
than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveller whom it
accompanies. Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the
voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch
the helm or handle the rigging.
The theory also maintains that we are in error to suppose that
our thoughts awaken each other by inward congniity or rational
necessity, that disappointed hopes cause sadness, premisses con-
clusions, &c. The feelings are merely juxtaposed in that order
without mutual cohesion, because the nerve-processes to which
they severally correspond awaken each other in that order.
1 Fortnightly Revinv, Vol. XVI., p. 555.
2 Ibid., p. 714. 3 Vol. L, pp. 416 ff.
2 Are we Automata ?
It may seem strange that this latter part of the theory should
be held by writers, who like Prof. Huxley have openly expressed
their belief in Hume's doctrine of causality. That doctrine
asserts that the causality we seem to find between the terms
of a physical chain of events, is an illegitimate outward
projection of the inward necessity by which we feel each thought
to sprout out of its customary antecedent. Strip the string of
necessity from between ideas themselves, and it becomes hard
indeed for a Huniian to say how the notion of causality ever
was born at all.
This, however, is an argumentum ad Jwminem which need not
detain us. The theory itself is an inevitable consequence of the
extension of the notion of reflex action to the higher nerve-
centres. Prof. Huxley starts from a decapitated frog which
performs rational-seeming acts although probably it has no con-
sciousness, and passing up to the hemispheres of man concludes
that the rationality of their performances can owe nothing to
the feelings that co-exist with it. This is the inverse of Mr.
Lewes's procedure. He starts from the hemispheres, and finding
their performances apparently guided by feeling concludes,
when he comes to the spinal cord, that feeling though latent
must still be there to make it act so rationally. Clearly
such arguments as these may mutually eat each other up to all
eternity.
The reason why the writers we speak of venture to dogma-
tise as they do on this subject, seems due to a sort of
philosophic faith, bred like most faiths from an aesthetic de-
mand. Mental and physical events are, on all hands, admitted
to present the strongest contrast in the entire field of being.
The chasm which yawns between them is less easily bridged
over by the mind than any interval we know. Why then
not call it an absolute chasm ? And say not only that the
two worlds are different, but that they are independent ? This
gives us the comfort of all simple and absolute formulas, and it
makes each chain homogeneous to our consideration. When
talking of nervous tremors and bodily actions, we may feel
secure against intrusion from an irrelevant mental world.
When, on the other hand, we speak of feelings, we may with
equal consistency use terms always of one denomination, and
never be annoyed by w T hat Aristotle calls "slipping into another
kind ". The desire on the part of men educated in laboratories
not to have their physical reasonings mixed up with such
incommensurable factors as feelings is certainly very strong.
Nothing is commoner than to hear them speak of conscious
events as something so essentially vague and shadowy as even
doubtfully to exist at all. I have heard a most intelligent
Are we Automata ? 3
biologist say : " It is high time for scientific men to protest
ajaiust the recognition of any such thing as consciousness in a
:tific investigation". In a word, feeling constitutes the ^
" unscientific " half of existence, and any one who enjoys calling
himself a " scientist " will be too happy to purchase an
uutrammeled homogeneity of terms in the studies of his
predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which,
in the same breath that it allows to mind an independent
status of being, banishes it to a limbo of causal inertness, from
whence no intrusion or interruption on its part need ever be
feared.
But Common Sense also may have its aesthetic demands, and
among them may be a craving for unity. The spectacle of an
ultimate and inexplicable dualism in the nature of things may
be as unsatisfying as the obligation to calculate with hetero-
geneous terms. Two " aspects," ncmine tuhpiciente, seem un-
called for. One may well refuse, until absolutely overpowered
by the evidence, to believe that the world contains items which
in no wise influence their neighbours ; whose existence or non-
existence need, so far as the remainder go, be taken into no
account. It is a smoother and more harmonious thought to
imagine all the items of the world without exception as
interlocked in bonds of action and reaction, and forming a
single dynamic whole.
And now, who shall decide between such rival aesthetic
needs? A priori to shrink from a "chasm" between the
objects of one's contemplation is as respectable as to dislike
heterogeneity in the factors of one's reasoning operations. The
truth is, then, that neither aesthetic motives nor ostensible
reasons entitle us to decide between the Conscious-Automaton-
Iheory and the theory of Common Sense. Both alike are
conceptions of the possible, and for any one dogmatically to
affirm the truth of either is, in the present state of our knowledge,
an extremely unscientific procedure.
The question for us then is : Can we get light from any facts
hitherto ignored in the discussion ? Since the direct evidence
of our living feeling is ruled out of court as mendacious, can we
find circumstantial evidence which will incline the balance either
way, and save us from the dreary strife of prejudice and
prepossession ?
I think we can, and propose in the remainder of this article
to show that this presumptive evidence wholly favours the
efficacity of Consciousness. Consciousness, namely, has been
slowly evolved in the animal series, and resembles in this all
organs that have a use. Since the mere supernumerary depicted
by the Conscious-Automaton-theory would be useless, it follows
4 Are we Automata ?
that if we can discover the utility of consciousness we shall
overthrow that theory.
Our problem consequently is : Of what use to a nervous
system is a superadded consciousness ? Can a brain which has
it function better than a brain without it ? And to answer this
question, we must know, first, the natural defects of the brain,
and secondly, the peculiar powers of its mental correlate.
Since consciousness is presumably at its minimum in creatures
-whose nervous system is simple, and at its maximum in the
hypertrophied cerebrum of man, the natural inference is that,
as an organe de perfectionnement, it is most needed where the
nervous system is highly evolved ; and the form our first question
takes is : What are the defects characteristic of highly evolved
nervous centres ?
If we take the -actions of lower animals and the actions of
lower ganglia in higher animals, what strikes us most in them is
the determinateness with which they respond to a given
stimulus. The addition of the cerebral hemispheres immediately
introduces a certain incalculableness into the result, and this
incalculableness attains its maximum with the relatively
enormous brain-convolutions of man. In the beheaded frog the
legs twitch as fatally when we touch the skin with acid as do a
j umping-jack's when we pull the string. The machinery is as
narrow and perfect in the one case as in the other. Even if all
the centres above the cord except the cerebral hemispheres are
left in place, the machine-like regularity of the animal's response
is hardly less striking. He breathes, he swallows, he crawls, he
turns over from his back, he moves up or down on his support,
he swims and stops at a given moment, he croaks, he leaps for-
ward two or three times each and all with almost unerring regu-
larity at my word of command, provided I only be an experienced
physiologist and know what ganglia to leave and what particular
spur will elicit the action I desire. Thus if I merely remove
his hemispheres and tilt my hand down, he will crawl up it but
not jump off. If I pinch him under the arm-pits, he will croak
once for each pinch ; if I throw him into water, he will swim
until I touch his hands with a stick, when he will immediately
stop. Over a frog with an entire brain, the physiologist has no
such power. The signal may be given, but ideas, emotions or
caprices will be aroused instead of the fatal motor reply, and
whether the animal will leap, croak, sink or swim or swell up
without moving, is impossible to predict. In a man's brain the
utterly remote and unforeseen courses of action to which a given
impression on the senses may give rise, is too notorious to
need illustration. Whether we notice it at all depends on our
mental pre-occupations at the moment. If we do notice it, our
Are v:c Automaial 5
action again depends on the " considerations " which it awakens,
and these again may depend as much on our transient mood or
on our latest experience as on any constant tendencies organised
in our nature.
We may thus lay it down as an established fact that the most
perfected parts of the brain are those whose action are least
determinate. It is this very vagueness which constitutes their
advantage. They allow their possessor to adapt his conduct to
the minutest alterations in the environing circumstances, any
one of which may be for him a sign, suggesting distant motives
more powerful than any present solicitations of sense. Xow it
seems as if certain mechanical conclusions should be drawn from
this state of tilings. An organ swayed by slight impressions is
an organ whose natural state is one of unstable equilibrium.
We may imagine the various lines of discharge in the cerebrum
to be almost on a par in point of permeability what discharge
a given small impression will produce may be called accidental,
in the sense in which we say it is a matter of accident whether
a rain-drop falling on a mountain ridge descend the eastern or
the western slope. It is in this sense that we may call it a
matter of accident whether a woman's first child be a boy or a
girl. The ovum is so unstable a body that certain causes too
minute for our apprehension may at a certain moment tip it one
way or the other. The natural law of an organ constituted after
this fashion can be nothing but a law of caprice. I do not see
how one could reasonably expect from it any certain pursuance
of useful lines of reaction such as the few and fatally determined
performances of the lower centres constitute within their narrow
sphere. The dilemma in regard to the nervous system seems to
be of the following kind. "We may construct one which will
react infallibly and certainly, but it will then be capable of
reacting to very few changes in the environment it will fail to
be adapted to all the rest. We may, on the other hand,
construct a nervous system potentially adapted to respond to
an infinite variety of minute features in the situation ; but
its fallibility will then be as great as its elaboration. We
can never be sure that its equilibrium will be upset in the
appropriate direction. In short, a high brain may do many
things, and may do each of them at a very slight hint. But its
hair-trigger organisation makes of it a happy-go-lucky, hit-or-
miss affair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing at
any given moment. A low brain does few things, and in doing
them perfectly forfeits all other use. The performances of a high
brain are like dice thrown for ever on a table. Unless they be
loaded, what chance is there that the highest number will turn
up oftener than the lowest ?
6 Are we Automata ?
All this is said of the brain as a physical machine pure and
simple. Can consciousness increase its efficiency by loading its
dice ? Such is our next problem.
But before directly attacking it, we must pause a moment to
make sure that we clearly apprehend the import of such
expressions as useful discharge, appropriate direction, right
reaction, and the like, which we have been using. They all
presuppose some Good, End OT Interest to be the animal's.
Until this goal of his salvation be posited, we have no criterion
by which to estimate the utility of any of his reactions. ]S T ow
the important thing to notice is that the goal cannot be posited
at all so long as we consider the purely physical order of
existence. Matter has no ideals. It must be entirely indifferent
to the molecules of C, H, "N and 0, whether they combine in a
live body or a dead one. What the present conditions fatally
necessitate, that they do with equal infallibility and cheerfulness;
whether the result of their action be the perfume of a rose or the
odour of carrion, the words of a Eenouvier or the crackling of
thorns under a pot, it is brought forth with as little reluctance
in the one case as in the other. Good involves the notion of
less good, necessitates comparison, and for a drop of water either
to compare its present state with an absent state or to compare
its total self with a drop of wine, would involve a process not
commonly thought of as physical. Comparison requires a
tertium quid, a locus call it what you will in which the two
outward existences may meet on equal terms. This forum is
what is known as a consciousness. Even sensations cannot be
supposed, simply as such, to be aware of their relations to each
other. A succession of feelings is not (as James Mill reiterates)
one and the same thing with a feeling of succession, but a wholly
different thing. The latter feeling requires a self-transcendency
of each item, so that each not only is in relation, but knows its
relation, to the other. This self-transcendency of data constitutes
the conscious form. Where we suppose it to exist we have
mind ; where mind exists we have it.
You may, it is true, ascribe mind to a physical process. You
may allow that the atom engaged in some present energy has a
dreamlike consciousness of residual powers and a judgment
which says, " Those are better than this ". You may make the
rain-drop flowing downhill posit an impossible ascent as its
highest good. Or you may make the C, H, N and atoms of
my body knowingly to conspire in its construction as the best
act of which they are capable. But if you do this, you have
abandoned the sphere of purely physical relations.
Thus, then, the words Use, Advantage, Interest, Good, find
no application in a world in which no consciousness exists.
Are, ice Automata ? 7
Things there are neither good nor bad ; they simply are or are
not. Ideal truth to exist at all requires that a mind also exist
which shall deal with it as a judge deals with the law, really
creating that which it professes only to declare.
But, granting such a mind, we must furthermore note that
the direction of the verdict as to whether A or B be best, is an
ultimate, arbitrary expression of feeling, an absolute fiat or
decree. What feels good is good ; if not it is only because it
negates some other good which the same power of feeling
stamps as a Better. 1
Thus much,- then, is certain, that in venturing to discuss the
perfection and uses of the brain at all, we assume at the outset
the existence of some one's consciousness to make the discussion
i possible by defining some particidar good or interest as the
standard by which the brain's excellence shall be measured.
"\Vithout such measure Bismarck's brain is no better than a
suicidal maniac's, for the one works as perfectly as the other to
its end. Considered as mere existence, a festering corpse is as
real as a live chancellor, and, for aught physics can say, as
desirable. Consciousness in declaring the superiority of either
one, simply creates what previous to its fiat had no existence.
The judge makes the law while announcing it : if the judge be
a maggot, the suicide's brain will be best ; if a king, the chan-
cellor's.
The consciousness of Mr. Darwin lays it down as axiomatic
that self-preservation or survival is the essential or universal
good for all living things. The mechanical processes of " spon-
taneous variation " and " natural selection " bring about this
good by their combined action ; but being physical processes
they can in no sense be said to intend it. It merely floats off
here and there accidentally as oneTof a thousand other physical
results. The followers of Darwin rightly scorn those teleologists
who claim that the physical process, as such, of evolution
follows an ideal of perfection. But now suppose that not only
our Darwinian consciousness, but with even greater energy the
1 I have treated this matter of teleology being an exclusively conscious
function more at length in an article on " Spencer's Definition of Mind :!
(Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Jan., ISTb), to which I take the liberty
of referring the reader. The fact that each consciousness simply stakes its
ends and challenges the world thereby, is most conspicuous in the case of
what is called Self-love. There the end staked by each mind is peculiar
to itself, whilst in respect of other ends ruanv minds mav unite in a
common position. But in their psychological essence these impersonal ends
in no wise differ from self-interest. Abolish the minds to whom they
6eem good and they have no status ; any more than the categorical impera-
tive that perish who may John Smith must wax fat and prosper, has a ratio
alter Smith's peculiar lusts have been annihilated.
8 Are we Automata ?
consciousness of the creature itself, postulates survival as its
summum bonum, and by its cognitive faculty recognises as well
as Mr. Darwin which of its actions and functions subserves this
good; would not the addition of causal efficacy to this con-
sciousness enable it to furnish forth the means as well as fix
the end make it teleologically a fighter as well as a standard-
bearer? Might not, in other words, such a consciousness
promote or increase by its function of efficacity the amount of
that " usefulness " on the part of the brain which it defines and
estimates by its other functions ? To answer such a question,
we must analyse somewhat closely the peculiarities of the
individual consciousness as it phenomenally presents itself to
our notice.
If we use the old word category to denote every irreducibly
peculiar form of synthesis in which phenomena may be com-
bined and related, we shall certainly have to erect a category of
consciousness, or what with Eenouvier we may, if we prefer, call
a category of personality. This category might be defined as the
mode in which data are brought together for comparison with, a
view to choice. 1 Both these points, comparison and choice, will
be found alike omnipresent in the different stages of its activity.
The former has always been recognised ; the latter less than it
deserves.
Many have been the definitions given by psychologists of the
essence of consciousness. One of the most acute and emphatic
of all is that of Ulrici, who in his Leib und Seele and elsewhere
exactly reverses the formula of the reigning British school, by
calling consciousness a discriminating activity an Unterschei-
dungsvermogen. But even Ulrici does not pretend that con-
sciousness creates the differences it becomes aware of in its
objects. They pre-exist and consciousness only discerns
them ; so that after all Ulrici's definition amounts to little more
than saying that consciousness is a faculty of cognition a
/rather barren result. I think we may go farther and add that
the powers of cognition, discrimination and comparison which
it possesses, exist only for the sake of something beyond them-
selves, namely, Selection. Whoever studies consciousness,
from .any point of view whatever, is ultimately brought up
against the mystery of interest and selective attention. There
^Neither 'association' nor ' dissociation' is synthesis of a peculiar kind ;
they are mere generic modes, and are wholly unfit to serve as differentiae of
psychical phenomena in ^any general philosophical classification. Com-
parison and choice, on the contrary, are each sui generis. Let it not be said
that a magnet compares the different filings in a machine-shop to choose the
iron filings from the heap. There is no proof that the brass filings appeal
to it at all. In comparison, both terms equally appeal to consciousness.
Are v:e Automata? 9
are a great many things which consciousness is in a. passive
and receptive way by its cognitive and registrative powers.
Lut there is one thing which it does, sud sponte, and which
seems an original peculiarity of its own ; and that is, always to
choose out of the manifold experiences present to it at a given
time some one for particular accentuation, and to ignore the
the rest. And I shall now show how, from its simplest to its
most complicated forms, it exerts this function with unremitting
industry.
To begin at the bottom, even in the infra-conscious region
which Mr. Spencer says is the lowest stage of mentality. What
are our senses themselves but organs of selection ? Out of the
infinite chaos of movements, of which physics teaches us that
the outer world consists, each sense-organ picks out those which
fall within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but
ignores the rest as completely as if they did not exist. It thus
accentuates particular movements in a manner for which
objectively there seems no valid ground ; for, as Lauge says,
there is no reason whatever to think that the gap in nature \
between the highest sound-waves and the lowest heat-waves is
an abrupt break like that of our sensations, or that the differ-
ence between violet and ultra-violet rays has anything like the
objective importance subjectively represented by that between
light and darkness. Out of what is in itself an undistinguish-
able, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or empha-
our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignor-
ing that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt
changes, in a word, of picturesque light and shade.
If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their
causes thus picked out for us by the conformation of the organ's
termination, the attention, on the other hand, out of all the
sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as worthy of its notice
and suppresses all the rest. Helmholtz's immortal work on
Physiological Optics is little more than a study of those visual
sensations of which common men never become aware blind
spots, muscae rolitantcs, after-images, irradiation, chromatic
fringes, marginal changes of colour, double images, astigmatism,
movements of accommodation and convergence, retinal rivalry,
and more besides. "We do not even know, as Professor "William
B. Rogers pointed out, on which of our eyes an image falls,
until trained to notice the local sensation. So habitually over-
looked is this by most men that one may be blind for years of
a single eye and not know it. 1
1 If one cared to indulge in d priori constructions i la Spencer, one
might easily show how the differentiation of sense-organs arose in the
primitive polyp through this reinforcement by a selective attention (sup-
10 Are we Automata ?
Helmholtz says we only use our sensations as signs. The
sensations from which we avert our attention are those which
are valueless as tokens of the presence of objective things.
These things are called the Objects of perception. But what
are they ? Nothing, as it seems to me, but groups of coherent
sensations. This is no place to criticise Helmholtz's treatment
of perception, but I may say, in passing, that I think his rather
indefinite and oracular statements about the part played by the
intellect therein have momentarily contributed to retard psycho-
logical inquiry. We find the Kantian philosophers everywhere
hailing him as the great experimental corroborator of their
master's views. They say he has proved the present sensation
to have nothing to do with the construction of the Object that
is an original act of the intellect which the sensation merely
instigates but does not furnish forth : it contains ultra-sensational
elements. All that Helmholtz really does prove is, that the so-
called Object is constituted of absent sensations. What he has
'not explicitly noticed is, that among these the mind picks out
certain particular ones to be more essential and characteristic
than the rest. When, for example, on getting a peculiar
retinal sensation with two acute and two obtuse angles,
I perceive a square table-top, which thus contradicts my
present image ; what is the squareness but one out of an
infinite number of possible retinal sensations which the same
object may yield ? From all these the mind, for aesthetic
reasons of its own, has singled out this one and chosen to call
it the object's essential attribute ? Were room here given, I
think it might be shown that perception involves nothing beyond
association and selection^ The antithesis is not, as Helmholtz's
admirers would have it, between sensations on the one hand as
signs and original intellectual products, materially different from
posed efficacious) of particular portions of the feeling yielded by an organ
already nascent. The integument of the animal might, for instance, at first
be affected both by light-vibrations and by those far below them. But if
the former were picked out by the consciousness as most interesting, the
nervous movements would soon grow more and more harmonious with
them, and more and more out of tune with the rest. An optic nerve and
retina would thus result. One might corroborate this reasoning by pointing
to what happens in cases of squint. The squinting eye gives double
images which are so inconvenient that the mind is forced to abstract its
attention from them. This resolute refusal to attend to the sensations of
one eye soon makes it totally blind. It would seem, indeed, that the
attention positively suppressed the function of the retina, for the presence
of cataract which keeps the image from it altogether, results in no such
paralysis. I do not insist on this point, partly because such speculation is
rather cheap " all may raise the flowers now, for all have got the seed "-
and partly because there seems some reason to doubt whether the usually
received explanation of strabLsmic blindness be correct.
Are we Automata ? 11
sensations on the other, as Objects. It is between present sen-
is as signs and certain absent sensations as Objects, these
latter being moreover arbitrarily selected out of a large number
as being more objective and real than the rest. The real form
of the circle is deemed to be the sensation it gives when the line
of vision is perpendicular to its centre all its other sensations
are signs of this sensation. The real sound of the cannon is the
sensation it makes when the ear is close by. The real colour of
the brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarely
at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the
gloom ; under other circumstances it gives us other colour-sensa-
tions which are not signs of this we then see it looks pinker or
blacker than it really is. The reader knows no object which
he does not represent to himself by preference as in some
typical attitude, of some normal size, at some characteristic
distance, of some standard tint, &c., &c. 'But all these
essential characteristics, which together form the genuine objec-
tivity of the thing and are contrasted with the subjective
sensations we may happen to get from it at a given moment, are
themselves sensations pure and simple, susceptible of being
fully given at some other moment. The spontaneity of the mind
does not consist in conjuring up any new non-sensational quality
of objectivity. It consists solely in deciding what the particular
sensation shall be whose native objectivity shall be held more
valid than that of all the rest. 1
Thus perception involves a twofold choice. Out of all present
sensations, we notice mainly such as are significant of absent
ones : and out of all the absent associates which these suggest,
we again pick out a very few to be the bearers par excellence of
objective reality. "We could have no more exquisite example of
the mind's selective industry.
That industry goes on to deal with the objects thus given in
perception. A man's Empirical Thought depends on the objects
1 When I say Objects are wholly formed of associated and selected sen-
sations, I hope the reader will not understand me to profess adhesion to the
old atomic doctrine of association, so thoroughly riddled of late by Professor
Green. The association of sensations of which I speak, presuppose -
parison and memory which are functions not given in any one sensation.
All I mean is, that these mental functions are already at work in the first
beginnings of sensation and that the simplest changes of sensation moreover
involve consciousness of all the categories time, space, number, objectivity,
causality. There is not first a passive act of sensation proper, followed by
an active production or projection ("inference") of the attributes of objec-
tivity by the mind. These all come to us together with the sensible
qualities, and their progress from vagueness to distinctness is the only pro-
-vhologists have to explain. What I mean to say in the text is, that
this process involves nothing but association ar.d selection, all new pro-
duction of either material or formal elements being denied.
12 Are ive Automata ?
and events lie has experienced, but what these shall be is to a
large extent determined by his habits of attention. An object
may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persistently
fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his experience.
We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but
to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct ?
On the other hand, an object met only once in a life-time may
leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men
make a tour in Europe. One will bring home only picturesque
impressions costumes and colours, parks and views and works
of architecture, pictures and statues. To another all this will
be non-existent ; and distances and prices, populations and
drainage-arrangements, door- and window-fastenings, and other
useful statistics will take their place. A third will give a rich
account of the theatres, restaurants, and public balls, and naught
beside ; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in
his own subjective breedings as to tell little more than a few
names of places through which he passed. Each has selected,
out of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his
private interest and has made his experience thereby.
If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask
how- the mind proceeds rationally to connect them we find
selection again to be omnipotent. In an article on'" Brute and
Human Intellect " in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, July
1878, p. 236, -I have tried to show that all Eeasoning depends on
the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the pheno-
Lftenon reasoned about into partial factors or elements, and to
pick out from among these the particular one which, in our
given theoretical or practical emergency, may lead to the
proper conclusion. Another predicament will need another
conclusion, and require another element to be picked out. The
man of genius is he who will always stick-in his bill, as it were,
at the right point, and bring it out with the right element
" reason " if the emergency be theoretical, " means " if it be
practical transfixed upon it ? Association by similarity I have
shown to be an important help to this breaking-up of represented
things into their elements. But this association is only the
minimum of that same selection of which picking out the right
reason is a maximum. I here confine myself to this brief state-
ment, but it may suffice to show that Reasoning is but another
form of that selective activity which appears to be the true
sphere of mental spontaneity.
If now we pass to the Esthetic activity of the mind, the
application of our law is still more obvious. The artist notori-
ously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colours, shapes, which
do not harmonise with each other and with the main purpose of
Are u-e Automata ? 13
his \vork. That unity, harmony, "convergence of characters,"
_M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their su-
periority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination.
Any natural subject will do, it' the artist has wit enough to
1" nince upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and sup-
press all merely accidental items which do not harmonise with
this.
Ascending still higher we reach the plane of Ethics, where
choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical
quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally
possible. To sustain the arguments for the good course and
keep them ever before us, to stifle longing for more flowery
ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the arduous path, these
are characteristic ethical energies. But more than these ; for
these but deal with the means of compassing interests already
felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy ^x/r excel-
lence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several
equally coercive shall become supreme. The issue here is of the
utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career. When
he debates, Shall I commit this crime ? choose that profession ?
accept that office, or marry this fortune ? his choice really lies
"between one of several equally possible future Selves. What his
entire empirical Erjo shall become, is fixed by the conduct of this
moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the
argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is
possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical
ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the
very complexion of the character. The problem with the man is
less what act he shall now choose to do, than what kind of a
being he shall now resolve to become.
Looking back then over this review we see that the mind is
at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Con- <
sciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the
selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the rein-
forcing and inhibiting agency of Attention. The highest and
most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data
chosen by the faculty next beneath out of the mass offered by
the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a
still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The
highest distillate thus represents in the last analysis nothing but
sensational elements. But this is far from meaning that it
implies nothing but passive faculty of sensation. As well
might one say that the sculptor is passive, because the statue
stood from eternity within the stone. So it did, but with a
million different ones beside it. The world as a Goethe feels and
knows it all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensa-
14 Are we Automata ?
tions, and into these elements we may analyse back every
thought of the poet. We may even, by our reasonings, unwind
things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and
moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only
real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in,
will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative
strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, as the sculptor
extracts his statue by simply rejecting the other portions of the
stone. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone !
Other minds, other worlds from the same chaos ! Goethe's
world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those
who may abstract them. Some such other worlds may exist in
the consciousness of ant, crab and cuttle-fish.
After this perhaps too long analysis let us now look back.
We have found that the unaided action of the cerebral hemi-
spheres would probably be random and capricious ; that the
nerve-process likely to lead to the animal's interests would
not necessarily predominate at a given moment. On the other
hand, we have found that an impartial consciousness is a non-
entity, and that of the many items that ever occupy our mental
stage Feeling always selects one as most congruous with the
interests it has taken its stand upon. Collating these two results,
an inference is unavoidable. The " items " on the mental stage
are the subjective aspects of as many nerve-processes, and in
emphasising the representations congruous with conscious
interest and discouraging all others, may not Attention actually
reinforce and inhibit the nerve-processes to which the represen-
tations severally correspond ?
This of course is but a hypothetical statement of the verdict
of direct personal feeling a verdict declared mendacious by
Professor Clifford. But the intricate analysis by which it has
been reached gives it great plausibility. I shall strengthen the
probability by further facts in a moment. But I beg the reader
to notice here the limitations of the power of Feeling, if power
tliere be. All the possibilities of representation, all the images
are furnished by the brain. Consciousness produces nothing, it
only alters the proportions. Even the miraculous action of
free will can only consist in the quantitative reinforcement of
representations already given qualitatively. A sonorous plate
has no proper note of its own. It is almost impossible by
scraping it to reproduce twice an identical tone. The number
of Chladni's sand-figures it will furnish is as inexhaustible as
the whimsies which may turn up in a brain. But as the
physicist's finger pressing the plate here or there determines
nodal points that throw the sand into shapes of relative fixity,
Are we Automata ? 15
.ay the accentuating finger of consciousness deal with the
fluctuating eddies in the cerebral cortex.
That these eddies are stirred by causes that have no connec-
tion with either dominant interests or present impressions seems
manifest from the phenomena of dreaming. The chaotic irnagery
there appears due to the unequal stimulus of nutrition in different
localities. But if an accidental variation in nutrition is suffi-
cient to determine the brain's action, what safeguard have we at
any time against its random influence ? It may of course be
mably objected that the exceptional state of sleep can afford
no proper clue to the brain's operations when awake. But
ry in his classic work, Le Sommtil, has conclusively proved
the passage of dreams through " hypnagogic hallucinations " into
that meteoric shower of images and suggestions, irrelevant to the
main line of thought, the continual presence of which every one
who has once had his interest au'akened in the subject, will
without difficulty recognise in himself. Ordinarily these perish
in being born, but if one by chance saunters into the mind,
which is related to the dominant pursuit of the moment, presto !
it is pounced upon and becomes part of the empirical Eyo. The
greatest inventions, the most brilliant thoughts often turn up
thus accidentally, but may mould for all that the future of the
man. Would they have gained this prominence above their
peers without the watchful eye of consciousness to recognise
their value and emphasise them into permanence ?
Xur allein der Mensch
Yenuag das Unmogliche.
Er unterscheidet, wahlet und richtet,
Er kann deui Augenblick
Dauer verleihen.
The hypothesis we are advocating might, if confirmed, con-
siderably mitigate one of the strongest objections to the credi-
bility of the Darwinian theory. A consciousness which should
not only determine its brain to prosperous courses, but also by
virtue of that hereditary influence of habit (nowadays so
generally believed in by naturalists) should organise " from
generation to generation a nervous system more and more
mechanically incapable of wandering from the bines of interest
chosen for it at first, would immensely shorten the time and
labour of natural selection. Mr. Darwin regards animated
nature as a sort of table on which dice are continually being
thrown. Xo intention presides over the throwing, but lucky
numbers from time to time fortuitously turn up and are pre-
served If the ideas we have advanced concerning the insta-
bility of a complicated cerebrum be true, we should have a sort
of extension of this reign of accident into the functional life of
16 Are we Automata ?
every individual animal whose brain had become sufficiently
, evolved. As his body morphologically was the result of lucky
| chance, so each of his so-called acts of intelligence would be
' another ; and ages might elapse before out of this enormous
j lottery -game a brain should emerge both complex and secure.
| But give to consciousness the power of exerting a constant
pressure in the direction of survival, and give to the organism
the power of growing to the modes in which consciousness has
trained it, and the number of stray shots is immensely reduced,
and the time proportionally shortened for Evolution. It is, in
fact, hard to see how without an effective superintending ideal
the evolution of so unstable an organ as the mammalian cere-
brum can have proceeded at all.
That consciousness should only be intense when nerve-pro-
cesses are retarded or hesitant, and at its minimum when nerve-
action is rapid or certain, adds colour to the view that it is
\ efficacious. Rapid, automatic action is action through thoroughly
\ excavated nerve-tracks which have not the defect of uncertain
1 performance. All instincts and confirmed habits are of this sort.
I But when action is hesitant there always seem several alterna-
/ tive possibilities of nervous discharge. The feeling awakened
I by the nascent excitement of each nerve-track seems by its
attractive or repulsive quality to determine whether the excite-
ment shall abort or shall become complete. Where indecision
is great, as before a dangerous leap, consciousness is agonisingly
intense. Feeling, from this point of view, may be likened to a
cross-section of the chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the
links already laid down, and groping among the fresh ends pre-
sented to it for the one which seems best to fit the case.
The remarkable phenomena of " vicarious function " in the
nervous centres form another link in our chain of circumstantial
evidence. A machine in working order functions fatally in one
way. Our consciousness calls this the right way. Take out a
valve, throw a wheel out of gear or bend a pivot, and it becomes
a different machine, functioning just as fatally in another way
, which we call the wrong way. But the machine itself knows
nothing of wrong or right : matter has no ideals to pursue. A
locomotive will carry its train through an open drawbridge as
cheerfully as to any other destination.
A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a new machine,
and during the first days after the operation functions in a
thoroughly abnormal manner. Why, if its performances blindly
result from its structure, undirected by any feeling of purpose,
should it not blindly continue now to throw off inappropriate
acts just as before its mutilation it produced appropriate ones ?
As a matter of fact, however, its performances become from day
Are we Automata ? 17
to day more normal, until at last a practised eye may be needed
to suspect anything "wrong. If we suppose the presence of a
mind, not only taking cognisance of each functional error, but
able to exert an efficient pressure to inhibit it if it be a sin of
commission, to lend a strengthening hand if the nerve-defect be
a weakness or sin of omission, nothing seems more natural than
that the remaining parts of the brain, assisted in this way,
should by virtue of the principle of habit grow back to the old
teleological modes of exercise for which they were at first
incapacitated. Xothing, on the contrary, seems at first sight
more unnatural than that they should vicariously take up the
duties of a part now lost without those duties as such exerting
any persuasive or coercive force. 1
There is yet another set of facts which seem explicable by
the supposition that consciousness has causal etficacity. It has
long been noticed that pleasures are generally associated with
beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences. All the funda-
mental vital processes illustrate this law. Starvation, suffoca-
tion, privation of food, drink and sleep, work when exhausted,
burns, wounds, inflammation, the effects of poison, are as dis-
agreeable as filling the hungry stomach, enjoying rest and sleep
after fatigue, exercise after rest, and a sound skin and unbroken
bones at all times, are pleasant. Mr. Spencer, in the chapter of
his Psychology entitled " Pleasures and Pains," has suggested
that these coincidences are due, not to any pre-established
harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection which
would certainly kill off in the long run any breed of creatures
to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed enjoy-
able. An animal that should take pleasure in a feeling of
suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficacious enough to
make him immerse his head in water, enjoy a longevity of four
or five minutes. But if pleasures and pains have no efficacity,
one does not see (without some such a priori rational harmony
as would be scouted by the " scientific " champions of the Auto-
maton-theory) why the most noxious acts, such as burning,
might not give a thrill of delight, and the most necessary ones,
such as breathing, cause agony. 2 The exceptions to this law
1 This argument, though so striking at first sight, is perhaps one
which it would be dangerous to urge too dogmatically. It may be that
restitution of cerebral function is susceptible of explanation on drainage-
principles, or, to use Strieker's phrase, by "collateral innervation". A- I
am preparing a separate essay on this subject, I will say no more about the
matter here.
2 1 do not overlook an obvious objection suggested by such an operation
as breathing. It, like other motor pr< ilts from a tendency to ner-
vous discharge. AVhen this takes place immediately, hardly any feeling but the
2
18 Are we Automata ?
are, it is true, numerous, but relate to experiences that are either
not vital or not universal. Drunkenness, for instance, which
though noxious is to many persons delightful, is a very excep-
tional experience. But, as the excellent physiologist Tick
remarks, if all rivers and springs ran alcohol instead of water,
either all men would hate it or our nerves would have been
selected so as to drink it with impunity. The only very con-
siderable attempt, in fact, that has ever been made to explain
the distribution of our feelings is that of Mr. Grant Allen in his
suggestive little work Physiological Esthetics ; and his reasoning
is based exclusively on that causal emcacity of pleasures and
pains which the " double-aspect " partisans so strenuously deny.
Thus, then, from every point of view the circumstantial
evidence against that theory is very strong. A priori analysis
of both brain and conscious action shows us that if the latter
were efficacious it would, by its selective emphasis, make
amends for the indeterminateness of the former; whilst the
study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it
to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added
for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to
regulate itself. The conclusion that it is useful is, after all this,
more than justifiable. But, if it is useful, it must be so through
its efficaciousness, and the Conscious- Automaton-theory must
succumb to the theory of Common Sense.
Our discussion might fairly stop here save for the possible
difficulty some readers may have in appreciating the full utility
of having certain nervous possibilities emphasised above the
rest. The measure of all utility is, as we have seen, some
standard posited by Desire. The standard of survival or self-
preservation is most potent. But there exist a host of other
standards, aesthetic and moral, imperative so long as they do
not conflict with this one and sometimes imperative over this
one. In the preliminary selection by the senses of certain
objective orders of movement, it is difficult to see what standard
rather negative one of ease results. When, however, a nervous discharge
is checked it is a universal law that consciousness of a disagreeable kind is
awakened, reaching in the case of suffocation the extremity of agony. An
Automatist may then say that feeling here, so far from playing a dynamic
part, is a mere passive index or symptom of certain mechanical happenings ;
and if here, then elsewhere. It may be replied that even were this true of
completely habitual acts like breathing, where the nervous paths have been
thoroughly organised for generations, it need not be true of hesitant acts
not yet habitual ; it need not be true of pains and pleasures, such as hunger
and sleep, not connected with motor discharge ; and even in the instance
chosen it leaves out the possibility that the nervous mechanism, now auto-
matically perfect, may have become so by slowly organised habit acquired
under the guidance of conscious feeling.
Are we Automata ? 19
is subserved. The utility of not having a sense for magnetism
when we have one for' heat, is not obvious. We may at most
suspect a possible aesthetic brightness and clearness to result
from the wide intervals. But passing by this obscure region we
see without the least difficulty why we ignore those ingredients
of sensation which are not signs of things. What the peculiarity
is in itself which makes Smith's voice so different from Brown's,
we need never inquire so long as whenever we hear it we say,
" There is Smith". For our practical interest in recognising
whom we have to deal with outweighs our interest in the shades
of sound per se. The selection again of certain attitudes, expres-
sions, c., in Smith, to stand as characteristic of Mm so that
when others are present we say, " He does not look like himself,"
and if he is sitting to us for his portrait we spend an hour per-
haps in placing him and lighting him so as to bring out with the
utmost clearness these selected traits this selection, I say, is
equally explicable by various aesthetic standards, permanency,
simplicity, harmony, clearness, and the like. Passing now from
traits to things, the utility of selection is obviously created and
measured by the interests the man has made his own. If Edward
never walks out without finding a four-leafed clover, while Oliver
dies of old age without having seen one, this is merely due to the
fact that Edward has somehow been led to stake his happiness,
on that particular branch of discovery, and out of a visual field
identical with that of Oliver has picked the details that minister
to this somewhat arbitrary interest. Granted the interest, we
cannot deny the use of the picking-out power. That Edward,
having this interest in common with many others, should finally
succeed in emphasising certain of those others and suppressing
this, would be an example of the utility of selection in the
ethical field, supposing always that the new interest chosen
were of a higher order and not, like making puns, for example,
as trivial an end as the one forsaken.
In the ethical field the importance of choosing one's paramount
interest is universally recognised. But it is not so commonly
known how, when the interest is once fixed upon, the selective
activity must ceaselessly work to detect its presence or absence
in each emergency that turns up. Take, for example, an
inebriate struggling with temptation. The glass is before him,
and the act of drinking has an infinity of aspects and may be
defined in as many ways. If he selected the aspect of its
helping him to write an article, of its being only lager-beer, of
its being the fourth of July, of his needing it as medicine, of his
never having formally signed the pledge, of this particular drink
" not counting," or else of its giving him the strength to make
a much more powerful resolution for the future than any of his
20 Are we Automata ?
previous ones, or whatever other sophistries his appetite may
instigate, he does but accentuate some character really contained
in the act, but needing this emphasising pressure of his atten-
tion to be erected into its essence. But if, out of all the teeming
suggestions with which the liquor before him inspires his brain,
respectively saying, " It is a case of this good, of that interest,
of yonder end," his mind pounces on one which repeats, " It is
essentially a case of drunkenness!" and never lets that go, his
stroke of classification becomes his deed of virtue. The power
of choosing the right name for the case is the true moral energy
involved, and all who posit moral ends must agree in the
supreme utility of, at least, this kind of selective attention.
But this is only one instance of that substitution for the
entire phenomenon of one of its partial aspects which is the
essence of all reasoned thought as distinguished from mere
habitual association. The utility of reasoned thought is too enor-
mous to need demonstration. A reasoning animal can reach its
ends by paths on which the light of previous experience has never
shone. One who, on the contrary, cannot break up the total
phenomenon and select its essential character must wait till luck
has already brought it into conjunction with his End before he
can guess that any connexion obtains between the two. All this
is elaborated in the article " On Brute and Human Intellect " to
which I have ventured to refer the reader. In that article (p. 274)
I stated that I had found it impossible to symbolise by any
mechanical or chemical peculiarity that tendency of the human
brain to focalise its activity on small points which seems to
constitute the essence of its reasoning power. But if such
focalisation be really due not so much to structural peculiarity
as to the emphasising power of an efficacious consciousness
superadded, the case need no longer perplex us.
Of course the materialist may still say that the emphasised
attention obeys the strongest vibration and does not cause it,
that we will what we do, not do what we will, that, in short,
interest is passive and at best a sign of strength of nerve-dis-
turbance. But he is immediately confronted by the notorious
fact that the strongest tendencies to automatic activity in the
nerves often run most counter to the selective pressure of con-
sciousness. Every day of our lives we struggle to escape some
tedious tune or odious thought which the momentary disposition
of the brain keeps forcing upon us. And, to take more extreme
cases, there are murderous tendencies to nervous discharge which,
so far from involving by their intensity the assent of the will,
cause their subjects voluntarily to repair to asylums to escape
their dreaded tyranny. In all these cases of voluntas paradoxa
or invita, the individual selects out of the two possible selves
Are we Automata? 21
yielded by his cerebral powers one as the true Ego ; the other he
regards as an enemy until at last the brain-storm becomes too
strong for the helmsman's power. But even in the depths of
mania or of drunkenness the conscious man can steady himself
and be rational for an instant if a sufficient motive be brought
to bear. He is not dead, but sleepeth.
I should be the last to assert that the Common-Sense-theory
leaves no difficulties for solution. I feel even more strongly
than Professors Huxley and Clifford that the only rational nexus
is that of identity, and that feeling and nerve-tremor are
disparate. I feel too that those who smile at the idea of
calling consciousness an " organ," on a par with other organs,
may be moved by a fundamentally right instinct. And I more-
over feel that that unstable equilibrium of the cerebrum which
forms the pivot of the argument just finished may, with better
knowledge, be found perfectly compatible with an average ap-
propriateness of its actions taken in the long run. But with all
these concessions made, I still believe the Common-Sense-theory
to merit our present credence. Fragmentary probabilities sup-
ported by the study of details are more worthy of trust than any
mere universal conceptions, however tempting their simplicity.
Science has won all her credit by the former kind of reasoning,
Metaphysics has lost hers by the latter. The impossibility of
motion, of knowledge, either subjective or objective, are proved
by arguments as good as that which denies causality to feeling,
because of its disparity with its effects. It is really monstrous
to see the prestige of " Science " invoked for a materialistic con-
clusion, reached by methods which, were they only used for
spiritualistic ends, would be hooted at as antiscientific in the
extreme. Our argument, poor as it is, has kept at any rate upon
the plane of concrete facts. Its circumstantial evidence can
hardly be upset until the Automaton-theorists shall have con-
descended to make or invoke some new discoveries of detail
which shall oblige us to reinterpret the facts we already know.
But in that case I feel intimately persuaded that the reinter-
pretation will be so wide as to transform the Automaton-theory
as thoroughly as the popular one. The Automaton-theory in
its present state contents itself with a purely negative
deliverance. There is a chasm, it says, between feeling and
act. Consciousness is impotent. It exists, to be sure, but all
those manners of existence which make it seem relevant to
our outward life are mere meaningless coincidences, inexpli-
cable parts of the general and intimate irrationality of this
disjointed world. What little continuity and reason there seems
to be, it says, lies wholly in the field of molecular physics.
22 On Discord.
Thither Science may retreat and hump her strong back against
the mockeries and phantasms that people the waste of Being
around.
Now the essence of the Common-Sense-theory, I take it, is to
negate these negations. It obstinately refuses to believe Con-
sciousness irrelevant or unimportant to the rest. It is there for
a purpose, it has a meaning. But as all meaning, relevancy and
purpose are symbolised to our present intelligence iii terms of
action and reaction and causal efficacy, Common Sense expresses
its belief in the worth of Feeling by refusing to conceive of it out
of these relations. When a philosophy comes which, by new
facts or conceptions, shall show how particular feelings may be
destitute of causal efficacy without the genus Feeling as a whole
becoming the sort of ignis fatuus and outcast which it seems to
be to-day to so many " scientists " (loathly word ! ), we may hail
Professors Huxley and Clifford as true prophets. Until then, I
I hold that we are incurring the slighter error by still regarding
our conscious selves as actively combating each for his interests
in the arena and not as impotently paralytic spectators of the
game.
WM. JAMES.
II. ON DISCOED.
MR. GRANT ALLEN, in his recent book on Physiological
^Esthetics, adopted the words " maximum of stimulation with
minimum of fatigue" as the general formula for the conditions of
peripheral stimulation most favourable to pleasure in the case
of the higher sense-organs. I wish to point out some considera-
tions which seem to detract from the value and generality of
this formula. One obvious objection may be seen at once to be
the use of the subjective word " fatigue " for the expression of
objective phenomena in physiology : and it is iiltimately owing,
as I believe, to this dangerous and misleading use that the other
weak points in the formula, if such indeed they prove to be,
easily escape detection.
To illustrate my first objection, we may take a case or two
where the sort of ratio expressed in the formula seems familiar
to us. We say, for instance, that a skilful violinist extracts from
his strings the maximum of transverse with the minimum of lon-
gitudinal vibration ; or that mountain-air enables us to walk a
maximum number of miles with a minimum of fatigue. In
either case the two terms of the ratio are clearly distinct things,
which may be conceived as increasing together or decreasing
together, or one of which may increase as the other decreases.
On Discord. 23
Xow let us look at the word "fatigue" as used in the formula. It
relates simply to physiological facts, to the molecular distur-
bances of stimulated organs in which wear is outrunning repair,
and wliich are thus being brought further and further from the
state they were in to start with, without a chance of recurring
to that state during the continuance of the stimulation l ; a con-
dition whose relation to the condition of stimulation icithout
" fatigue " finds a rough parallel in the difference of behaviour
of two bodies respectively moved from a position of unstable
and of stable equilibrium. But, holding fast to this objective
view of the terms employed, we see of course that the need of
repair is simply dependent on the amount of disturbance or
wear ; that the unfatiguing and the fatiguing stimulation are
not two distinct things which can be separately appraised, but
are continuous, one being an excess of the other beyond the line
where perpetual repair is possible. So that our formula seems
reduced to " a maximum of getting up to the line with a mini-
mum of going over it".
Cases where the formula is really applicable are those where
several sets of nerve-fibres are concerned : for instance, we can
speak of a surface covered with strips of the primary colours as
inducing the maximum of stimulation with the minimum of
fatigue ; since here, while the eye ranges about, each colour
affords a rest to the nervous elements stimulated by the other
two ; whereas the same surface covered by one of the colours,
and stimulating a single set of elements, would cause a maximum
of fatigue. Again, by improving the quality of a musical note,
that is, by calling into play more nervous elements in response
to the additional harmonic vibrations, we increase the general
stimulation without making it anywhere excessive. But the
case of single and simple phenomena, or single and simple parts
of compound phenomena, is of course an entirely different thing ;
and here the only way in which we can get any scientific con-
ception including the idea of " maximum of stimulation " seems
to be by taking into consideration a new term the time, namely,
during wliich the stimulation lasts, and by substituting for
" minimum of fatigue " the maximum of time during which the
sensation is pleasant. Take the case of a fine musical note : if
this be of only moderate strength, it can be listened to for a
good many seconds witli satisfaction : if, on the other hand, it
be extremely loud, it may be pleasant for a moment, pleasanter
perhaps to many people and in some states of the organism than
the gentler note, but rapidly becomes almost unendurable. We
1 " Stimulation " is used throughout in a physiological sense, to express the
movements which constitute the response of the peripheral nervous elements
to physical stimuli
24 On Discord.
may assume then that for any given state of a particular organ
a particular period of stimulation has corresponding to it a
maximum intensity of stimulation, which constitutes the con-
dition most favourable to pleasure for that period. But the two
factors obviously vary inversely l ; if we increase the loudness of
the note we diminish the time during which it is agreeable : and
on the subjective side we have very uncertain and limited power
of comparing things so heterogeneous as greater intensity and
greater prolongation of pleasure ; so that, if we ourselves cannot
decide in what case pleasure is really most favoured, the physio-
logical conditions most favourable to it become a somewhat
indefinite object of search. Our two maxima, however, must
clearly lie well within the points where, on the one hand, the
amount of stimulation would reduce the time of possible pleasur-
able endurance of it to zero, and where, on the other, the length
of time during which it was endurable would imply an almost
inappreciable amount of it.
To return to our formula. The use of the word "fatigue" seemed
to lead to difficulties ; but if we relegate it to its rightful place
on the subjective side, there are doubtless feelings connected
with the higher sense-organs to which it seems quite fairly
applicable ; and it is incontestable that .the physiological
counterpart of these feelings is an excess of stimulation in the
organs concerned. But my main objection is of a much more
serious kind ; since, if substantiated, it connects the lax use of
the word, not with a weakness or want of clearness in definition,
but with a certain amount of failure in the apprehension and dis-
crimination of facts. It will be best to state at once the point
which I wish here to discuss. "We find the word "fatigue" used to
express the objective counterpart not only of what is felt as
fatigue, e.g., the too prolonged continuance of a loud note, but of
what is felt as discord, an ultimate and wholly different sensa-
tion. The two objective phenomena agree probably in the
general character of wear and tear as the two subjective sensa-
tions agree in the general character of impleasantness : but, the
natural supposition being that under this most general head the
1 They probably vary inversely in a very complex way. For the sub-
jective phenomena, and doubtless therefore the objective, are gradated as
the limiting instant is approached when pleasantness vanishes : and the
steps of gradation, and the proportion of the whole time which elapses
before the decline sets in, probably differ according to the degree of stimu-
lation ; that is to say, with change of stimulation the part of the time
during which the sensation is purely pleasant may vary differently from
the whole time during which its pleasantness remains above zero. The
matter lies quite beyond the reach of experiment, as the subjective facts can
never be rendered sufficiently distinct and isolated for accurate examina-
tion.
On Discord. 25
two former differ from each other no less than the two latter, is
it not rash to identify them under a common name, when we
should never dream of so confusing their psychical counterparts ?
Discord is not felt the least as fatigue : if then we give the name
"fatigue" to the physiological counterpart of discord, are we not
likely to overlook the extreme specialty which that particular
form of wear and tear (if so it be) must possess, and to rest
content with a most imperfect explanation ?
It is hardly necessary to remind readers of this journal that
the sensation of musical tone is produced by continuous regular
nervous stimulation, and that the sensation of discord is due to
rapid " beats," that is, to a series of augmentations and diminu-
tions of stimulation interposed in the regular series, and caused
physically by the interferences of sound-waves of nearly equal
lengths. The separate beats are as little present to conscious-
ness in the pure sensation of discord as the separate vibrations
in the pure sensation of tone : the sensation seems quite unique
and beyond analysis. The manner of connecting the unpleasant-
ness of the sensation with the theory of stimulation and fatigue
is clearly shown in Chapter VIII. of Helmholtz's Ton-Empfin*
du'fi/jen, which forms a convenient text for the objections I
would venture to raise. U e points out that a nerve is deadened
by strong stimulation, and rendered less sensitive to fresh
irritants : a rest, however, enables it to recover its sensibility,
and the time of rest necessary in the case of the more delicate
sensory organs is extremely short. Now the intermittence
which beats cause in the stimulation gives the nerves an oppor-
tunity for recovery and repair during each minute period of
interruption, and they thus present themselves to each fresh
attack of the stimulus in a state of renewed nutrition and irrita-
bility. They are therefore subjected to a series of more violent
shocks than in cases of unintermittent stimulation, and this
violence, as Helmholtz holds, sufficiently explains the unpleasant
sensation. He illustrates this position by the case of the eye,
pointing out that by looking for even a moment at the sun the
sensibility of the retina is so blunted that we see a dark spot
when we turn our eyes to the sky; that on coming out of dark-
ness into full daylight we first feel blinded, but the sensibility
of our eyes is soon so far blunted that this degree of brightness
is found very pleasant ; and that so, " by the continuous uniform
action of the irritation of light, this irritation itself blunts the
sensibility of the nerve, and thus effectually protects this organ
against too long and too violent excitement." Intermittent
flashes of light, on the other hand, permit fresh renewals of
irritability and so act with more intensity, and " everyone
26 On Discord.
knows how unpleasant and annoying is any flickering light,
even if it is relatively very weak".
With respect to stimulation so violent as that caused by
looking at the sun, the statement that the blunting of the
nerve-sensibility acts as a natural preventive of " too violent
excitement " is surely too general. For, though the power of
producing the subjective impression of light is at once consider-
ably blunted, it would be rash to assume that the peripheral
nerve-elements concerned in that impression play no part in the
sensation of increasing discomfort, which would result if a
person's eyes were forcibly kept open and exposed for a few
seconds to the direct action of the sun. But anyhow here the
stage of possible comfort is instantly passed : that stage in the
eye's power of adaptation lies within a certain limit of stimula-
tion. Thus, when the retina encounters ordinary daylight after
total darkness, nervous wear outruns repair (that is, on the sub-
jective side, discomfort is felt), until the stored-up superfluity of
irritability has run down, so to speak, after which wear and
repair go 011 equally. The stages of the shifting ratio between
wear and repair might be roughly illustrated by a steel spring,
which will yield and then remain steady under certain weights,
but which, if the pressure be excessive, will rapidly pass all the
positions of steadiness and snap ; the limits of normal and
reparable wear, the counterpart of agreeable sensation, corres-
ponding to the steady positions of the spring. Under direct
exposure to the sun, the snapping comes, that is, the molecular
disturbance far outruns all chance of recovery in an almost
inappreciable time. But this would happen whether the sensi-
bility of the retina had been previously blunted or not : let us
then neglect such violent cases, which tend to confuse the
subject, and confine ourselves to the limits within which regular
stimulation is the counterpart of endurable and agreeable sensa-
tion, as only here can the problem of intermittence and its
effects be introduced.
Now, in trying to connect the unpleasant sensation corres-
ponding to intermittence with intensity of stimulation, under-
stood in the ordinary and natural sense, we at once come across
a difficulty which is not removed by the undoubted fact that
the intermittence enables the nerves in some measure to renew
their irritability, and which may be illustrated by the following
case : Suppose that a person with good eyesight reads a book
for half an hour by a strong and agreeable light, or looks for the
same time at a bright landscape, or merely sits talking in a sun-
shiny room. The sensibility of his eyes is not to his knowledge
affected by the process ; for aught he is aware of, the page or
the landscape or the room looks as bright at the end of the time
On Discord. 27
as at the beginning, and the blunting of irritability must at any
rate have been very small. Now suppose him to read a book or
sit in a room illuminated by a much lower but still sufficient light,
and let the light flicker. The discomfort will be very decided :
but it seems impossible to make out that the normal kind of
stimulation of the end-organs connected with sight is more
intense here than in the former case. The stimulation has no
no doubt been more intense than if the light, instead of flickering,
had remained steady at its highest strength : but the light in
the first case we considered was very much stronger than this ;
and in order to make out the intensity of stimulation or mole-
cular disturbance in that first case to be less than in the second,
we should have to suppose a self-protection amounting to a
great and continuous blunting of the power of response to
stimulus ; and, as this would be represented in consciousness by
the reduction of the page or room to darkness long before the
expiration of the half-hour, the supposition is contradicted by
facts. The subjective feeling of brightness was far greater at
every instant of time in the first case than in the instants of
greatest brightness, when the nerve -irritability was most
thoroughly renewed, in the second : and the subjective feeling
of brightness is the concomitant of a high amount of stimula-
tion. It seems illogical then to imagine greater violence of
stimulation in the second case. The question as regards the
eye is complicated by the fact, to which Helmholtz does not call
attention, that much of the discomfort caused by flickering is
due to the perpetual muscular readjustments necessitated by the
variations in the strength of the light. But if we agree to
neglect this element, the proposed explanation could only pass
muster in a case where the light, supposing it to be steady, was
as strong as the eye could comfortably stand, in which case
making it flicker and so permitting renewals of nervous irrita-
bility would send the sensation over the line of discomfort : if
we look at a less extreme case, we seem driven to connect the
unpleasantness not with excessive response of the nerves to
stimulus, but with a special feature of discontinuous response,
whether referable to perpetual stoppings or perpetual starlings
or both. We need phrases like "violence of stimulation" or "ex-
cessive response" (which are both better than "fatigue") to express
the excessive molecular disturbances which would be caused by
increasing the steady light on the page or in the room till it was
disagreeably dazzling : we want another expression for the excep-
tional order of disturbance introduced by the repeated intermit-
tences. It is not of course meant that the latter may not be in
some way included under the general rule of wear and repair :
but it is in itself a quite different species of wear from that
28 On Discord.
involved in excess of the regular and normal stimulation. A
man's frame will need repair after rolling a truck along rails for
three hours, and also after setting it going, letting it stop and
setting it going again, and continuing this jerky labour for an
equal time : but the movements in space and the work done
will be very different in the two cases.
When we pass to the ear the problem becomes much simpler
and more distinct, for several reasons. First, we get rid of
the irrelevant element of mmcular fatigue, caused by adjust-
ments of the pupil to varying degrees of light. Secondly, the
visual intermittences are felt as such, and the confused feeling
of discomfort may seem fairly describable by the word "fatigue "-
especially under cover of the associated muscular feelings,
whereby the difference from the normal fatigue caused by
excess of light is necessarily much disguised ; whereas in discord
the intermittences are not perceived as such, but give rise to a
new sensation to which no one would dream of applying the
name " fatigue ". Again, confusion is avoided in the case of the
ear by the organ's very limited power of self-adaptation. For
the ear seems little liable to anything analogous to being first
dazzled (like the eye in emerging into daylight from the dark)
and then getting its sensibility blunted to the comfortable pitch
which represents eqilibrium between wear and repair. Deafness
of course ensues from prolonged exposure to excessive sound,
but this is owing to real structural injuiry : and in the case of
musical tone, 1 at any rate, I do not think it is ever the experi-
ence of a healthy ear to find a single sound intolerably loud for
a few seconds, and then to get reconciled to it ; whenever it is
disagreeably loud to begin with, it gets worse.
Let us now take two means of stimulation for the ear
analogous to our former two cases of the strong steady light
and the weaker flickering light : they will evidently be a
loud single tone or concord, and a soft discord, say a very
loud octave and a very soft discord of a semitone, played
on a finely-toned organ. The former is of course felt as
pleasant, the latter as unpleasant : and in consistency it is
sought to connect the former sensation with a lesser and
moderate amount, the latter with a greater and violent amount
of stimulation. But the actual physical stimulus is obviously
very far greater in the case of the loud concord than of the soft
discord : the whole burden of the explanation must therefore be
1 With respect to extremes of non-musical sound, opinions may vary.
The getting accustomed to such an extreme, in the sense of gradually
becoming able to distract attention from it, hardly implies that the acoustic
sensibility has been deadened. Here again it is almost impossible to isolate
the phenomena sufficiently for experiment.
On Discord. 29
thrown on the other factor of stimulation, namely the degree of
irritability or molecular instability in the organs concerned.
:hen, with respect to the loud concord, in order to make out
the stimulation in the case of this, the greater, stimulus to be less
than that caused by the soft discord, we should have to suppose
the sensibility or power of response to be very greatly and
rapidly deadened : but we have sufficient proof that the nerve-
elements are performing their functions in a highly vivacious
and persistent way in the fact of our continuing to hear and
appreciate the sound for many seconds just as perfectly as we
did at first. Secondly, with respect to the discord, we can take
tliis as soft as we please ; so that the relation*of the perpetually
repaired organs to the intermittent stimuli is not analogous to
that of an eye brought from darkness into daylight, but brought
from darkness into obscure twilight ; and in such a case
" intensity of stimulation " ought not in reason to outrun the
conditions of agreeable sensation. For, looking at our two
factors of stimulation, we see that it is only the amount of
stimulus which can be indefinitely varied, and there is an obvious
limit to the extent to which we can draw on the other factor,
that of irritability dependent on nutrition. The perfection
of nutrition and repair cannot be more than perfect ; it cannot
be carried, cannot therefore carry irritability, beyond a certain
natural point ; so that, however unstable be the condition of n^rxi-
mum irritability, we ought by diminishing the strength of the
physical stimulus to be able to avoid causing wear to outrun
repair. While, granting of course that the greater the irritability
the less the stimulus which will suffice to cause the amount of
stimulation corresponding to u -.ess, we still know that
the amount of stimulation which normally corresponds to
pleasantness is a very considerable one : and we cannot postu-
late the perpetual renewal of such a miraculous amount of
irritability as would be required to bring stimulation up to and
far beyond this point even under the action of a very weak
stimulus. The intermittent stimulus produces, according to
Hehnholtz, "a much more intense and unpleasant excitement
of the organs than would be occasioned by a continuous uniform
tone". More unpleasant certainly : but the assumption is that
it i> more unpleasant simply by dint of being more intense,
however soft the sound, in face of the fact that more intense
excitement still, caused by a much greater stimulus acting
regularly on organs which are proved by the concomitant
sensation to remain perfectly responsive and uudeadened, . is
felt as pleasant. And over and above all this, if it were more
intense in the manner imagined, it ought to be felt as loudness :
" loudness," as Mr. Grant Allen himself remarks in one place,
30 On Discord.
" is the subjective concomitant of intensity in stimulation".
And the sensation of loudness has absolutely no relation to that
of discord, which retains its unique character even when barely
audible.
In this connexion I may quote an illustration given by
Helmholtz, which seems to me delusive. He says, " If a tuning-
fork is struck and held at such a distance from the ear that its
sound cannot be heard, it becomes immediately audible if the
handle of the fork be revolved by the fingers. The revolution
brings it alternately into positions where it can and cannot
transmit sound to the ear, and this alternation of strength is im-
mediately perceptible by the ear. . . . Just as this alterna-
tion of strength will serve to strengthen the impression of the
very weakest musical tones upon the ear, we must conclude
that it must also serve to make the impression of stronger tones
much more penetrating and violent than they would be if their
loudness were continuous." No doubt a change or movement
serves often to direct attention to feelings which when uniform
were too slight to be noticed : a change even to a lesser degree
of stimulation might have this effect, if the attention had got
deadened by the monotony of a prolonged impression. But the
change here described by Helmholtz would be consciously per-
ceived as a change of loudness. In just the same way, with a
very much greater strength of tone, if the alternations were slow
enough to be perceived as separate, they would be recognised as
alternations of loud and soft sound, the loudness unless very
extreme being in no way unpleasant. Now by artificial means
we can introduce into a single continuous tone, that is, into a
simple series of regular stimulations, an intermittence similar to
that produced by natural interference in the compound series,
whose counterpart in consciousness is the sensation of two dis-
cordant tones. Let us then, by way of getting a new point of
view, suppose the alternations to get faster and faster till they
merge in consciousness into one continuous sensation. What
quality or qualities should we expect this sensation to have ?
We know that there has been no change in the nature and
amount of the respective physical stimuli as they gradually got
crowded nearer together : a priori therefore we find no reason
to suspect much change in the nature and amount of the
physiological response to each of these stimuli : and hence we
should expect that the psychical representative of this response
would continue to be the sensation of loudness up to the end of
the process. And such we find by experiment to be the case :
the quality of loudness remains when the sensation has become
single and unintermittent. But experiment reveals another
quality which we could not have predicted : the sensation is not
On Discord. 31
one of fondness only, but is distinctly unpleasant and jarring.
Again, if we made the experiment with a soft sound, the rapid
alternations of strength, when merged in one sensation, could
only bring its loudness up to the low level of what were its
louder parts when it was felt as intermittent ; but the same
jarring quality would be experienced as in the other case. And
just so discords, when soft, give a sensation which is not " pene-
trating and violent," but disagreeable in a special and unique
way. The following consideration may set the difficulty in a
still clearer light. A continuous low note, having say 120
vibrations to the second, is pleasant : a higher note of equal
apparent strength with several thousand vibrations to the second,
having its regular series of vibrations interrupted 120 times
every second, is unpleasant ; so is a discord of two high notes
with the same number of beats and interruptions. But here the
periods given to the nerves for renewal of irritability are equal
in number in the two cases of the unpleasant and the pleasant
sensation. What right then have we to account for the contrast
by speaking of the stimuli as " wastefully attacking the fibres
and end-organs concerned " (to quote Mr. Grant Allen) in the
one case, and as blunting and so protecting them in the other ?
I will adduce only one more argument. If the same kind of
stimulation, when excessive, caused the unpleasant sensations
both of over-loudness and of discord, those who are able to
experience one ought, under the appropriate conditions, to agree
in experiencing the other. But it is very common to find that
of two persons who are equally susceptible of annoyance from
over-loudness one is keenly sensitive to -discord and the other
totally unconscious of it.
To sum up. The disputed view, when clearly drawn out,
implies variety in degree, but not in kind, of the stimulation
proper to the several end-organs. This stimulation is felt as
pleasant up to the point at which nervous wear begins decidedly
to outrun repair ; when it is felt as unpleasant this point has
been passed. The point itself is supposed to be the resultant of
two factors : one is the amount of the physical stimulus, which
must be called excessive, in relation to a particular state of the
organs, whenever the action cannot last for an appreciable time
without seriously disturbing the balance between wear and
repair : the other is the degree of nutrition and consequent mole-
cular instability in the organs concerned, which must be called
excessive, in relation to a particular amount of stimulus, if
discomfort is experienced under the action of an amount of
stimulus which at other times may be found quite pleasant.
We took cases where one sensation was pleasant and another
unpleasant, in spite of much greater violence of stimulus in the
32 On Discord.
former case : and to account for this according to the theory
recourse was inevitably had to the second factor the irritability
of the nerves, supposed to be deadened in the former case,
perpetually revivified in the latter. We objected to each
feature of the explanation : to the deadening in the case of the
continuous tone or concord as being contradicted by the con-
tinued vitality of the subjective feeling ; to the revivification in
the case of the discord (a) as needing often to be miraculous in
degree in order to account for the facts, (/3) as bound, so far as it
did occur, to produce the normal concomitant of intensity of
stimulation loudness, and not something quite different. Next,
we found a case where a pleasant and an unpleasant sensation
were produced under conditions which, as regards opportunity
for renewal of irritability, were identical. Finally, we showed
that, whereas sensations depending on precisely the same
physiological facts ought to be equally awakenable under the
appropriate stimuli, cases were common where one was so
awakenable and the other not. We seem thus driven to assume
the existence of somo* other kind of nervous disturbance, con-
nected specially with interruptions supervening on a mode of
motion which has been sufficiently established to become, so to
speak, familiar. We find an illustration, perhaps even a true
analogy, in the effect of interruption of any regular rhythm
which is being watched by the eye or ear, or produced by our
own voluntary muscular actions. In this comparison whole
sense-organs, and actions slow enough to be consciously and com-
pletely followed, take the place of the infinitely minute nervous
elements and infinitely rapid movements we have been consider-
ing. And here we assuredly should never think of accounting
for the unpleasant sensation by " intensity of stimulation," the
feeling of being baulked and disappointed being totally different
from that of over-strain or fatigue ; not more different, however,
than is the feeling of discord from the oppression of excessive
sound. If the new and special phenomenon, in either the illus-
trating or the illustrated case, is to be brought on the objective
side under the general rule of wear and repair, it must probably
be by supposing energy to be stored up ready for discharge,
which, when the regular and established stimulus does not
come, is discharged unnattirally, so to speak, and against
resistance : as Mr. Grant Allen well expresses it with regard to
rhythm, " if the opportunity for the discharge is wanting, the
gathered energy has to dissipate itself by other channels, which
involves a certain amount of conflict and waste". If the sug-
gested analogy be applicable, we may imagine the new pheno-
menon of discord to appear in consciousness as soon as the
frequency of the baulkings, or whatever we are to call them,
On Discord. 33
has become sufficient to bring this sort of conflict up to a certain
pitek of intensity.
I may just remark, in passing, that this case of discord serves
well to illustrate in how extremely small a degree considerations
of peripheral nerve-stimulation can really penetrate into the
secrets of artistic beauty. A discord is always a discord wherever
at occurs, and has the same wearing effect on the peripheral
organs : but the action of the higher co-ordinating centres so
overrides the natural character of the sensation as to convert it
into an all-important feature of modern music, the simplest bit
of which is often crammed with discord.
A few words may be added on the subject of colour-discord.
To put a simple case : why is immediate juxtaposition of orange
and vermilion on one surface disagreeable ? Mr. Grant Allen
tries to bring such facts under his general formula on the ground
that the same class of optic fibres is stimulated by each of the
two colours, and that over-stimulation therefore ensues. But if
the orange part were vermilion, like the other, stimulation of
the same class of optic fibres would be carried still further and
a still greater degree of over-stimulation would result, whence
we should logically expect an intensification of the same sub-
jective feeling. This objection is in fact the one which Mr.
Sully made in his review of Mr. Allen's book in this Journal,
and his rednctio ad dbsurdum was perfectly sound, that " it
would follow that the same colour spread over a large surface
would produce the pain of chromatic dissonance in its maximum
degree". To this Mr. Allen replied that though all dissonance
is fatigue, all fatigue is not dissonance. lS T o : but even if we
could conceive for the moment that the lesser stimulation, being
still excessive, was cognised as a special form of discomfort.
colour-discord, while the more excessive stimulation was cognised
as the normal discomfort known as fatigue, what are we to say
if we find a case where the feeling of the lesser stimulation
answers to the above description, but the feeling of the greater is
not fatigue but pleasure ? If " fatigue " is one in kind (as the old
formula and the arguments in support of it throughout imply), how
will Mr. Allen explain the fact that we are annoyed by a mixed
mass of pink and scarlet geraniums, but are pleased by an equal
mas? of the flowers when they are all scarlet, seeing that the
conditions are more favourable to " fatigue " in the latter case ?
He adds : " What would Mr. Sully say to a person who argued
that on Helmholtz's principles one and the same note continued
for a long time would produce in the maximum degree the pain
of musical dissonance '< " But this remark, proposed as an
absurdity, really suggests the very difficulty which I have found
in accepting Helmholtz's principles of musical dissonance as
3
34 On Discord.
complete : and indeed the remark has its exact parallel and
converse in the argument which forms the gist of the present
paper. I have argued that, on the theory that stimulation is one
in kind and only varied in degree and is completely expressible
in terms of intensity, it is impossible to explain how it happens
that its subjective concomitant in certain cases is an impression
not of loudness but of discord : conversely, had I taken discord
as the chief and central phenomenon, the fact with which I
should have confronted the theory would have been that the
feeling of the stimulation due to a loud continuous note is
unaccountably not discord but loudness. The above remark
proposed by Mr. Allen may in fact be used as a rcductio ad
abswdum of the view he adopts on musical discord exactly
parallel to Mr Sully's rcductio ad absurdum of his view on
colour-discord. Mr. Sully, after his criticism on this point,
adds : " We do not say that these disagreeable combinations may
not be brought under such a principle of painful stimulation as
that laid down by Mr. Allen, but if so, it must be effected in
quite another way." This appears to me to be a suggestion
parallel in kind to that advanced above as to the supervention,
in cases of intermittent nervous stimulation, of some special kind
of dissipation and disturbance : but if such facts really exist in
the case of discordant colours, they are probably of a much more
obscure kind, since they can hardly depend on anything so simple
as interruptions of an established rhythm.
Two further considerations may be mentioned which tend to
discredit the view that "fatigue" or excess of normal stimulation
is a sufficient explanation of colour-discord. First, to return to
our example of vermilion and orange, the special unpleasantness
ceases when the one is made to shade off into the other : and yet
here again the same optic fibres are used to a greater extent,
as the eye passes and repasses along the surface, than when it
was more -restrictedly occupied with the dividing line where the
two colours lay side by side without gradation. Secondly, the
briefest time will suffice for the unpleasant sensation to be felt.
This is an objection which we are precluded from urging in the
case of note-discord, because there the " fatigue " was connected
with intermittences of which a large number occur in a second :
but colours, however discordant, cause no such intermittences,
and the " fatigue," if such it be, ought in reason to grow by
gradual and sensible .degrees, just as it would in the case of
a single bright colour when looked at continuously. All things
considered, one is led to guess that the extent to which explana-.
tions resting on peripheral nervous conditions apply to sensa-
tions of colour-discord and concord must be very limited. They
may cover, for instance, such broad effects as the obviously
The Difficulties of Material Logic. 35
resting action of complementary colours, which affect different
fibres : but one seems more and more driven to refer the more
delicate shades of feeling to associational and intellectual
elements. This must be the case even with single colours
which are not bright, stimulating or fatiguing, and can be looked
at for a long time without serious discomfort, but which are
simply ugly. Again, it is impossible to abstract the colour
from the object ; and even beautiful colours displease us in
inappropriate and unusual positions. Such associations, however,
as we can consciously discover will often be found provokingly
insufficient if pressed as explanations. For instance, the
pleasantness of the gradation from bright red to orange, as
compared with their immediate juxtaposition, might perhaps
suggest a connexion with the frequency of such gradation in
nature, as for example in sunsets. But then we also continually
find in nature a total absence of gradation in nearly related
tints whose juxtaposition is nevertheless felt to be delightful ;
as in looking at a light blue sky through blue-green leaves.
And indeed a slightness of divergence in colours often seems
the essential feature of their harmony ; whence a new difficulty
in accepting as final and complete the view that " those com-
binations produce discord which successively stimulate the same
class of structures ". And these experiences of colour-effects often
occur in isolated acts of observation without any relation to
surrounding conditions ; so that they cannot possibly be
explained on the same grounds as the presence in music of
sound-discords, which are enjoyed as parts of a complex and
organic whole. Such considerations are almost enough to make
one despair of anything like an exact and complete rationale of
colour-discords and affinities : it would at any rate lie far beyond
the scope of any conceivable formula.
EDMUND GUENEY.
III. THE DIFFICULTIES OF MATERIAL LOGIC.
IN a notice of Mr. C. Read's Essay on Logic, published in
MIND XII., some remarks were made upon the possibility
of a purely objective treatment of the science. There was not
then space for an adequate discussion of the subject, but it
seems sufficiently interesting and important to deserve fuller
examination.
That neither Logic nor any other science can possibly be
regarded as being out of relation to the human faculties, we are
presumably all agreed. Its necessary relativeness, in this sense,
is universally admitted. Things are what they are to our facul-
36 The Difficulties of Material Logic.
ties ; their attributes are at bottom merely certain ways in
which they affect us. Objectivity in this sense and under these
restrictions is of course not confined to Logic, but is common to
every physical science. In the physical sciences it is assumed so
much as a matter of course by all investigators and expounders
that it is seldom considered necessary formally to enunciate it.
. In Logic alone it deservedly obtains more explicit recognition ;
partly because traditional feeling and associations had for the
most part conspired to give another aspect to the treatment of
the question, and partly because in any abstract or universal
science philosophical inquiries become appropriate which would
be very much out of place in the hands of more special inves-
tigators.
The best exposition perhaps of this view, in a few words, is
that of Mr. H. Spencer, who draws the following distinction be-
tween the Science of Logic and the Theory of Eeasoning : -" The
distinction is, in brief, this, that Logic formulates the most
general laws of correlation among existences considered as ob-
jective ; while an account of the process of Eeasoning formulates
the most general laws of correlation among the ideas corres-
ponding to those existences."
That the view of Logic in which it is regarded from the
objective standpoint instead of from that of the conceptualist,
is the essentially sound view, I most cordially recognise. It
seems indeed to me that nearly all the interesting and valuable
additions that the science has received at the hands of Mill, Mr.
Bain, and Mr. Spencer himself (to say nothing of others), have
originated in the more or less consistent adoption of this mode
of treatment. But still this view as expressed by Mr. Spencer
seems to me rather an ideal towards which we are to aim, than
a goal which we can consider ourselves to have attained. The
sense in which this remark is to be understood must of course
be gathered from the general substance of this article, the object
of which is to point out that if we were to adhere rigorously to
this objective view, we should be forced into one or other of two
alternatives. Either we should have to support our position by
the aid of conventions and assumptions, the number and import-
ance of which have never been sufficiently realised, or we must
make room for a third science which will have to stand some-
where between the two mentioned above by Mr. Spencer, and
which will contain a very large portion indeed of the material
which has most educational interest and value, and which has
always gone by the name of Logic.
To prevent any possibility of misunderstanding, as we are
/ j forced to use somewhat ambiguous words, it may not be amiss
1 1 just to remark that the objectivity here referred to does not in
TJie Difficulties of Material Logic. 37
any way imply acquaintance with more than phenomena. The
contrast before us here is not that between things in themselves
and things' as presented to us, but merely between the more
perfect and accurate knowledge of them and the less perfect and
accurate. My knowledge of the ' thing ' is very inaccurate
arid defective ; this imperfect presentation of it is my concep-
tion or idea of it, and we term it subjective. But suppose this
knowledge, always within the range of phenomena, deve-
loped and perfected to the utmost attainable degree ; let it be
determined with all the accuracy which present or future methods
of measurement may invent ; let this knowledge receive the
final and general assent of mankind, and we should then have
obtained what we may call objective knowledge. We should
know the thing itself as well as beings with faculties at all
resembling those which we possess could ever hope to know
it. In a word this knowledge thus rendered final and general
is, for all practical and speculative purposes, the same thing as
the sum-total of " existences considered as objective " which,
according to the above extract, is to be regarded as the subject-
matter of Logic. This is the sense in which I presume that the
objective existences with which Logic has to deal would be un-
derstood by most writers at the present time ; it is certainly the
sense in which they will be understood in this essay.
It is obvious enough to every one that any such attainment
as this of objective knowledge is at present indefinitely remote.
But the bearing of this state of things upon the practical treat-
ment of our system of Logic has never, so far as I know, been
systematically worked out. Few persons, I imagine, have an
adequate conception of the number of assumptions, or at least
of conventions, which are forced upon us at one point or
another if we wish to render our system consistent and homo-
geneous.
One of the earliest occasions upon which we thus have to
decide a convention is in connexion with the existence of the
objects which we name. This is forced upon our notice directly
we discuss the denotation of names in an objective system of
Logic. Names, we are told, are the names of things, not of our
ideas of things. This is all plain enough in the great majority
of cases, for the sharp distinction between the thing and our
mere idea of it corresponds well enough with the equally sharp
distinction between what is universally accepted as exist-
ing and what is universally rejected as such. But then what
an amount of summary legislation is needed to sweep away all
the intermediate shades of truth and certainty, and to leave
nothing but plain black and white. Three hundred years ago
the dragon and unicorn were ' things ' in this sense, and the
38 The Difficulties of Material Logic.
black swan was not ; now their positions are reversed. Is the
sea-serpent a thing ?
It is not for a moment suggested liere that difficulties of this
kind are of any very serious nature in principle, but merely
that they mar the symmetry of our system by demanding
conventions which the pure theorist would gladly avoid. The
conceptualist logician is not troubled by them, for the only
denotation of a name which he cares to entertain is a potential
one, but the opposite party cannot thus evade the question.
Those who say that names are the names of things, who sup-
port this decision by a pointed distinction between real and
imaginary names, and regard the definitions of these as having
respectively different interpretations, must have an opinion
not necessarily as to the limits of any given denotation, but at
least as to whether there really be any denotation or not. Thus
as to the ' existence ' of these doubtful or disputed things. Be-
yond all question they do exist or not. Some day we shall
have made up our minds on every point of this kind, and may
find it advisable to print, say, the names of all imaginary things
in italics so that the simplicity of early youth should never
misled by the creation of wrong associations. But meanwhile,
since we do not know, that is, cannot agree finally amongst
ourselves which of these two alternatives is true, we are forcec
into a difficulty. Either we must give up our doctrine that
names stand for things ; or we must admit that a ' thing ' neec
have no actual existence ; or we must, by an exercise of sum-
mary jurisdiction, decide from time to time what does and what
does not exist ; or we must exclude from Logic all consideration
of names and their significance. The first of these alternatives
would be tantamount to abandoning o\ir case, as it would so far
imply adhesion to that subjective view of Logic which we are
supposed to reject. The second would soon lead to an over-
whelming invasion of mythical and fanciful objects. The gra-
dations between what was once universally accepted ; what was
accepted by a large party ; by the thoughtful few ; invented
consciously by some but believed in by others ; believed in by
the ignorant generally, by particular sects, by a few and so on,
are far too refined to admit of appreciation. If, for instance, we
opened the door so as to admit within the denotation of ' animal '
any creature whose existence was affected by the slightest doubt,
we should find it hard to shut it till they had all effected their
entrance, not the dragon only, but all his congeners down even
to the Jabberwock and the Snark. The fourth of the above
alternatives would doubtless save all trouble of this kind, but
he would be a bold logician who should attempt to treat Logic
after he had ridded it of names. The remaining alternative is
The Difficulties of Material Logic. 39
really the only one available. We have to rule, from time to
time" that such and such things do exist, and that others do
not ; and we have to do this with the decisiveness of a judge
who feels that a definite settlement of the question is far more
important than a settlement in accordance with strict justice.
That is, we have as logicians, whe'n asked to declare what is
the denotation of any term, to draw a clear line dividing entities
into the real and the imaginary, and to forget that any such
arrangement is altogether relative, not merely to the age in
which we live, but in some respects to the society with which
we happen to mingle.
The difficulty just mentioned may seem to have risen mainly
from that perversity or indolence of men which would continue
to invent and believe in such multitudes of fictitious entities as
to have done a good deal towards obscuring the very distinc-
tion between truth and falsehood. But we must notice another
now, which arises from the constitution of things rather than
from our folly in looking at them. Take the case of a class-
name, where the existence of the objects corresponding to that
name is unquestioned. What objects exactly does it apply to
or denote ? All that possess the attributes implied by the
name ? True, but not enough : it will be almost universally
admitted that we must extend this denotation so as to include
all the objects which ever have, or ever will come, under the
name ; for not so to extend it would be to introduce a very
narrow degree of relativeness indeed, and to make the applica-
tion of the name changeable from instant to instant. But then
what if these attributes undergo a change in course of time, as
all must admit to happen within limits in certain cases, and as
every evolutionist will claim to happen without limit in almost
all cases ? The name cannot then apply to every individual in
the indefinite succession of objects, but only to a certain number
out of the whole succession, that number being greater or less
according to the rapidity of change in the type. But then what
we may call the centre of the limited selection which is thus
forced upon us is necessarily determined by the accident of our
position in time, and accordingly is relative to this. The total
range of applicability of the term ' horse,' for instance, is not
coextensive with the whole ancestry and posterity of the present
animals so called, but can only be regarded as extending a cer-
tain way backwards and forwards in time. At what points then
does it stop short ? At points determined by a two-fold rela-
tiveness : firs*., that depending upon the magnitude of variability
which we are prepared to admit as being covered by the term.
This decides, so to say, the length of the piece which we cut out
and retain from the infinite succession. Then, secondly, there
40
TJie Difficulties of Material Logic.
is that which depends upon the particular point of the stream
opposite which we logicians happen to be standing at the pre-
sent time. This decides, so to say, the position of the centre of
the piece thus selected.
The points above insisted upon may seem to some, when thus
stated in their generality, to be somewhat fanciful and over-
refined. But they will soon cease to seem so when it is pointed
out how seriously their decision, one way or the other, affects a
number of the details of his science with which every logician is
bound to occupy himself. We will examine some of these de-
tails successively without troubling ourselves much about the
exact order in which we take them.
The formal logician, of course, recognises no distinction
between the potential and the actual constituents of a class ; or
rather, being occupied with the form and not the matter, it is
no concern of his whether there really be any such constituents.
In every subdivision therefore of classes produced by dichotomy
or otherwise, he regards each compartment as equally occupied
in a logical sense, because we may conceive objects possessing
the requisite particular group of attributes. Similarly he main-
tains that connotation and denotation must necessarily vary
together, because any alteration of the number of attributes
taken into account corresponds to a potential variation in
the range of application of the name. On both of these points
the objective logician is apt to take him to task, on the ground
that he is neglecting the teachings of nature : that he ought
not to try to fill his class-compartments unless he can actually
find the wherewithal to put into them ; that he must not assume
that the more the attributes taken into account the fewer will
be the things possessing them, unless he has actually ascertained
that in the cases in question nature does not group her attri-
butes in bundles of her own selection, the whole bundle being
present or absent together. But surely, if we insist upon his
carrying out his own view with rigorous consistency, we should
find that both these grounds of objection fail from beneath him.
The entire range of denotation must be regarded as almost in-
finite, since it is not restricted to present existences. But, clearly,
when we assign an infinite range, the actual and the potential
become much about the same thing, According to well known
results of the Theory of Probability, to say that anything is
possible, or that it may happen, is equivalent to saying that
(within the scope of sufficiently extensive experience) it is occa-
sionally actual, that there are circumstances under which froi
time to time, however rarely, it does happen. m And, apart from
that Theory, it is clear that almost all negation is made under
certain conditions of time and space, which will be evaded b}
The Difficulties of Material Lojic. 41
sufficiently extending our range. Accordingly hardly any sub-
division of the possible is doomed to be eternally empty. The
utmost we dare say is that it is unfilled at present, and will be
found to be unfilled within a reasonable range about the period
occupied in time by us of the present day. With this relative
restriction our arrangement will hold well enough.
Turn now to examine some of the corresponding questions
which suggest themselves in the case of Propositions. We shall
find ourselves encountered here not only by the difficulties al-
ready touched upon under the head of Terms, but also by some
additional ones as well. They are the difficulties which inevi-
tably attend upon us when we are discussing by implication the
existence of things, even when that existence is merely of the
phenomenal kind with which alone we are here concerned.
When, for instance, we say that ' All A is B,' do we imply the
existence of A and of B ? Certainly we do ; for otherwise the
proposition would not be a true one ; or rather, by not saying
that existence is implied, we should be losing our hold of that
distinction between truth and falsehood, between well- and ill-
grounded belief, which it is the main prerogative of an objective
Logic to keep clearly before us. Xow take a negative propo-
sition, ' Xo C is D ' : how about the existence of C and D here ?
It is clear that C must exist, for otherwise there would be no
meaning in denying D of it. But then this leads at once to the
admission of the existence of D also, unless we abandon the right
of conversion, for at any time by simple conversion we might
change D from predicate into subject. And this has further
implications if we claim our undoubted right to contraposit a
proposition. From ' All A is B,' we obtain at once ' Xo not-B
is A '. Is this legitimate ? If it is, then we draw the conclusion
that every term in a tine and lawful proposition has something
existent corresponding not only to it, but also to its contra-
dictory as well. Experience of course would not quite justify
us here, for take the proposition ' Xo object possesses a tempera-
ture below 280 C'. The very meaning of the proposition
denies the existence of its predicate.
It is clear therefore that what we really do is to take a licence
or make a convention for convenience sake. If we chose to
adhere to our strict logical view with punctilious accuracy, we
should have to lay down our rules somewhat as follows : In
an Affirmative Proposition the subject and predicate distinctly
imply the existence of their objects ; but, as we must appeal to
experience to make sure of the existence of their contradictories,
we have no right without due inquiry to coutraposit such a pro-
\ position. In a Xegative Proposition the subject must exist, but
' not necessarily the predicate (for negation does not carry exist-
42 The Difficulties of Material Logic.
ence with it). Accordingly we have no right without due
examination even to convert a negative proposition.
There is a confirmation of this afforded by the doctrine of the
Quantification of the Predicate. If there is any one who ought
not to have adopted : this doctrine, I should say that it was
Hamilton, as it peculiarly belongs to the objective view. If we
look to the subjective side, I should say with some confidence
that we do not as a rule quantify the predicate, and with still
greater confidence that we ought not to do so. In certain excep-
tional cases the form of the sentence decides this point, but in
general there is nothing in the form to show whether we are
referring to the whole or a part of the predicate ; if therefore
we render this quantification definite, we are outstepping our
data unless we make a renewed appeal to experience. Objec-
tively considered, of course, the subject is or is not coextensive
with the predicate, but we have no means at the time, without a
daring assumption, to decide which of the two alternatives is
true. This comes out very clearly when we adopt Euler's
symbolic method of representing propositions by means of inter-
secting or including circles. This being a representation of the
relations to one another of the things themselves and not of our
probably imperfect conceptions of them, we cannot avoid quanti-
fying our predicate by the way in which we choose to draw our
circles; though we often try to avoid committing ourselves by
the subterfuge of drawing lines only dotted in part.
Turn now to the consideration of Hypothetical Propositions.
Piigorous consistency ought, I suppose, to exclude them from an
entirely objective Logic. Their real differentia is to express
human doubt ; where certainty is felt, no ' if ' could have a right
of entry. Doubt clearly affects the subject only, and has no
relation to the object. ' If men were prudent their meals would
be frugal ' ; this sentence when duly objectified is turned into
' all prudent men eat frugal meals '. Logically the two state-
ments are identical, except in so far as the former gives expres-
sion to a certain tinge of doubt as to whether any men of that
degree of prudence do exist. If we know that they do exist, the
logician ought by rights to employ the categorical form ; if we
know that they do not, then he has no right to utter the pro-
position within the domain of a science whose function it is to
express and accumulate truth and certainty.
Will not this consideration, by the way, help to clear up the
frequently expressed doubt as to whether the so-called hypo-
thetical reasoning is or is not really inference ? ' If A is B,
then C is D ; but A is B ; therefore C is D.' What probably
gives rise to the opinion that there must be inference here is
the conviction that the supposed premisses and conclusion are
The Difficulties of Material Logic. 43
not the same tiling exactly, whence it seems to follow that one
must be inferred from the other. That they are net exactly the
same must be admitted, but the only difference appears to me
to lie in the fact that the premiss expresses a relation affected
by a doubt, whilst the conclusion expresses it without a doubt.
Of course, if the removal of this doubt depended upon anything
within the limits of the given propositions this would amount to
reasoning ; but it is not so, the doubt being clearly removed
from some extraneous source. It is merely as if we said, ' I
think A is B,' and then, owing to the intervention of some
information or observation, corrected ourselves by saying,
' Certainly A is B '. Xothing would be thus added to the
contents of the proposition, but there would merely be, from
some extraneous source, a gain of certainty in entertaining it.
So with our hypothetical reasoning abjove. If we had no doubt
about the truth of our premiss, we ought not strictly to have
put it into the hypothetical form, but to phrase it ' Every time
that A is B, C is I),' or in some such form. The conclusion is
then obviously no reasoning, but either the repetition of the
same fact over again (if we say generally ' A is B ') or of a part
of the same fact (if we say particularly ' This A is B '). In
the former case it is merely restatement, and in the latter it
is one of those partial restatements termed immediate in-
ferences. 1
Such a result as the above ought not to surprise us, for it is
surely only natural that anything which has to do with doubts
entertained by us about objective facts (the essential character-
istic of all hypothesis) should in strictness be excluded from a
thorough objective treatment of Logic, and, for that matter, from
a thorough conceptualist treatment also. From the former it is
excluded because the facts themselves being certainly one way
or the other, the doubt about them must be purely subjective,
and relative ; from the latter it ought to be equally excluded,
because our mere notions when unconnected by appeal to fact
can never have that experimental certainty which is the neces-
sary contrast to hypothesis. The distinction between fact and
supposition is equally lost whether we regard all or nothing as
1 There has been too much discussion of the nature of Hypotheticals for
the above remarks to be regarded as anything more than hints for the
readers of this Journal. The Editor in a former number (Xo. IV. p. 216),
drew a distinction between the 'if of doubt and the 'if of inference.
That this distinction exists practically, that is, that we frequently throw
into the form of a hypothesis propositions of which we entertain no doubt, I
should fully admit and maintajn. But it will readily be seen that what I
am discussing above is rather the position and function of these ' ifs ' under
a system of rigid stringency, than the uses to which we put them under
ordinary circumstances.
44 The Difficulties of Material Logic.
fact, whether we look only to the things or only to our notions
about them.
That any theory of Definition must stand in need of a con-
siderable amount of assumption or convention is only too
obvious, but I think that the nature and significance of this
assumption is constantly underestimated. The definition of a
term, it will be commonly agreed, is the enumeration of its
essential attributes ; that is, of the attributes connoted by the
term. But when we ask, What are the attributes so connoted ?
we get into a difficulty. These attributes regarded in them-
selves are of course indefinitely numerous ; even the number of
those which distinguish one class from a neighbouring class are
often too many for enumeration. We are obliged therefore to
take a limited selection of them to comprise the connotation.
How important is the nature of this selection, for logical pur-
poses, will be seen at once when we consider that the entire
decision of the mutual relations of genus, species, difference,
property and accident, as well as the distinction between
essential and accidental propositions, all turn upon the meaning
we assign to the ' connotation ' of a term.
It appears to me that the only tenable course is to admit at
once that the connotation is determined by conventional agree-
ment as to what are the attributes in question. This convention
of course is not an arbitrary one, but rests upon what is generally
considered to be the ' importance ' of the attributes. This is
clearly a relative and provisional interpretation ; for the con-
vention will never obtain universal adhesion, but will depend
mainly upon the opinions of the well-informed, and it will inevi-
tably change from time to time under the impress of varying
theories and gradually advancing knowledge.
It needs, I think, but little inquiry to convince us that a
purely objective interpretation of the connotation is impossible.
Let us examine some of the attempts in this direction. We
need only notice, to reject, the statement that the essence of a
thing is ' that without which it would cease to be ' ; for what
sort of injury a thing can undergo without fatal consequences
will depend upon its own toughness of constitution. The state-
ment is really nothing but a somewhat realistic paraphrase for
the much more rational one ' that upon the loss of which we
should cease to apply the same name'. A far more plausible
account is given by saying that the essential attributes (that is,
the connotation) comprise those primary qualities from which
the others may be deduced. There are, however, two objections
to this. In the first place it does not meet the very commoi
case, of which the species of Natural History are an instance,
wherein a number of attributes seem to stand each on its own
The Difficulties of Material Logic. 45
independent footing, so that we cannot point to a few of them
as being the source and origin of the remainder. But there is
another important objection behind, which will perhaps need
some exposition. What is called dependence often means
merely dependence by inference, not by physical consequence and
succession ; in other words, a subjective not an objective depen-
dence. Dependence by inference is clearly relative not merely to
the amount of knowledge of the age, but to the theories in accord-
ance with which that knowledge is grouped and arranged. It is
very possible that by a change of point of view in science two
attributes should each shift into the place of the other in this
respect, so that that which was at one time the dependent one
becomes, by the new mode of treatment, the independent one.
Every one can see, by reference to works of different dates, how
decidedly this is the case in Geometry and Mechanics. In fact
it presents itself as a practical difficulty to the examiner that pro-
positions, which on one mode of treatment are simple corollaries,
perhaps even axioms, are on another mode only obtainable after
several steps of deduction. What, to take one simple example,
is the independent, and what the dependent, characteristic of
parallel Hues ?
: be^urged that the Xatural Kinds of Mill afford a strictly
objectivespecific distinction, the first answer~\rould be that even
wefe'ffie existence of these kind? admitted, they would only
partially meet the difficulty. It will hardly be contended that
ffiey can be soughTfor except amongst the species of Biology or
amongst simple substances ; and in each of these departments
they are having to undergo a criticism which will sorely try
them. In the one case they have to settle accounts with the
Darwinians and in the other with the molecular theorists, and
from neither party are they likely to find much mercy. Even
if we confine our attention to the present time, without pro-
jecting our vision towards the changes indicated in the remote
past or future, we shall find that the considerations suggested
above cannot be neglected. Those present distinctions between
one species and another are undoubtedly deep and important,
and it is absolutely necessary to recognise them in any system
of classification ; but it appears to me that Evolution, once
admitted, tends not merely to erase these distinctions in the
remote distance, but also to shed a light upon them in the
present which greatly modifies their significance. Grant to the
fullest the objective nature of the distinguishing attributes
themselves, yet their relative ' importance,' and therefore the
particular selection to be made from amongst them for purposes
of definition, must depend upon subjective considerations. Xot
merely is this relative importance determined by the particular
46 The Difficulties of Material Logic.
needs, or stage of knowledge, of the current generation, but a
change of general theory may create as much disturbance
amongst their relative ranks as one of dynasty would in an
Oriental monarchy. If I mistake not, the present disposition
of advanced biologists is to regard structure as of much more
importance in classification than function ; the purposes, that is,
to which different organs may be put are widely modifiable by
external circumstances. If therefore we look merely to the
magnitude of the differences between individuals we should
make one arrangement ; but if we seek to trace out actual
relationship we shall make a very different one, by attaching the
importance to underlying structural affinities which would
otherwise be very indifferent, and neglecting those which may be
very striking. If Evolution in its present form be a final theory,
then no doubt we may have got at something like an ' objective'
connotation of some of our class-terms, but only on this rather
bold assumption.
The foregoing considerations might be pursued in detail in
many other directions, but what has already been said may
suffice to illustrate the general proposition with which I started,
viz., that we cannot regard an entirely objective treatment of
Logic as anything but an ideal from which we are at present
indefinitely remote. In speculation, no doubt, we can make a
clean split between the objective and the subjective, and set
them apart over against one another. But if we look to the
practical necessities of life and the actual processes of thought,
w~e shall find that it is in the intermediate layer of tissue, if
one may so say, that all the vital processes of growth and
organisation are going on, Instead of regarding Logic as a
purely objective science, we might with more propriety term it a
science which gives the rules for converting the subjective into
the objective.
I cordially agree with Mr. Spencer in the propriety of the
logician keeping before him the congeries of objective existences
as the goal to which he is to strive, and the standard by which
/ he is to test every rule, and to this extent causing his science to
\ I be classed amongst those which are objective. But if we
/ 1/\ attempt to do more than this, by insisting upon confining
\ Logic to what can be regarded as strictly objective at present,
Vwe should find ourselves greatly straitened. We should in fact
stand in need of a third science, midway between the two called
Logic and the Theory of Seasoning, and to this third we should
have to relegate far the greater part of all that now currently
goes by the name of Logic This would, of course, be an absurd
subdivision, and therefore it seems better not to claim an
objectivity unattainable at present, but to admit frankly that
Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy. 47
our processes and results in Logic are conditioned on every side
bv subjective or relative considerations. Our logical machinery
and technical phraseology can only be interpreted by the help
of numerous assumptions or conventions ; relative, not merely
to human intelligence in general but, more narrowly, to the
amount and distribution of the knowledge of the persons who
have to use the Logic.
J. YEXX.
IV. MARCUS AURELIUS AXD THE STOIC
PHILOSOPHY.
IT costs us some effort to realise the full importance of philo-
sophy to the Greek or Roman citizen who had received a liberal
education. For him it combined in one whole body of doctrine
all the authority and influence which nowadays are divided,
not without contention, by science, philosophy, and religion in
varying shares. It was not an intellectual exercise or a special
study, but a serious endeavour to gather up the results of all
human knowledge in their most general form, and make them
available for the practical conduct of life. We know that
Greek philosophy had its full share in the bloodless victories
won by Greece over her conquerors ; and that the Stoic system
was especially congenial to the Roman character, and had a con-
siderable majority of adherents among cultivated Romans. We
know that the lives of illustrious rulers and statesmen, and of
him not least among them of whom there is presently more to
be said, were formed upon the discipline of that system ; and if
evidence is ever to be trusted to connect men's actions and
character with their professed beliefs, we have abundant and
trustworthy evidence in this case. These facts are almost too
commonplace for express mention ; but it is perhaps not so easy
to remember, what nevertheless is undeniable, that for every
name whicli has made Stoicism remarkable in history, there
must have been many, now scarcely noted or wholly forgotten,
among the men who did the abiding work of the Roman empire
in provinces where the folbies and revolutions of the palace
had little effect. 1 have called their work abiding, for it is
to be remembered that Rome not only kept peace and order
throughout an immense dominion inhabited by all races and con-
ditions of men, and governed some parts of the world infinitely
better than they have been governed before or since, but set a
stamp on the whole frame of the civilised world which in many
respects remains to this day. The Stoic philosophy was in no
48 Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy.
small measure the source of the moral influences under which
this work was done. Moreover, its hand can be distinctly traced
in the development of legal conceptions and of the law itself.
It is therefore a matter of considerable interest to understand
how Stoicism presented itself to the men in whose hands its
teaching bore such fruit ; nor is this altogether so easy as might
be supposed, for it is one thing to have the tenets of a system
laid down in works of professed exposition or discussion, and
another thing to seize those elements which really commend the
system to those who adopt it in practice. In the case of
Stoicism we have abundant accounts of its theory, but for the
most part at second-hand. Nothing has come to us straight
from the founders or leaders of the original Greek school. In
the latter time Seneca can hardly be counted for more than a
retailer. Of Epictetus we have only notes and reminiscences
put into shape after his death ; and Epictetus, after all, is an
official preacher. And this increases the difficulty of rightly
apprehending the real working contents of the Stoic philosophy.
But the difficulty is happily much lessened by our possession of
an almost unique piece of evidence the note-book of an
emperor who was likewise a philosopher, or at least a very
apt learner in philosophy. The Commentaries of M. Aurelius
Antoninus, as the editions call them for the want of a better
name, have all the appearance of notes freely set down for the
writer's own use, and without any thought of publication. They
are constantly abrupt, unfinished, or hardly grammatical ; some
passages are evidently mere jottings of topics for further writing
or reflection, the exact meaning of which can be only guessed
at. How or when they were first made public is not known.
We have here, then, the substance of the Stoic philosophy con-
sidered as a working rule of life, and so considered by a disciple
whose opportunities of testing it could not well be surpassed.
For although it is commonly taken for granted that men's moral
principles are best judged in adversity, one may well doubt
whether a position of great eminence and weighty duties does
not put them to a more perfect trial.
In Marcus Aurelius, then, it seems to me that we may find
the safest guide to the knowledge of the Stoic morality in its
practical aspect and in its relation to the general system of
which it was part. The intrinsic beauty of the morality set
forth by him, both in substance and in temper, has been con-
stantly admired ; but we are apt to forget that Marcus Aurelius
was not a solitary apparition of virtue, but the disciple and
representative an illustrious one, no doubt of a settled and
widely-spread doctrine. And this doctrine, notwithstanding its
singularities, or sometimes by reason of them, comes nearer to
Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy. 49
our own ways of thinking, and has more lessons for us, than
appears at first sight.
Before we examine any specific points of the Stoic philosophy,
it may be as well to pause and see what were its aims. It is in
some sense true that all philosophers are in search of the same
end ; yet it is in practice very difficult for a philosopher even
to announce his object without showing what method he intends
to follow and what sort of results he expects to get Now the
objects of the Stoics were eminently practical ; they strongly
held that knowledge is for the sake of action, and that the
worth of philosophy consists in its power to guide the conduct
of life. Among other illustrations and comparisons which seem
not very pointed to a modern taste they likened philosophy to
a fertile field, logic to the fence round it, and ethics to the crop
grown in it. They further said that the knowledge by which
action is to be guided is a knowledge derived from experience ;
and they said it in terms which fixed no bounds to the possible
bearing of experience and knowledge upon action. Chrysippus,
who was considered to have settled the Stoic system in its
finished form, is reported to have stated his ideal of life to this
effect : "A virtuous life is the same thing as a life agreeable to
experience of what happens in the course of nature ; for the
nature of each of us men is part of the nature of the world." J
How the Stoics conceived of experience we learn from Plutarch ;
experience, they said, is by the multitude of similar (or uniform)
perceptions. 2 Thus the knowledge that is to serve us in life is
founded on an observed order of things, which order is thought
of as something belonging to the whole world, and equally
present in every part of it. Now this is exactly such a general
conception of knowledge as in these times is growing upon us
as we become more familiar with the methods and results of
science. And we have here no mere verbal coincidence gathered
from scattered sentences ; the testimony of M. Aurelius will
show that the parallel is a real one. The conception of the
world as orderly does not only lie at the root of the Stoic system,
and explain, as will presently be seen, many of the things that
appear strangest in it ; we find it constantly treated as some-
thing to be kept actively present in the mind, and capable of
affording present support and guidance. This it does in two
ways : the first bearing immediately upon action, the other more
remotely, but not less steadily, through contemplation. First, a
1 Patter and Preller, Hist. Grcec. et Rom. Phil, p. 363, 3rd ed. We are
expressly told that with Chrysippus the commoner Stoic form of speech
' a life according to nature ' was synonymous with this (Ib. 388).
XijQos (76. 368).
50 Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy.
right understanding of the external order of things (17 rov o\ov
<u0-i?) is in a manner needful for right conduct. It points out
to us not indeed duty itself, but the conditions of our duties.
It cannot tell us what our actual duties, are ; that depends on
the specific character of man as distinct from other creatures,
and more especially upon his social nature. But it can guide
us in judging the circumstances and consequences of which we
must be in possession in any particular case before we can tell
what is really the question of conduct that arises ; it does not
solve moral problems, but enables us to know what we are about
in settling their data. " See whither nature leads you, the
universal nature by means of that which happens to you, your
own by means of that which you have to do." * Obstacles and
difficulties present themselves to man's intentions ; but he has
reason given him that he may find out what is the best thing
practicable, and do that ; nay, reason has the power to compel
the stubborn things of the world to her own ends, as fire con-
verts all sorts of fuel to itself. A right purpose guided by right
understanding cannot be really disappointed. 2 But this is
hardly so important as the more contemplative aspect of the
universal order, which is dwelt upon by Marcus Aurelius with
striking force and frequency. The mind that learns to recognise
a fixed order and connexion in the changing appearances of the
world also learns to take a certain intellectual pleasure in that
order considered in itself, apart from the pleasurable or useful
character of its operations in their particular effects. Every-
thing has a fitness in its own place, and almost everything may
thus be a source of contemplative pleasure to him " who has
become truly familiar with nature and her works ", 3
Again, all things are ever changing and passing away ; one
comes in another's place and no single thing endures. Perpetual
change and renewal is the first law of nature, and everything is
in a manner but the seed of that which shall be made of it ; 4
existence is a river in constant flow, a torrent sweeping every-
thing before it ; the operations of all forces consist in manifold
1 Marcus Aurelius, VII. 55. References hereafter given without an
author's name are to the book and section of his work.
2 IV. 1 ; VII. 68 ; VIII. 32, 35 ; X. 31, 33. In an extreme case the
general Stoic doctrine allowed the final way of escape (e" a 7 w 7 r /) by
suicide. But M. Aurelius, though he nowhere controverts this, seems
to hold that there is no case in which there is not something satisfactory
to be done.
3 III. 2 ; a remarkable passage, which seems to place the contentment
of the scientific mind on grounds independent of the ordinary Stoic
teleology.
4 IV. 36 ; comp. VIII. 6.
Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy. 51
and unceasing change, 1 and this change is indeed the very con-
dition of the being and perfection of all finite creatures. 2 Every
part of the world is mutable and subject to decay ; but these
things are so in order that the world, thus made up of ever
perishing parts, may itself be ever the same and ever young. 8
But man is himself part of the universal scheme, and his specific
character as man, although it is distinct and important (and by
no one has its distinctness and importance been more dwelt
upon than by the Stoics), is in the last resort determined by
the conditions of the universal order. We may therefore think
of ourselves as belonging to the whole order of the world and
: bring ourselves into a certain sympathy with it. And this
i habit of thought will help us to lift ourselves above the common
passions that vex us with surprise and discontent when events
fall out so as to cross our individual desires. Nothing can
\ befall us that is not in the nature of things capable of being
: understood and reckoned with, and it is our business to master
i circumstances by understanding them. 4 As for those things
! which it is not in the power of man to alter or avoid, we are to
! accept them as being part of that order in which we ourselves
; are a part, and in which all things, however wide asunder in
seeming, are in truth conjoined, and work together for the
\ whole. 5 " Consider the courses of the stars as one running the
; same course with them, and think constantly upon the changes
of the elements into one another ; for by the perception of these
i things the grossness of our life on earth is purged away : "
" nothing is so fitted as this to beget highmindedness." 6 Thus
we are led to one of the features which is most prominently put
forward by the Stoics, at any rate by Marcus Aurelius, in
setting forth the ethical ideal Not only does the fruit of
skill and understanding belong to the mind that knows the
beginning and end of things, and the reason that pervades and
rules all existence ; 7 not only does the wise man acquiesce in
;the decrees of the universal order, knowing that they cannot be
[otherwise; he meets events with a contented and cheerful
.assurance, and his maxim is " to welcome everything that
i happens ". s Whatever comes to us, however hard it may seem,
1 V. 23 ; IX. 29 ; \fifiappovi ?y ~H'V o\tav ovaia
1 VII. 18.
1 VII. 25 ; XII. 23. Cp. Spinoza's "facies totius universi, quaequamvia
infiniti? modis variet, manet tamen semper eadem" (Ep. 66, ad fin.}.
* VII. 47, 68 ; VIII. 15 ; comp. XII. 10, 18.
* IV. 40 ; VI. 36, 38 ; VII. 9. 6 VII. 47 ; X. 11. ' V. 32.
8 affird^effdai TO avfifiaivovTa. or TTU.V ^o avpfiaiv<jv t III. 16; IV. 33 ;
nd many other places.
52 Marcus Aurelius and tlie Stoic Philosophy.
is prescribed by nature, and is no less for the health of the whole
than the remedies prescribed by a physician are for the health
of the patient. If we repine at anything that happens in the
course of nature, we are striving, so far as in us lies, to maim
the perfection and unity of the world. 1 So that the rightly
instructed man will say to Nature, the giver and taker of all
things : " Give what thou wilt : take what thou wilt." 2 Epic-
tetus bade his hearers never to say that they had lost anything,
but that they had returned it. 3 And Marcus Aurelius, going
far beyond simple resignation or acquiescence, lifts up his voice
in a hymn of adoration (for one can hardly call it otherwise)
which is among the most remarkable utterances of ancient
philosophy.
" Everything harmonises with me which is harmonious to thee,
Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late which is in due time
for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, Nature ;
from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.
The poet says, Dear city of Cecrops ; and wilt not thou say, Dear city of
Zeus?" 4
The last words bring out the speculative foundation of that
cosmopolitan character which has always been remarked as
prominent in the Stoic system. The Stoics shared, however,
with other post-Aristotelian schools a strong: cosmopolitan
tendency, which is accounted for by the social and political
circumstances of the time, and in particular by the decay of
local independence, and therewith of the old Greek patriotism,
coinciding with a great enlargement of commerce and inter-
course between different parts of the world.
It is not my purpose to enter on the task of comparing
Stoicism with modern philosophies. But one cannot help being
struck by the resemblance of the line of speculation which I
have just endeavoured to trace in M. Aurelius, and which seems
to me to have been a very central one with the Stoics, to that
which is struck out by Strau:s in his latest work. English
readers may find an even closer parallel to the Stoic nature-
worship in a place where few, perhaps, would think of looking"
for it ; I mean in Mr. Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise.
It will be observed that the mood of reverent acquiescence,
or something more, with which a Stoic looked upon the order
of the universe includes elements which do not seem to belong
to a purely scientific contemplation. As yet we have not taken
account of these, although the foregoing statement could not be
kept clear of them. The Stoics had, indeed, the conception of
natural order as a thing ascertained by experience, and worth
i V. 8. a X. 14 3 Epict., Ench. 11.
4 IV. 23 ( Mr. Long's translation).
Marcus Aurclius and the Stoic Philosophy. 53
knowing and making the best of simply because it is there and
cannot be otherwise. But they sought to reinforce this idea by
a creed of dogmatic pantheism with which their doctrine of the
Kosmos was closely knit. And this pantheism was associated
with, and to a large extent rested upon, a no less dogmatic
teleology. Some, at least, of the Stoic leaders appear to have
pushed their reflections on final causes into details which
nowadays must appear ludicrous to every one. I do not mean
that these dogmas were adopted of set purpose ; existing habits
of thought and language must have suggested them with almost
:ible force. " Qui dit loi dit ordre ; qui dit ordre dit
finalite : tous ces termes s'impliquent logiquement," says a
writer of our own day. 1 To a Greek all this was implied in
the one word Kosmos, as M. Aurelius does not fail to note.
:oics asserted that the world is a product of reason, and
that all the laws of nature aim in the long run at reasonable
ends. That which partakes less of reason exists for the sake of
that which has a greater share of it ; so that, without saying
exactly that the world was made for man, a Stoic might easily
take an anthropomorphic, or rather anthropocentric view of it
Again, the earlier Stoics were not content with the uniformity
of nature as an observed similarity of results in similar condi-
tions, but by a strangely fantastic addition they imagined the
conditions themselves as recurring on a vast scale. They held,
in coramon with the Pythagoreans, that the world is periodically
destroyed and regenerated. Internal evidence and tradition
both tend to show that the Pythagoreans got this doctrine,
together with that of the transmigration of souls, from India.
true that the details of the Pythagorean teaching are not
sufficiently known. But both doctrines are set forth at some
length in mythical fashion by Plato ; the recurring cycles of the
world's life in the Politicus, the transmigration of souls in the
Phccdnis. And in both places, especially the latter, the points
of likeness to Indian belief are almost too many to be accounted
for by coiucidence. Probably both Plato and the Stoics bor-
rowed from the Pythagoreans, though M. Aurelius exhibits one
curious coincidence in detail with the language of Hindu
philosophy which suggests at least a possibility of later inde-
pendent communications with the East. 2 Be this as it may,
1 M. E. Yacherot, in Revue des deux Mondes, Aug. 1, 1876, p. 503.
1 " One is the sun's light, though dispersed by walls, mountains, and
other things without number. One is the substance of all things, though
dispersed in bodies without number, each of a determinate species [the
term in the original, Iciuv Trotov, is a technical one]. One is reasonable
mind (voepa Vn/x 1 ?)* though it seem to be divided," XII. 30. The simile
of the sun is a commonplace of Indian philosophic poetry, and may have
54 Marcus Aurdius and the Stoic Philosophy.
the Pythagoreans, followed by the Stoics, proceeded to better
their instructors (whom they had perhaps misunderstood) by
asserting that not only was the world to be destroyed and
renewed when the perfect period of all things, or annus magnus,
should be fulfilled, but that the former conditions were to be
exactly reproduced, and the whole course of events repeat itself
in the minutest details. (This is not only foreign to the
Brahman cosmogony, but inconsistent with it.) The only
modern parallel I can now call to mind is in a book of no
special philosophical pretensions, entitled Peter Simple, where
Mr. Muddle, the carpenter, assures the captain, with unconsci-
ous Stoicism, that he found the very same fault with him on
that same quarter-deck 27,672 years ago. Among the later
Stoics, Panffitius and some others rejected this absurdity ; but
there is nothing to warrant the belief, which one would be glad
to entertain if one could, that Marcus Aurelius did so. He
alludes to the doctrine several times without dissent, and with
only such slight indications of doubt as to leave it possible that
he may have thought the question an open one, but of no
practical importance. 1
Again, there is another quite distinct kind of reflection which
is apt to be mixed up with the scientific notion of uniformity,
and may even simulate it in expression. Moralists of almost
every age and school have dwelt upon the common and mono-
tonous character of human life as a reason for not setting one's
heart on the usual objects of desire. " There is nothing new
under the sun." This commonplace is certainly to be found in
M. Aurelius, 2 and when he says that he who has seen the
present has also seen the boundless past and future, 3 and speaks
elsewhere to the like effect, he may mean only to repeat the
same thing ; and very possibly the official teaching of Stoicism
put it forward as a deduction from the idle fancy just noticed.
Still one is tempted to think he had in his mind the greater
conception of an order without assignable bounds in time or
space, so complete and unbroken that from a perfect know-
become known to the Greeks. But the Stoic pantheism lias in the main
very little in common with that of the Hindus.
\ V. 13, 32 ; VII. 19 ; IX. 28 ; X. 7 ; XL 1 ; in VII. 19, voamn jfy
o aiwv X/^u0Y7r7rot/s, iroaowi ETTIKTIJTOVV Ku-rifirLirwKG ; may only mean, as
far as the words go, " How many such as Chrysippus and Epictetus have
lived and died ". So M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire takes it. But it is too
like the phrase, doubtless a regular one in the schools, in which the current
figment has been preserved to us : eaeaOui. ird\iv ^wKpattjv KU\ HXcmcva
KOI eKHff-rov TU-V ai'dpu-Trtav K. r. X. Nemesius ap. Ritt. and Pr. 381. On
the whole matter see Zeller's note, Phil, der Griechen, III., pt. i., 141.
For example, IX. 14. 3 VI. 37.
Marcus Aurelius and the Stale Philosophy. 55
ledge of the condition of the whole system at any given moment
there might be deduced an accurate account of its condition at
any time before or after. Certainly in another passage he seems
to imagine a " reign of law," as we now say, both in the co-
existence and in the succession of things. There is a rational
connexion, he says, in the sequence of events ; it is not like a
mere enumeration of particulars in an arbitrary order. 1 M.
Aurelius appears to affirm, again, that either there is no reason
at all in the world (and for him, as a Stoic, reason and order
are synonymous), or everything that happens must be the
determinate result of an original and universal order : but the
passage is far from clear. 2 It is worth noting that his concep-
tion of uniformity, whatever it was, applied no less to human
affairs and conduct than to any other class of events. 3 This is
no more than one would expect, as the Stoic philosophy is well
known from other sources to have been wholly determinist. 4
The technical name for the necessity or universal law governing
the world was eiftappevrj. " Fatum autem id appello," says
Cicero, abridging or paraphrasing, as it seems, from the Stoic
Posidonius, " quod Graeci eip-ap^evr^v, id est ordinem seriemque
causarum cum causa causae nexa rem ex se gignat. Ea est
ex omni aeternitate fluens veritas sempiterna. Quod cum ita
sit, nihil est factum, quod non futurum fuerit, eodemque modo
nihil est futurum, cuius uon causas id ipsum efficientes natura
contineat." 5
It is remarkable that this general tone of cosmical and
scientific contemplation did not bring the Stoics into conflict
with the popular creed. Not only did they offer no opposition
to the rites, observances, and superstitions of the unlearned, but
they even found reasons in their philosophy to support them.
Especially they defended the art and mystery of divination long
after- it had become the subject of doubt or open disbelief else-
where ; and they attempted to give their defence the appear-
ance of a serious argument on scientific grounds. Their system
forbade them to affirm special interferences with the course of
nature, such as signs and wonders were commonly esteemed.
The events foretold by omens and victims were indeed, they
said, unchangeable and determined from the first, as links in
the chain of an eternal order. But the omens and victims were
1 IV. 45. Mr. Long gives "a necessary sequence" for TO K^rj
LICVOV. But in modern usage that is necessary which is the result of law ;
whereas the 0^07*17 here contemplated is the opposite of law.
2 VII. 75 ; see Mr. Long's note. 3 VII. 49.
4 See Zeller, Phil, de Greichen, III. pt, 1, 144-155.
8 De, Div., I. 125.
56 Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy.
also links in the same order. 1 The fact of the connexion was
abundantly established by experience ; and as for the part of
the gods in the matter, they did not change the order of things,
but knew the hidden causes and signs of events better than
men, possessing as they did a higher intelligence ; and what
could be more natural and reasonable than that they should be
moved by goodwill to man to impart some of their knowledge
to him ? Arguments were constructed exhibiting the truth of
divination as a necessary deduction from the existence of gods : 2
and the prophecies of the soothsayer were represented as
analogous to the scientific predictions of the astronomer. The
Stoics would not have found much to learn, apparently, from the
defenders of sundry pseudo-scientific positions in later days.
On this point Pansetius again stands out in honourable dissent ;
he ventured (to the no small scandal of Ms colleagues) to cast
doubt on the efficacy of divination. 3
We have yet to remark the greatest speculative paradox of
the Stoic philosophy. It exalted Eeason as the source of the
world's order, the one ruler and judge of all things, the sole
fountain of good to every creature, and especially the sole origin
and measure of morality for man. And at the same time it was
frankly, nay grossly materialist ; no whit less so than the rival
school of Epicurus, and probably more so than any modern
school has been. The Stoics asserted in set terms that nothing
really exists but matter, and that the soul is material (awpa rj
fy v Xn}* Even the world-soul, which they identified with Zeus
or the supreme God, was regarded as a kind of finer matter
endowed with special qualities of penetration and diffusion
the elemental fire as they sometimes called it. They would
have hailed the luminiferous ether as an even more valuable
contribution to theology than to physics. To give one concrete
example of this materialism, Marcus Aurelius gravely notes and
considers the question (not unlikely to have been a current one)
how there can be room in the air for all the souls of the dead ? 5
I am not aware that either the materialism or the superstition
of the Stoics had any sensible effect on their ethical doctrines
or practice ; but it was impossible to omit mention of these
things, as the omission might have been misleading. It is
likewise hardly possible to forbear noticing the signal example
1 Cicero, op. cit., I. 118. 2 Cic., op. cit., I. 82, II. 101.
3 Cic., op. cit. I. 6. On the subject generally, Zeller, Phil, der Gr., III.
pt. i., 313, seqq.
* They described the intelligible or predicable relation (\CKTOI', Ka-ri]~
^dpTjfia) between material things as immaterial (oc-aytaToj').
5 IV. 21.
Marcus Aurclius and the Stoic Philosophy. 57
here given of tlie danger there is in affecting to hold either
schools or particular men to what are called the logical conse-
quences of their opinions. We hear a good deal nowadays of
the mischievous tendencies of materialism and pantheism, and
their incompatibility with a high moral ideal ; and this not
only from those who scatter materialism and pantheism as
vague terms of abuse, but from men who have a distinct mean-
ing for their words. In the philosophy of the Porch we find
that, as a matter of fact, a most lofty and ideal morality
which indeed so much abhorred all weakness, compromise, and
condescension, that it has earned even with a wise and generous
historian the reputation of being harsh and impracticable
was associated with both pantheism and materialism in their
crudest forms. We also hear a good deal of the absolute
necessity of the doctrine of free-will (that is, causeless volitions)
for the support and the very existence of morality : those who
use such language surely forget that Marcus Aurelius, in
common with all the moralists of his school, was an uncompro-
mising determinist. It would seem that on the whole it is more
or less unsafe to rely on any supposed necessary connexion
between metaphysics and morals.
It is true that the Stoics conceived matter itself, or at least
that which composed the finer elements, to be in its own nature
active, so that their physics, as Zeller puts it, were dynamical
rather than mechanical. And it may also be said that the
contrast between materialism and idealism had not then been
sharply defined as it is now. They may be said therefore, in a
certain sense, not to have been pure materialists. 1 But the
same may be said, for the same or other reasons, of most of the
writers to whom the name is applied in modern time*.
The ethical theory of the Stoics can be understood only by
keeping in mind its connexion with the general view of the
world of wfcich we have endeavoured to give some sketch.
Taken by itself, the language of their fundamental maxims is
exceedingly v;;gue ; and some well-known expositions of them,
which are classical as literature but of secondary rank in philo-
sophy, may be vague enough to justify the surprise and even
contempt expressed by some modern writers. " Live according
to Mature " is at first sight the most ambiguous of precepts.
But the Stoics had a definite meaning for it, and were at some
pains to explain it. They held, as we have seen, that every-
thing is subject to one universal order, which is itself settled by,
or rather is conceived as being, a supreme and all-pervadirg
intelligence. This order being determinate and irresistible,
1 Lange, Gesch. des Makrialismus, I. 72, 2nd ed.
58 Marcus Aurelius and the Stsic Philosophy.
every agent and event in some way or other fulfils it. Even
those who think to hinder it are against their own conceit
working for it, and we may say of them "Of these too the world
had need "- 1 On this ground there is obviously no foundation
for ethical distinctions. But when we so far quit this universal
point of view as to consider any particular species in relation
to the whole, we see that it has certain constant relations to the
rest of the world, which in fact determine its specific character,
and which in the case of living creatures the life of the species
is occupied in maintaining. Every creature has some normal
function as part of the general order of the Kosmos ; 2 what
those functions are for each kind is to be ascertained by
experience. They must always include, however, the preserva-
tion of the species ; otherwise it could not exist as a species :
thus the impulse of self-preservation, which the Stoics ascribed
to every creature as the first spring of action, is not only
common, as a matter of fact, to all active beings, but is an
integral part of the common order of the world. Every act of
an individual which belongs to the proper function of its species
as thus understood is, in the Stoic language, according to Nature
as regards that species, that is, according to its specific nature
(I8i'a (i'crt?) ; and inasmuch as it is an instance of the general
law which fixes the normal place and action of the species in
the great concert of the Kosmos, it is also said to be in an
eminent manner according to Nature, taken in the general sense
as the universal order (icoivr} Averts;). Now man, as well as
other creatures, has his specific function, or nature in the Stoic
sense, as part of the cosmical plan. But, unlike other creatures,
he can fulfil it with conscious intelligence and choice. He may
know his station in the world, and know also that in main-
taining it he is fulfilling the purpose of the supreme Reason.
By the very fact of being addressed to an understanding agent
the command " Live according to Nature " becomes " Live
according to Eeason." This reason, as expressed in the consti-
tution of man and his relations to the world, his capacities, his
achievements, and his aspirations, furnishes a type or pattern of
life which may be sufficiently known by those who choose to
model their conduct upon it. Actions conformable to this
type are morally right, and rightmindedness is the conscious
striving to attain it (we neglect for the moment the minuter
points of Stoic doctrine) ; it is in this sense that moral goodness
is the fulfilment of man's proper nature. The architect or the
physician has his proper art, which, if he is competent in it, he
conducts according to fixed principles ; but every man, simply
1 VI. 42. 8 eicaaTov irpos 11 'yt'yoj
Marcus Aurelitis and the Stoic Philosophy. 59
as a man, is in the same case ; * and man, like every other
creature, is judged by his fitness for the work for \vhich he is
destined. 2 " What is your business in the \vorld ? To be
good." 3 This then is the calling imposed upon man by the
supreme Keason ; a fact to be observed which implies a law to
be obeyed. Righteousness consists in fulfilling the duties
imposed by it with a cheerful obedience of discipline. 4
Some points must be noted here in which the Stoics differed
much from the moralists of later times, not so much in their
solution of ethical problems as in their conception of the
problems themselves and of the province of ethics as a science.
A modern reader is tempted to ask where is the sanction in the
Stoic scheme of morality ? How does it answer the question
which some regard as the very first that moral philosophy is
bound to answer why should I do right ? It may seem
strange to us, but so it is, that the Greek philosophers, and
especially the Stoics, troubled themselves very little to find a
direct reply. The question seems hardly to have occurred to
them in that form ; they rather assumed that a doctrine of
ethics is addressed to learners who are in the main willing to
be taught, and it is far from certain that they were wrong in
BO doing. It may be fairly doubted whether it is the business
of moral philosophy to establish the existence of its own
subject-matter. There is no topic on which one may not bring
argument to a standstill by pushing obstinate denial far enough;
and it may be that a man who will not admit that there is such
a thing as moral duty thereby removes himself out of the reach
of philosophy, and is amenable (supposing his opinion to be
sincerely held and acted upon) only to other kinds of discipline.
After all, the modern way of supporting the moral law with
sanctions only puts the difficulty back ; for what if a perverse
man should say, I do not care for your sanction ? We know
that the most stringent sanctions have in fact been deliberately
set at defiance on several occasions. Do we say, then, that
B motions are of no account ? Certainly not ; their part in a
historical inquiry concerning the growth of morality, or in the
consideration of the state of morals existing at any given time
and place, is of the utmost importance ; but this belongs to the
practical side of the matter, and does not show that duty can
be exhibited by way of logical demonstration to any recalcitrant
individual. But to return to the Stoics : whether it was a real
1 VI. 35. VI. 16. 3 XI. 5.
4 The disobedient and dissatisfied are compared to runaway slaves,
X. 25, and more oddly to a pig that kicks and squeaks when it is sacrificed,
X. 28. Modern readers may be inclined to agree with the pig.
60 Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy.
omission or not, they did not consider the groundwork of ethics
in this light. In Marcus Aurelius there is very little about the
consequences of right or wrong actions to the individual agent.
It is worth mentioning, however, that in one passage of
Epictetus we find a clear enough expression of what is now
called the sanction of self-esteem. 1 He distinctly says that we
are to weigh against the enjoyment of a present pleasure, on the
one hand the future pain of repentance and self-reproach, on the
other hand the future pleasure of a satisfied conscience. And
the Stoics asserted no less stoutly than any one else, even the
Epicureans, that virtue is the only true happiness, though they
denied that virtue is morally preferable because it gives hnppi-
ness. Even this, however, is not prominent in Marcus Aureiius;
and it is needless to repeat here that the Stoics required virtue
to be above all things disinterested. One instance may be
given : " When thou hast done a good act and another has
received it, why dost thou still look for a third thing besides
these, as. fools do, either to have the reputation of having done
a good act or to obtain a return." 2 Of the optimism of their
ethics we must say a word more presently.
Now this assumption, which I think is tacitly made all
through the Stoic teaching namely, that there is such a thing
as a rule of right conduct binding one man as well as another,
and that the average man, so far at any rate as philosophy has
to deal with him, is willing to follow that rule if it is properly
explained to him brings us almost at once to the famous
Socratic position, that virtue can be taught ; or obversely, that
vice is mere ignorance. If (among the nations which have
produced philosophers at all events) men were not on the whole
able and willing to do right oftener than not, it is difficult to
see how moral philosophy \vould be possible. In so far as a
man is able and willing to do right, he can do wrong only by
mistake or misapprehension ; and it is readily perceived that
much wrong has been and is done in the world for pure want of
knowledge. The Stoics, dwelling exclusively upon this view,
referred all wrong-doing to this head ; and the doctrine had
great practical importance in their school, as we see in Marcus
Aurelius, as an argument for patience and equanimity in bearing
misbehaviour at the hands of one's fellow-men. Reflect, he
says in substance, that it is the deed of your fellow and kins-
man, not knowing the law of his own nature ; 3 ask yourself
what is his mistake ; 4 his wrong is in truth involuntary ; 6 it is
1 Epict. Ench. 34.
2 VII. 73 (Mr. Long's translation) ; and see IX. 42, cited below.
3 III. 11. 4 V. 22; VII. 26. 5 VII. 22, 63 ; X. 30 ; XII. 12.
Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy. 61
the inevitable result of his erroneous notions sis to what is good
and desirable, 1 his mind being as it were jaundiced. 2 It is
more than once added that rather than waste time in anger,
you should teach him to know better. 3 Other reasons are also
given in the same and other passages, but none so characteristic
of the Stoic system. Once it is said, " It is proper to man to
love even offenders." 4 Again, the immortal gods have to put
up with worthless men through all time, and take it not amiss ;
how much more then shall you endure them for a little lifetime,
being even such an one yourself ? 5
From this digression, which seemed needful by way of
explanation, we go back to the positive conception of morality
as held by the Stoics. Virtue does not, in their view, consist in
action directed consciously to the attainment of some ulterior
advantage, but in the normal and healthy exercise of an active
function 6 belonging to the proper constitution of man as a
species (18 ia <f>ua-i<j). The question then presents itself, what is
this specific constitution ? What are the characteristic qualities
of man that make him a moral being ? The answer, often and
in many forms reiterated in the teaching and writing of the
school, is that man is reasonable and social ; there is no lack of
other authorities on this point, but the constant occurrence of
the topic in Marcus Aurelius is significant as confirming them.
Here again it is to be observed how the Stoics made use of
their cosmical and teleological ideas as a background for ethical
theory. The world itself being conceived as rational, and man
being the eminently rational creature, the agreement of man's
ISia <f>uai<; with the KOLVTJ (frvais, or general law of the universe,
is presented with an air of self-evidence. 7 It is likewise
assumed as axiomatic (so at least it appears in Marcus Aurelius)
that the only rational life for man is a social life. When man
consults his reason it clearly and imperatively bids him live
with his fellow-men ; human reason itself is constantly called
social (\6yos KoivwviicSs, sometimes 7roXtTt6?). " He is a
deserter who abandons the social reason he is a
fragment torn from society who tears his own soul from the
1 VIII. 14. VL 57.
8 X. 4 ; XI. 11 ; XI. 18 (in this last passage most of the precepts for
such occasions are summed up).
4 VII. 22.
8 VII. 70 ; compare with this the legend of Abraham and the fire-
worshipper.
8 The man of sound judgment perceives that his own good lies in his
own activity (liiav irpagtv'), VI. 51.
7 For the reasonable animal (man) action " according to nature" and
" according to reason " are identical, VII. 11.
62 Marcus Aurdius and the Stoic Philosophy.
soul of reasonable creatures, which is one." l As will be seen
by this last quotation, the pantheism of which we have already-
spoken is brought in to give a metaphysical reason for the social
bond ; the souls of men being conceived as pieces or quantities
of the same stuff. Man is social, and is entitled to sociable
treatment at the hands of his fellow-man because he is reason-
able. 2 Each man is to the community as a member to an
organism, not as a mere part to an aggregate ; 3 so the man who
commits an unsocial action is a inutilator of the body politic, in
that he cuts himself off from it ; but, as Marcus Aurelius or his
original quaintly, yet finely, adds, the limbs of this body have
the special gift of being able to reunite themselves to it. 4
Further, as a branch cut off from the next branch must needs
be cut off from the whole tree, so a man at strife with his
neighbour is cut off from the whole fellowship of men. 5 The
whole of man's action is to be directed to social ends, and to the
good of his fellow-men, 6 and such action, being the exercise of
man's proper energy and the fulfilment of his truest nature, is
its own sole and sufficient reward. Does the eye seek a recom-
pense for seeing or the feet for walking ? Likewise the man
who has done aught towards the common weal has done that
which he is set in the world to do, and in doing it receives his
own. 7 It is even said that every deed that does not bear
directly or remotely on the chief end of the common welfare is
of the nature of dissension and sedition. 8 One passage, in
which the duty of sociableness is enforced, first by various sup-
posed physical analogies in the elements, and then by the
example of the gregarious and social animals, concludes with
the remark that no man can be wholly unsocial even if he tries :
nature is too strong. 9 It is said, too, that the ruling principle
in man's constitution is that of society. 10 In all this there is at
the same time a notable absence of any distinct reference to
political activities and duties ; the city from which all the older
Greek ideas of religion and morality took their spring and
strength has become expanded to the bounds of the inhabited
world, and man o\ves duties to his neighbour, not as his fellow-
citizen, but as his fellow-man. For the TTO\I.TI,KOV ^wov of
Aristotle the teachers of Marcus Aurelius had substituted
KOIVOWIKOV. This is indeed one of the most familiar marks of
the post- Aristotelian philosophy in general. In some ways the
cosmopolitan turn of ethical conceptions was a real advance,
1 IV. 29. a VI. 23.
8 VII. 13. There is an untranslatable pun on ^e'Xos and pepo?.
4 VIII. 34 ; XI. 8. 5 XI. 8. 6 VII. 5 ; IX 23.
7 IX. 42. 8 IX. 23. 9 IX. 9. 10 VII. 55.
Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy. 63
though hoth its origin and its development exhibit clear signs of
weakness. But iu considering the effect of Stoicism on the
Roman world it is proper to bear in mind that the feeble side of
its cosmopolitan doctrine was just that to wliich a Roman
disciple accustomed to take part in affairs of state would be
likely to bring sufficient correction from his own resources. A
Roman commander or administrator guarding the frontiers of
the Empire against fierce and barbarous tribes could never be a
mere citizen of the world ; and it is not insignificant that we
find Marcus Aurelius, who was himself thus engaged during
part of the time that he set down his notes, more than once
giving a marked place in his reflections to his duties as the first
of Roman citizens. "Being Antoninus, I have Rome to my
city and country ; being a man, the world. The weal, then, of
these cities is the sole measure of good for me." * Before passing
on we may note that the connexion between the social morality
of Stoicism and its cosmical theory is well given in a single
sentence by Cicero : " They (the Stoics) are of opinion that the
world is governed by the power of the gods, and is in a manner
a common city and polity of men and gods ; of which world
each one of us is a member. Whence this follows in course of
nature, that we set the common weal before our own." 2
The next question may seem to be of this kind : All this
being so, how did the Stoic morality provide for dealing with
the problems of conduct that arise in actual life ? The founda-
tions of the work being thus laid, by what rule were the details
assigned ? And if it is indeed a material part of the business
of moral philosophy to tell people what is right and wrong in
given circumstances, there is no doubt that Stoicism must be
found sadly wanting. There is very little in Marcus Aurelius
that could be used to throw any direct light on particular cases
of conscience. But there is another view of the office of moral
philosophy not wholly without supporters, which is that this
task is exactly what moral philosophy should not attempt.
According to this opinion the office of ethical science, so far as
it has a practical bearing on conduct, is not to solve special
problems, but to form a habit of mind fit to solve them in action.
The object is to impart not bare precepts, but moral habits
which may bear the good fruit of right intention guided by
trained judgment ; not to teach men what actions are right, but
to make them rightminded. A healthy moral constitution may
be trusted to deal witli the particular cases as they arise. You
cannot make yourself righteous by working out a set of fixed
rules ; on the contrary, when you want to know how to apply
1 YI. 44. Cic., De Fin., III. 64.
64 Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy.
the rule in a new instance you must take the judgment of the
righteous man. This conception, more familiar perhaps to the
Greeks than to most of ourselves, is often present in Aristotle,
and there are indications, at least, in Marcus Aurelius that it
was practically adopted by the Stoics. We find the healthy
moral sense expressly compared to the healthy sight or taste of
bodily sense. 1 It is well known that the ideal wise man of the
school was conceived as infallible in his moral judgment ; this
however proves nothing as to the supposed character of the pro-
cess of judgment itself. But I do not think the process is
anywhere represented as one of calculation from rules, save so
far as an accurate knowledge of the circumstances and conse-
quences is dwelt upon as necessary to right action ; and this last
has to do with the conditions of the problem rather than with
the actual solution.
It is true that some of the Stoics appear to have committed
themselves to what is now called casuistry, and not to have
escaped the kind of odium which has become attached to the
like inquiries in later times. And certainly some of their results,
as handed down to us (if we could be sure that they are fairly
represented), are not altogether edifying. But the displeasure
they gave was due in great measure to their adopting from the
Cynics an open and offensive disregard of men's common feel-
ings. There was an original connexion between the Stoic and
the Cynic schools, and though the Cynic elements of the Stoic
doctrines were gradually thrust into the background, or ex-
plained away by the more enlightened leaders, yet there was
always a Cynic wing, as we might now say, of the Stoics, and
Cynical propositions held their ground as commonplaces long
after they had ceased to be consistent with the developed and
active social morality of the school. We find several times in
M. Aurelius a vein of coarse and exaggerated depreciation of all
ordinary objects of desire, where the argument, such as it is,
consists in exhibiting them as resolved into elements which are
separately worthless or disgusting. 2 These passages can be
accounted for, I think, only as a residue of Cynic traditions.
They have no real affinity with the lofty cosmical disdain with
which, as has already been seen, the Stoics endeavoured to look
down upon the slight and mutable things of this world, but
which is consistent with an earnest purpose of doing the best
one can, however little it may be, and not despising one's work
for not being greater, 3 and which sought contentment not in
1 X. 35.
2 VI. 13 ; VIII. 24, 37 ; IX. 36 ; XL 2. M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire's
phrase, " erudite etonnante," is not at all too strong.
3 Compare IX. 28 with the following section.
Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy. 55
violent self-deceptions, but in an even mind. It is no Cynical
prompting that bids men pray, not for the objects of desire, but
for a soul fiee from desire. 1 Developed Stoicism is equally
remote from the crudity of the Cynics on the one hand, and
from asceticism on the other. Man's physical well-being (fj &>?
o>ou (frvcns') is not to be suppressed, but rather cultivated, in
subjection however to the demands of his reasonable and social
well-being (77 co? ojoi> \oyifcov </>ucri?, TO \oyiicov teal TroXiTtfcov)?
The Stoic optimism and its curious consequences are perhaps
the most generally known parts of the system. The Stoics,
holding that the universe was governed by immutable law,
.which law was the expression of perfect reason and the pattern
of all good, were necessarily optimists. They looked upon the
universe as good in a human and ethical sense, and the "Wise
Man was the purposed crown and glory of creatures. And they
had accordingly to face the question which every scheme of
benevolent teleology has to face in some way namely, Why do
good men suffer evil in the world ? The answer they gave de-
serves admiration for its boldness. They simply denied the fact.
They said that the supposed evils are not evils at all; the
common objects of desire or aversion, in so far as they do not
involve ethical merit or demerit in the person enjoying or suffer-
ing, are neither good nor bad, but indifferent. This is the cele-
brated doctrine of Adiaphoria, which the Stoics maintained
against all comers with great zeal and pertinacity ; yet they had
to admit that for practical purposes there must be such a thing
as a rational preference among these indifferent things, if only
because the Wise Man must needs make some choice among
them ; and they saved a contradiction in terms by ingenious
distinctions and refinements, on the particulars of which we
need not enter here. The line of thought by which the main
doctrine was reached is no matter of conjecture : it is distinctly
given, for instance, by M. Aurelius, when he says that nothing
can be really good or bad which befalls good and bad men
alike. 3 The topic was considered by the Stoics as one of im-
portance on account of its practical value in strengthening the
mind against the common temptations of the world, and the
deliberate cultivation of Adiaphoria, the attitude of pure indif-
rerence towards the whole contents of the neutral field "between
virtue and vice," was recommended as a point of moral disci-
pline. 4 The same optimism led in much the same way to the
! T . x - 4-
- X. 2. The Cynics, it has been well remarked, were not ascetics ; for
they Bought not to mortify desires, but to reduce them to the least number,
and satisfy them in the cheapest and coarsest way.
3 IV. 39. * VII. "31.
5
66 Marcus Aurdius and the Stoic Philosophy.
well-known Stoic paradoxes concerning the blessed state of the
Wise Man. Since no real harm can befall the man who pos-
sesses true wisdom and virtue (it will be remembered that with
the Stoics these were synonymous), and he who does not possess
them possesses no real good, it follows that the wise man alone
is entitled to all the honourable additions which men are accus-
tomed to bestow indiscriminately ; to him alone belong freedom,
wealth, and kingship even personal beauty was not omitted
from the catalogue. 1
These and kindred propositions were not taken by the Stoics
in the way of rhetoric or metaphor ; we are told, indeed, that the
school was averse to rhetorical expansion. They were seriously
maintained as literal truth, and defended with the utmost rigour
of dialectic. 2 Still, it is difficult to believe that Stoic teachers
always resisted their capacities for rhetorical treatment. Cicero
has left us some specimens in this kind, and in particular a
little book entitled Paradoxes, where he sets forth the Stoic
maxims in a popular manner. It may be convenient to give
the heads they are as follows : 1. Moral good [TO tcaXov,
honestum] is the only good. 2. Virtue suffices for happiness.
3. There are no degrees of wrongness or Tightness in actions.
4. Every fool [not-wise in the Stoic sense] is mad. 5. The
wise man alone is free, and every fool is a slave. 6. The wise
man alone is rich.
Outsiders naturally found here a tempting field for ridicule,
and were not slow to make the most of it. Serious argument
was not so easy as it might seem at first sight, for the Stoic
could meet any appeal to facts by explaining that there was not
a real Wise Man to be- found in the world. It was certain that
there had been very few altogether, and it was an open ques-
tion whether any one had come quite up to the mark in histori-
cal times. Socrates and one or two others were commonly ad-
mitted, and some of the Eoman Stoics ventured to add Cato. 3
1 See, for example, Cic., De Fin., III. 75 ; Hor., Ep., I. i. 106 ; Sat., II.
iii, 45 (the whole Satire is an illustration of the paradox, TTU<S u<ppwv fA.aiveTai,
No. 4 in Cicero's list).
2 Cato autem, perfectus mea sententia Stoicus ... in ea est haeresi
quae nullum sequitur floreni orationis neque dilatat argumentuin ; mimitia
interrogatiunculis, quasi punctis quod proposuit efficit. Cic., Parad.,
Prooem.
3 The singular parallel between wisdom in the Stoic philosophy and
the state of grace in Augustinian theology is pointed out by Zeller (op. cit.
235). It extends even to the detail of the transition or conversion from
utter darkness to perfect enlightenment being the work of a moment. It
will be noted that the number of the elect is much more narrowly limited
by Stoicism than by even the most rigid forms of Calvinism ; there may not
be a single wise man in many centuries. But then the consequences of ex-
Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic Philosophy. 67
But here, again, they made a compromise with practical needs.
Strictly speaking, one must either be in the perfect light of
wisdom, or in an outer darkness wherein there were no degrees.
Amiss is a miss, they said, whether the shaft goes a hair's -breadth
or a mile beside the mark. Yet they devised the notion of a
certain proficiency towards real excellence, which might approxi-
mate indefinitely to it in its effects, though it could never be
the same tiling ; a kind of ethical asymptote to the unattainable
ideal. All this was likely enough to degenerate into quibbling
and mere verbal puzzles, especially under the influence of a
fondness for the curiosities of dialectic (Cicero speaks of the
Stoics as cultivating conclusiunculae, and see the quotation in
the note above) which was characteristic of the school. The
paradoxical and polemical aspects of the system acquired undue
prominence in the eyes of critics and outside observers, and, I
think, have retained it in modern times. It is remarkable that
there is hardly a trace of them in Marcus Aurelius. So far as
one can guess from his writing, Horace's jesting notice of Chry-
sippus's dictum that the Wise Man would be the best of cobblers,
if he chose, must have fallen quite harmless upon him. May we
not suppose that the men who, like Marcus Aurelius, took up
Stoicism not as a literary profession but as a guide to the
conduct of active life were content to leave this kind of dis-
cussion alone, or even in their hearts despised it as mere verbal
trifling ?
It will readily be understood, but perhaps I should expressly
repeat it, that the object of the foregoing pages is not to give
an exposition of the Stoic system, such as it was, or may have
been, officially set forth by the founders and masters of the
school, but to trace the substance and connexion of the doc-
trines which appear to me to have contained its working power
for Marcus Aurelius and those of whom he is the type. The
history of Greek philosophy is a magnificent and weighty siib-
ject, which yet remains to be worthily treated by an English-
man. My present endeavour is not only within narrow bounds
in extent, but altogether in a narrower sphere. But no inquiry
can be worthless which may throw any light upon the character
and moral training of the men whose arts and arms, maintained
by Eoman energy, and touched with the fire of Greek intellect,
elusion were comparatively slight. There is a coincidence of a higher kind
with Christian thought when Marcus Aurelius bids himself lead a new life
from even,* moment, "as one that is dead, and whose past life is now finished,"
(VII. 56) ; " thou shalt be a new man and enter upon a new life " (X. 8).
A not less striking parallel may be found in the Buddhist Xirvana, if that
(as maintained by Mr. Rhys Davids) is a state of passionless perfection,
theoretically attainable even in the present life.
68 Pessimism.
established the empire and the peace of Eome, and created the
civilised world.
NOTE. I may add a word here about editions and translations of Marcus
Aurelius. No author wants a commentary more, but Marcus Aurelius has
been strangely neglected in this respect. There is, I believe, no annotated
edition later than. Gataker's, which dates from the middle of the seven-
teenth century. The text is often difficult, or corrupt, or both ; the
condition of some places is probably hopeless. Besides other scholars,
Corais and Schultz have done good work upon it, but much yet remains to
do. The Tauchnitz reprint of Schultz's text (which is practically the only
available edition for ordinary purposes) has critical notes, but the absence
of all discriminating marks in the text itself is a drawback. For English
readers the want of a commentary is, to a considerable extent, supplied by
Mr. Long's excellent translation ; not altogether, for I think, with all
deference to the taste of a master in criticism, that the Greek has, if not
exactly a charm, yet enough of a " distinct physiognomy " to keep one
from leaving it on the shelf. One can only regret that Mr. Long's notes
are so few and brief. A new French translation has been published
by M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire (Paris, 1876). The version is more finished
in style than Mr. Long's, but often at the cost of exactness. Corrupt
passages are slurred over, for instance, in a way quite inadmissible accord-
ing to English notions of scholarship, by guesses at the general sense which
do not stand for any particular reading. There is a running commentary,
which does not attempt any specific tracing of the various Stoic doctrines,
and does attempt, with very indifferent success, to find in M. Aurelius the
tone and arguments of a modern French philosopher of the spiritualiste
school. The notes, in fact, are rather homiletic than exegetic. The object
appears to be simply to reproduce the book in a form suited for modem use
as an aid to moral reflection.
FEEDERICK POLLOCK.
V. PESSIMISM.
IN offering the following remarks on Pessimism, my object is
not to advance any new arguments in its support, but only to
review that critical survey of the doctrine which has recently
been made by an English writer. Pessimism, as is well known,
has of late been gaining ground both in Germany and elsewhere,
and in view of this fact Mr. James Sully has presented us with
an examination of the doctrine in a work entitled Pessimism :
A History and a Criticism.. Three points in particular have
been dwelt upon by him : first, the systematic proof which the
doctrine has found in the works of Schopenhauer and Hartmaim ;
secondly, its chance of realisation in the present and future ;
and lastly, the conditions of its genesis in the individual mind,
and the causes of its rapid propagation. Mr. Sully especially
attacks the Philosophic des Unbewussten of E. von Hartmann. As
this work has not yet been translated into English, it is hardly
Pessimism. 69
possible for English readers to estimate the justice of the charges
that Mr. Sully has brought against it ; and hence they may not
be unwilling to listen to a voice out of the pessimistic camp
raised in defence of its leader.
To the unrefiective miiid in the juvenile age of individuals as
well as of the race, life in itself is no problem: it is a sell-
evident thing that which must be, and cannot help being.
But when pain, sickness, hunger, death appear, then come
doubts and questionings, stirring that feeling of iccmder which is
destined to become the mother of philosophy. Thus does
meditation on the misery of Life beget philosophy, while at the
same time it prompts the desire to vanquish that misery, as a
thing which ought not to be.
Mr. Sully in the first four chapters of his work gives an
account of the struggles between pessimism and optimism,
which will interest many readers. As we approach the present
time, we find the voices of unreasoned pessimism swelling in
number, wliile philosophic pessimism recedes more and more into
the background. Schopenhauer first fully recognised the claim
of pessimism to be regarded as an integral part of the system
of philosophy ; Mr. Sully, accordingly, next expounds his system.
In relation to pessimism Dr. Hartmann 1 may be considered
the successor of Schopenhauer, but in respect of the principles of
his system he can no more be called the successor of Schopen-
hauer than of Hegel. All that can be said is, that as every
vital system of philosophy must assimilate the main ideas of its
predecessor, so Hartmann's is a higher synthesis of Schopen-
hauer's ' alogical ' will and Hegel's logical idea as attributes of
the unconscious spirit. It is an error in Mr. Sully to class
Hartmann with Bahnsen and Frauenstadt as disciples of
Schopenhauer - ; while he obscures the metaphysical and psycho-
logical proof of pessimism by constantly mixing up the doctrines
of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the part played by Will in the
systems of the two being entirely different.
Mr. Sully next gives a short biographical sketch of Hartmann,
with a brief analysis of the Philosophy of the Unconscious* In
composing this work Hartmann addressed himself less to the
limited circle of professional philosophers, than to the large body
of readers, happily still to be found in the " land of thinkers and
poets," who are interested in philosophical questions. Partly
on this account, and partly as a consequence of the inductive
method employed, we find explanations given in the first and
1 Hartmann is Doctor honoris causa of the University of Rostock.
2 It i< also an error to call A. Taubert a disciple of Schopenhauer. Tau-
bert's view of the world is based entirely upon Hartmann's philosophy.
70 Pessimism.
second parts of the work which either have a merely pro-
paedeutical value or which, though well fitted to elucidate the
successive steps of the induction, are seen from the higher levels
afterwards reached to be self-evident, not to say, tautological.
Now, Mr. Sully, in examining the work, points out first these
passages which are generally unimportant ; and, instead of indi-
cating the fundamental principles of the system and the conse-
quences drawn from them (the only way to give in a few pages
a sufficiently clear exposition of a philosophical system), he
follows the successive steps of the induction, sometimes crowding
the contents of a whole chapter into a single sentence. The
result is, to give the reader not only an inadequate, but a
decidedly distorted view of Hartmann's great book.
Here the historical part of Mr. Sully's work ends. In Chapter
VII. he begins the criticism of the metaphysical proof of pes-
simism. Like Hartmanu though from a very different motive
he designates the problem of pessimism a eudaemonistic or
hedonistic one. As the ethical worth of the world is of account
only as it influences the feelings, he shows that hedonism is the
only principle whereby we can try the solution of the pessimistic
question. Would the non-existence of the world be preferable
to its existence ? Pessimism, according to Schopenhauer and
Hartmann, follows a priori from the nature of Will, as the
principle of life. Every act of will refers to something which
does not yet exist, else it would not be necessary to will it ;
and as long as the volition does not procure its satisfaction,
there is a state of longing, restlessness. All these terms are of
course but similes when the satisfaction of will is an unconsci-
ous representation. If a volition can become satisfied, it must
be at the cost of another volition, which is proportionately
repressed in its sphere of action. In the region of conscious
life, whether the aim of will be the mere maintenance of
life, or the realisation of an idea, it is at all times and at all
points in collision with other volitions, tending in opposite
directions, and those that give way in the struggle react as pain.
Schopenhauer was content to deduce the misery of life cl
priori from the principle ; but Hartmann, proceeding inductively,
offers an a posteriori proof. Nevertheless, he also has his a
priori treatment, and thus, when Mr. Sully attempts to under-
mine the metaphysical and psychological bases of German pes-
simism, he has to deal with the metaphysics of both philo-
sophers. Metaphysical systems, in Mr. Sully's eyes, are mere
outgrowths of poetical fancy, without any claim to a relatively
objective truth. He grounds this opinion on the fact that new
systems are continually springing up ; but he does not see that
there is something common to all, which is ever developing and
Pessimism. 71
growing in breadth and depth. Acknowledging no objective
spirit, he does not understand how philosophy is the develop-
ment of the self-consciousness of the Absolute in the multitude
of individual minds. The impulse, rooted in the deepest ground
of our nature, to inquire after the causae causarum, to advance
from the phenomenon to the noumenoii this most lofty of the
impulses common to men is to Mr. Sully a weakness, and in his
optimism he hopes that a time will come when it shall be con-
quered (p. 153), and men will be satisfied with the knowledge
sufficient for the practical relations of phenomena to each other.
But as long as this impulse, which Schopenhauer calls the
" metaphysical want," exists in most men, Mr. Sully holds it to
be the prime task of philosophy to show that it has no right to
exist, since all that we can know is that a gulf yawns between
our empirical world (of subjective representations) and its trans-
cendental essence. Now against a dogmatism "which lays
claim to the possession of absolute truth, it is clearly open to
object on the ground of subjective idealism. Accordingly, when
Schopenhauer, notwithstanding his idealism, asserts that we are
immediately conscious of our will, Mr. Sully does well to point
out that we do not know our will otherwise than as a repre-
sentation as an object, like our Ego, among other objects.
Hartmann, however, in his philosophy is no dogmatist ; on
the contrary, he ever seeks to combat dogmatism. The critical
ground he takes up is indicated in his work New- Kantianism,
Schopenhau.crianism and Hegelianism, while his position re-
lative to the different theories of knowledge, especially to
Kant's subjective idealism, is shown in his Foundation of
Transcendental Realism (1875), and in a criticism of Von
Kirchmann's Tlieory of Perception (1875). We are willing to
suppose that Mr. Sully did not know of these works when he
wrote the airy sentences on p. 454.
From the point of view of subjective idealism metaphysic is
an impossibility. If time, space, causation, relation, exis-
tence, &c., have as forms of the mind an exclusively sub-
jective signification, without being forms of the Ding-an-s-ich,
then of course we neither have the right to construct a world by
deduction from an a priori principle, nor can we hope to reach
one by induction. But if subjective idealism is right, and
metaphysic an impossibility, then, since all we think is but our
thought, natural science, as it is generally understood, is also
impossible as science. For as it is the science of the real, inde-
pendent of the subjective, and has nothing but our representa-
tions for its objects, natural science can only be the science of
human modes of thinking and representing. Nay, even such a
science becomes questionable, if \ve follow out subjective idealism
72 Pessimism.
to its logical conclusion in solipsism and illusionism. If I have
the right to suppose a subject my Ego behind my represen-
tations ; if I further have the right to suppose the existence of
other subjects, independent of my representations, but analog-
ous to my own subject, then I also have the right to suppose
things -in-themselves behind my representations, as their causal
conditions. Let it be observed, I only say, If I have the right to
use Kant's categories transcendentally. Should I assert this
right as self-evident, I fall into the dogmatism of naive realism
(as the older materialism does) ; should I deny it, I sink into the
hopeless abyss of illusionism, or into scepticism, which is also a
negative dogmatism. If, on the contrary, I am convinced that
my nature is not a mere colossal humbug, whose very existence
I can rightly neither affirm nor deny, but corresponds to an
objective truth, if by the very constitution of my mind I am
forced to suppose things-in-themselves behind my representations
as their causes, then I stand on the ground of transcendental
realism, a doctrine which modern natural science, more or less
consciously, accepts. Mr. Sully never tells us what his own
theory of knowledge is. Will he doom metaphysics because its
constructions are founded on mental representations ? Then the
doom must equally fall upon science also, since we never can
travel outside our perception and thoughts, outside our senses.
On p. 170, Mr. Sully says, " our minds have received their
structure in connexion with this very order of things, which is
to be accounted for ; consequently, all ontological deduction of
the world has to be carried out by help of conceptions drawn
from this very world itself." This, however, is far from being a
proof that mind cannot acquire any real knowledge ; the
essential identity of the subject with the object to be known is
the very condition of the possibility of knowledge and the
conditions of the possibility of knowledge form the first
principles of all the modern systems of metaphysic.
Having pointed out the worthlessness of metaphysic in general,
Mr. Sully might have saved himself the trouble of criticising
in particular the metaphysical doctrines of Schopenhauer anc
Hartmann. It is easy to show the contradictions in Schopen-
hauer's system, yet, besides the error above mentioned, Mr.
Sully refers only to his obscure scheme of Platonic ideas. Ht
does not mention Schopenhauer's greatest mistake of all th<
attempt to combine materialism with subjective idealism b]
declaring the intellect to be the product of matter, and matter
itself with the entire empirical world to be the product of
intellect.
Passing next to Hartmann, Mr. Sully finds everywhere can-
tradictions and fallacies, which are mainly due to Lis own inis
Pessimism. 73
understanding. Whenever Hartmann makes use of a simile to
illustrate a difficult conception, he at once lays hold of it as an
opportunity of reproaching him for his "mythological fancies" and
" anthropomorphism". When Hartmanu, starting from the con-
ception of the world as a process of evolution, and from the
relation of the logical idea to the ' alogical ' will, arrives at a
negative conclusion, namely, the cessation of volition, the end of
the world's existence, the reduction of actual being to potential
being ; and when further, after carefully explaining that he by
no means thinks of predicting what will actually happen, he tries
to show how an end of the world-process might be conceived,
Mr. Sully takes it all as a positive statement, and ridicules him
accordingly.
The two chapters in which Mr. Sully undertakes to undermine
the scientific basis of pessimism, after having, as he believes,
overthrown metaphysic in general and the doctrines of Schopen-
hauer and Hartmann in particular, present a jumble of sophism
and prejudice, which it would need a whole treatise to unravel.
We can here only briefly refer to his way of demolishing
the well- compacted system of the Monism of Will. He seems
to believe that a thing or an action has but to be denominated
differently to cease to be what it was. According to
Schopenhauer and Hartmann, all force is will; the atom is a
single act of will. Mr. Sully admits that " if force were proved
to be a reality in the physical world, we should, by the very
limitation of our minds, be compelled to think of it in terms of
our volitions " ; but force is " in science proper nothing but a
serviceable fiction ". 1 If now, according to Mr. Sully, science
does not know force, what then is the ultimate and fundamental
phenomenon, of which the whole empirical world is the product ?
Motion, he replies. But motion can only be understood as the
function of a subject. Even supposing it could be empirically
shown that the elementary qualities, heat, light, &c., are caused
by motion, we should still have to face the questions : Whence
these motions ? What is their cause, and what are they ?
The conception of motion does not dispense with the con-
ception of force; there would be no motion if there were no
force. Force, whether we call it so, or call it will, is a
metaphysical conception, which seems to natural science a
somewhat shadowy thing, that might well be excluded from its
sphere. And physics is indeed justified in banishing force from
its territory ; but the attempt to blot it out of existence is an
inroad into a higher sphere, which it is necessary to repeL Mr.
1 Force as an entity is a fiction, but force as a phenomenon is thoroughly
real, and to Hartmann the act of will is simply phenomenal.
74 Pessimism.
Sully acknowledges no force and hence no will, only conscious
volition ; but volition, as defined by him, is not genuine will, no
real volition. It is only a perception of will, accompanying a
mechanical action. This is plainly enough stated on p. 202 :
" The great doctrine of the conservation of energy, carried out to
its logical results, has led to the theory of animal and human
automatism, namely, that all the actions of our bodily organs,
voluntary as well as involuntary, are fully explained as the
results of mechanical processes." What stamps certain me-
chanical actions of the human organism as acts of volition,
different from mere " spontaneous movements " (not a happy
expression for a believer in automatism to employ) and from
" instinctive impulses," is simply a conscious perception (1) of
its motive, (2) of the aim of the movement, (3) of the character
of the action, either as an immediate means to the object in view,
or as a link in a chain of means to that object. To be consistent,
Mr. Sully should declare volition also to be only a useful fiction,
unless he is prepared to acknowledge all bodily functions to be
acts of will (volition proper). But this is what he cannot do,
for, as he truly says, there is no volition without a representation,
and he will not admit unconscious representation. Consciousness
and perception are synonymous to him ; while he tries at length
to persuade us that there are no unconscious perceptions, with the
effect, however, only of showing us that consciousness is not
unconscious, and that he has misunderstood Hartmann's concep-
tion of unconscious representation as the ideal form of real
existence.
He even denies the relatively unconscious, that is to say, the
consciousness of the different nervous centres within an organism,
which is asserted by Hartmann in the same sense as by
Helmholtz, Maudsley, Lewes, and other men of science. It
would perhaps be more consistent to go back at once to
Descartes, and deny consciousness altogether to the lower
animals ; for not possessing self-consciousness, they cannot tell
us of their consciousness.
Hartmann's view of consciousness as springing from the
conflict of will seems to Mr. Sully fallacious, but he himself
avoids fallacy only by taking the easy course of having no theory
of its genesis, and so saving himself the trouble of explaining
how a purely spiritual moment, like a conscious representation,
can set in motion the bodily mechanism. Without such
explanation, it is idle to tell us that the pessimist falls into
the blunder of supposing that will is the parent, instead
of the natural and necessary foe, of life's misery, inasmuch
as it partly crushes, partly satisfies, desire and longing and
other unpleasant feelings, at the same time that it directly
Pessimism. 75
aims at the attainment of pleasure. Just as if pessimists
ever doubted that the will makes for pleasure and avoids
pain ! If each act of will could extort its own satisfaction,
the world would be a paradise, and there would be no pessimists.
But it is just this satisfaction that is difficult of attainment in a
world of conflicting acts of will.
We come now to Pleasure and Pain. According to Hartmaun,
Sensation is a special mode of consciousness. Pleasure and
pain, on the physical side, are intensified forms of the specific
affections of the different organs ; on the mental side, they are
intensified reactions of will upon representations. Unsatisfied
will is pain, whether the accompanying representation is consci-
ous or (as in the case of many uncertain and indefinite feelings)
unconscious. But unconsciously satisfied will yields no pleasure ;
it is only when the consciousness is sufficiently established to
allow of representations and sensations being compared with each
other, that the satisfaction of will becomes known as pleasure,
as a higher feeling than mere painlessness, which is the normal
state. By this conception of pleasure and pain, Hartmann's
doctrine that the difference between the two is merely
quantitative, not qualitative, loses much of its apparently
paradoxical character. On this point Mr. Sully has uupardon-
ably misunderstood Hartmann. He says, p. 120 : " Hartmann's
account of the manifestations of the Unconscious in pleasure
and pain is extremely curious. Pleasures and pains are perfectly
homogeneous states, differing in quantity only ! " But Hart-
mann says no such thing. What he really says is, that
pleasure and pain as such, i.e., apart from their causes and
contention, show, each within its awn sphere, merely quantita-
tive, not qualitative, differences.
To understand what pleasure and pain really are, Mr. Sully
refers us to "any respectable text-book in psychology".
" Pleasure and pain are found to arise from certain modes of
bodily and mental activity, which are variously defined as those
which promote or hinder function." This, however, is an ex-
planation which is only applicable if matter and mind are con-
ceived as one identical substance. From the standpoint of a
vague dualistic automatism (pp. 177 and 465), pleasure and pain
can be nothing but the signs of approbation and disap-
probation on the part of the concrete mind, when the
latter, in some mysterious way (heaven knows how !), perceives
that its seeing, hearing, speaking, and walking machine is
working smoothly, or the reverse. We are far from denying,
and Hartmann himself admits, that pleasure often does accom-
pany the promotion, and pain the hindrance, of organic function,
but promotion and hindrance are not at all times causes of
76 Pessimism.
these feelings. Pleasure may just as well be the cause as the
consequent of physical well-being ; and if pain is often the
offspring of bodily disturbances, it is just as often their parent.
Moreover, how is this doctrine to account for the fact that
pleasure of a high degree can co-exist with conditions that are
destroying health and life ? If in this case the pleasure does
not arise from the satisfaction of a higher will than is in the
cells or organs, it is altogether inexplicable. Again, even on
Mr. Sully 's own supposition, we can establish an evident excess
of pain, the very thing that he disputes. The organism is at all
times and from all sides exposed to dangerous influences, both
natural and artificial, which hinder and destroy its well-being,
and may even depress it for long periods to a state little above
death. The influences that promote physical well-being, on the
other hand, have to be looked out for and provided, and after
all can do no more than raise life to its normal state. This
normal state (which is paralleled, in the case of species, by
adaptation to natural conditions in the struggle for existence)
is the least we can get on with, and it is only our familiarity
with pain that makes it appear as positively pleasurable. Every
attempt to raise the state of well-being beyond the normal point
leads again to pain, though perhaps in another sphere, as when
certain spiritual pleasures disorder the bodily energy or vice
versa.
If Mr. Sully thus far, in controverting the pessimistic theory,
advances nothing in support of optimism, he is no more suc-
cessful in his strictures upon Hartmann's arguments for the pre-
ponderance of pain. Hartmann maintains, (1) that through
irritation and exhaustion of the nerves pain becomes more and
more painful the longer it lasts, while positive pleasure in the
like case is lessened and, prompting the will to seek relief,
gives rise to a new pain if relief is not found ; (2) that satis-
faction of will is recognised as pleasure only where the indivi-
dual mind is advanced enough to compare the different states
of sensation, while the mere fact of unsatisfied will is consciously
felt ; (3) that the relief which follows a pain constitutes the
highest degree of pleasure ; (4) that the pleasure of satis-
faction is only a fleeting one, while the pain of non-satisfaction
lasts as long as the effort of volition. Mr. Sully strives
to show that the pleasure that follows relief from pain is
a real pleasure, and not mere painlessness. This Hartmann
does not doubt, but lie holds that, in any general estimate
of the value of life according to the balance of pains or
pleasures, the whole amount of such pleasure is not only not
sufficient to outweigh pain, but is not even enough to redress
the scale. Were there no pain in the world, there would not be
Pessimism. 77
any of this negative pleasure; but that it would be a good bargain
jet rid of all positive pain at the cost of all such pleasure,
will be doubted only by those who would assert that poverty is
desirable in order that the rich rnay enjoy the pleasure of alms-
giving, With regard to the first of Hartmann's arguments for
the preponderance of pain, Mr. Sully admits the fact, but finds
in it an argument against pessimism, since the insensibility pro-
duced by nervous exhaustion destroys the pain and diminishes
the discontent at the absence of pleasure. Xow it is true that
there is a certain degree of pain at which insensibility sets in.
But terrible suffering must be endured before the nerves are
paralysed, while as the field of irritation spreads and new parts
are affected, though the first may have become insensible, those
last attacked are but just beginning to torment. After all,
too, this painless exhaustion yields but a short respite : as soon
as the nerve has recovered its energy, suffering begins again ;
or if the complete destruction of certain nerves, or of whole
organs, does really bring permanent relief, then it is attended
with peril to the existence of the individual. Physicians do not
regard the cessation of pain as a favourable symptom as long as
the source of the irritation remains or has become intensified.
In Hartmann's view, although it is hardly possible to deter-
mine the equivalence of a certain quantity of pleasure to a certain
quantity of pain, yet " the pleasure must be considerably greater
in degree than the pain, if the two are so to counterbalance each
other in consciousness as to amount in combination to the state
of indifference, and be preferred to this if the pleasure is a little
increased or the pain lessened". The true measure of the com-
parative value of pain and pleasure is the readiness with which
a pain is accepted for the sake of an antecedent or succeeding
pleasure, or a pleasure sacrificed to avoid such a pain ; and even
so there will be all manner of individual differences. Yet the
mere possibility of such comparison implies an habitual endur-
ance of pain, for to the na'ive mind every pain, if it is anticipated
with any degree of accuracy, is absolutely great ; or if often the
opposite seems to be the case, this is due to the careless disre-
gard of pain and determined exaggeration of the value of
pleasure.
So much for pleasure and pain of the same kind : it is a still
more difficult matter to furnish a standard of comparison of
sensual pleasures or pains with mental pains or pleasures. For
here the estimate will vary even more with differences of
character and intelligence. AVe are not surprised to find Mr.
Sully at variance with pessimists on this head also. He
acknowledges its difficulty, but hopes to get over it thus :
" The simplest method is to make the antagonistic feelings
78 Pessimism.
simultaneous. In this case it will be found that when they are
of equal intensity, they tend to neutralise one another, that is,
to produce a resultant state of feeling which has a zero-value."
Probatum est ! It is a pity Mr. Sully does not deal in concrete
examples, else we should have liked an illustration.
If, again, we turn from pain and pleasure to their cause?, we
shall find, as a general rule, that the natural and artificial
circumstances that are productive of pain are present every-
where and at all times, while those productive of an over-
balancing pleasure are limited and difficult of attainment ;
unless indeed we are content to regard the mere painless modi-
fications of organic sensation as pleasures, as Mr. Sully does
with the visual impressions of form and colour. As for ennui,
on which Schopenhauer laid so much stress as the foe of human
well-being, Mr. Sully regards it as only " the penalty inflicted
on us for the non-fulfilment of some normal function, or the
reminder which is given us by the natural impulse of an organ
to discharge its recruited store of energy ". Now certainly ennui
is n<3t in the common sense of the word an external evil, like
poverty or sickness ; but the circumstances that prevent us from
actually removing this removable evil are very often either
social or political ones, or are material organic conditions of our
own body which are outside the mind of the individual. Many
evils might be annihilated, if we so willed with all our power ;
unfortunately it only too often happens that we cannot will
that which is reasonable and, if not positively pleasurable, at
least painless. This troublesome question of the Niclit-wollen-
Jconnen will, however, meet us again. Meanwhile, let us turn to
Mr. Sully's criticism of Hartmann's a posteriori proof.
First of all, we are told that Hartmann himself " cuts off the
surest avenue to the facts " by rejecting " individual testimony
as an untrustworthy source of information on the subject," men
being disposed " to magnify the value of life through the very
action of unconscious will ". Mr. Sully here misunderstands
Hartmann. The latter simply warns us against a false estimate
of the past life, past pains being so readily underrated because
they are past ; whilst the passing pleasure is greatly magnified.
We see this happy gift of the human mind well displayed in the
frequent talk of aged people about "the good old times". If it
were possible to examine hourly a large number of men as to
their actual general feeling during a long time, and to put on
record the result, Hartmann would have no objection ; but the
result would be very different from that yielded by the
beautified notes of memory. It is only in this sense that
Hartmann attaches a superior value to objective testimony not
from any disposition to make light of the individual's experience.
Pessimism. 79
Hartmann's view of the various circumstances of life does not
commend itself to Mr. Sully. He gives the list : (1) Health,
youth, liberty and material sufficiency ; (2) Hunger and love ;
(3) Pity, friendship and family happiness , (4) Pride, ambition
and desire for dominion ; (o) Keligious edification ; (6) Immoral-
ity ; (7) Enjoyment of science and art ; (8) Sleeping and
dreaming ; (9) Pursuit of wealth ; (10) Envy, vexation, &c. ;
(11) Hope; and then exclaims, What a classification! But,
though the reader may expect it, he does not offer a better one.
It was, in truth, no part of Hartmann's intention to review all
the internal and external circumstances and conditions of life
that result in feeling. He held that an h priori proof, based on
that of Schopenhauer, but modified at some points, was quite
sufficient for his purpose. Having adopted the inductive method,
however, he felt that some amount of a posteriori proof was
necessary, and so he dipped into the abundant materials at his com-
mand, in a way indeed that may seem superficial to the hypercriti-
cal. Mr. Sully especially objects to Hartmann's comprehensive
treatment of labour, and to the omission of " motor activity,"
" genuine humour," and " the daily fulfilments of obligation of
all worthy citizens " as sources of happiness " both to the agent
and to others ". But, when Hartmann says that labour generally
brings more pain than pleasure, he understands labour as such
and apart from the aims whose attainment, or even the mere
hope of whose attainment, is or may be pleasurable. When
Mr. Sully speaks of labour as a source of happiness, he means
the aim arrived at. When a workman enjoys his labour, it is
the thought that the produce of his toil will protect himself and
his family from want, with the hope that a time may come when
he may live without this labour, that is the real source of
his enjoyment. It will also satisfy his ambition to see his
handiwork sought for and acknowledged, while, if his work
is such as to admit of the display of inventive fancy, " the
interest of pursuit " (as Mr. Sully rightly suggests) will be
satisfied as he realises the ideas of beauty or utility in his works.
Work, however, as mere bodily activity, is hardly a source of
pleasure. If the physical condition is good, the pleasurable
feeding of health is not readily disturbed by it, though even here
fatigue is apt to set in towards evening, while in the case of the
elderly, the weak, or the sensitive, the fatigue may even extend
itself to the first working hours of the succeeding day. So to
the professional man and the man of business the labour of each
day is pleasurable, chiefly as satisfying their desire for wealth,
self-respect, ambition, and vanity, or the loftier sentiments of
patriotism, humanity, and love to their fellow-creatures. The
case of the agricultural labourer or the factory hand is somewhat
80 Pessimism.
different ; the pleasure of their daily work being limited to
that of winning their daily bread, or, at the best, satisfying their
self-respect and vanity. It is only in the field of the fine arts
and sciences, and not always even there, that we find, as
Hartmann himself is careful to admit, work as such to be a
pleasure. As for that which Mr. Sully sets down as the most
important ingredient of happiness, namely, " what is known as
mental tone or the underlying sense of well-being," this
ought clearly to be reckoned under the head of health, which
stands first in Hartmann's classification. Health and the
accompanying feeling of well-being are simply conditions
that ought to le, life being presupposed as necessary, and in
general we do not think anything about them until we are
deprived of them. Even where they may be deemed as positive
pleasures, as in the aimless gambols of children and young
animals generally, there is mixed up with them another motive
to pleasure, namely, the play of merry fancies, expressed by
inarticulate sounds, or movements of the countenance. The
equilibrium, however, so essential to well-being is easily
disturbed, so that by the time the juvenile stage is past a
feeling of lassitude and heaviness, a residuum of pain in all the
organs except those of the special senses, is nearly always
present, though in so slight a form in the so-called healthful
state as to be covered by the manifold impressions of the outer
world, and to emerge into consciousness only during moments of
reflection and solitude.
It is another mistake of Mr. Sully's to suppose that muscular
exercise is the source of pleasure in the arduous sports of boys,
or in the chase and long pedestrian rambles of grown men. In
the case of the former it is the social impulse and the desire of
showing strength and adroitness that give to their games their
chief stimulus and satisfaction. In pedestrian rambles, again,
the pleasure does not lie in the mere act of transferring the
weight of the body from one foot to the other throughout a
certain space of time, a pleasure .which might equally be
enjoyed by the recruit in the drill-yard, or the prisoner at the
treadmill. The pleasure comes from the change which rambling
brings to sedentary people, living in towns : the farm-servant,
who daily walks behind the plough, finds his pleasure rather in
rest or in simple rural games.
As for humour and laughter, no one, certainly no German
pessimist, will doubt the value of the power " to transform all
the lighter evils of existence into sources of an after-gaiety ".
Genuine humour, indeed, is bound up in an especial manner
with pessimism, the object of laughter being generally something
that ouglit not to be. Throughout the whole range, from the
Pessimism. 81
harmless merry laugh to the scornful laugh of despair, we find
the same cause the incongruity of a certain reality with the
representation or idea which we or others have of it. And,
though it is pleasant to laugh, we generally laugh at somebody's
cost, and feel that as pleasure which gives pain to another. If
laughter takes its motive from poetry, it falls within the domain
of art ; and a philosopher with Hartinann's artistic gifts is little
likely to undervalue whatever thereto belongs. He only draws
the limits of the fine arts more strictly than Mr. Sully does,
banishing from their sanctuary those feelings of vanity, ambition,
curiosity, love of the adventurous, &c., &c., which are sometimes
imported into them. Mr. Sully has nothing to say about Hart-
mauu's other divisions of hunger and love, of pity and family
happiness ; the need of concrete treatment becomes too pressing
for him there. He censures Hartmann's examination of grief
and vanity, and with the remark that " the reader is by this
time, perhaps, pretty well convinced of the utterly flimsy and
meretricious character of Hartmann's examination of human
life," he passes on to consider the conditions of happiness in the
future.
Mr. Sully finds that, in spite of all the efforts of philosophers
from Aristotle to H. Spencer, " a systematic science of hedonics
has, as yet, no existence," and he aims at supplying the want by
" a truly scientific attempt to define happiness and its conditions,
and to determine whether the average external circumstances of
human life realise these conditions " (p. 263). 1 Now at first
sight it does certainly seem easier to determine whether a person
is happy than to say whether in the same person's life pleasure
has predominated over pain ; not because happiness is simply " a
peculiar compound of pleasure " (p. 279), but because happiness
may include a certain amount of pain, without ceasing to be
counted as happiness. According to Mr. Sully, " a wise man "
will not aim at single pleasures, but at those fixed and
permanent relations of life which are ever sources of pleasure
and safeguards against pain, and which, from being the
1 Let us note, in passing, one piece of inconsistency. When criticising the
ry of Schopenhauer and Hartmann that pleasure and pain are the
contentment or non-contentment of an act of will, Mr. Sully, it will be
remembered, advised his reader (p. 221) to consult any respectable text-book
in psychology, to learn that this theory is fallacious, and that pleasure and
pain ' arise from certain modes of bodily and mental activity, which are
variously denned as those which promote or hinder normal function" cc\
On p. 272, however, he has changed his mind, and points out how
inadequate this doctrine is to explain the facts of feeling. There is good
ground for the hesitation, but Mr. Sully should have remembered this when
he previously opposed a theory which not only recognises the truth of the
other doctrine within certain limits, but supplies its^deficiencies.
6
82 Pessimism.
originators of happiness, come to be identified witli it. Surveying
his mental and physical faculties, he will strive to gain wealth
and riches ; for the satisfaction of his inner life he will surround
himself with friendship and love ; and with works of charity
so far as they do not disturb his personal comfort he will
gratify his sense of pity. He will seek to counteract the bad
influences of weather and climate by hardening and training his
body, and enlarge his ability to enjoy mental* pleasures by the
acquisition of knowledge, which extends his mental horizon and
improves his artistic skill. He will render his mental life, the
sphere of sensations, thoughts and fancies, happy by the power
of conscious volition, being careful to exclude all painful and sad
representations, whether recollections or anticipations, and to
cultivate sweet memories and hopes of a future more and more
bright. Nor is it merely the attainment of these ends that is to
be called happiness : the very act of striving after them is a
source of felicity, since all (?) the varied activities of self-culture
and bodily training are pleasurable. Thus, " when all the worst
evils of life, such as sickness, bereavement, &c., are averted when
the conditions of large schemes of agreeable activity are present,
when the person concerned manifests an habitual pleasurable
interest in the events of the world which immediately surrounds
him, and when the whole 'key of life is that of quiet, unfaltering
devotion to large, inspiring and yet rational ends, we may be
said to have a fairly unambiguous presentation of human
happiness ". " Observing such a type of existence, we take
upon ourselves to assure the person that he is and must (!)
be happy at moments when he is disposed to doubt the fact."
" We have the fact that happiness has been and is now being
realised. By this fact alone the fundamental idea of modern
pessimism is amply refuted."
So far Mr. Sully, to whom we would say in reply : The fact
that there are persons, and will be, at least as long as the
development of our earth goes on undisturbed, whose life is to be
declared a 'happy one, is not denied by pessimism. But the
question with .the pessimist is-: (1) Has such a happy life really
a higher value than pleasureless, but also painless, non-
existence ? and : (2) If happy life really is preferable to
non-existence, what is the proportion of this self-justified
existence to that which we may call unjustified, as not including
a greater amount of pleasure than of pain ? To the philosopher,
existence is not more reasonable, has no higher value, than
non-existence ; existence can become superior to non-existence
only .by its content. Mr. Sully everywhere conceives life as
something that ought to be. This no doubt it is to the simple
Pessim ism. 83
unreflective miud, from the fact of its being willed. But the
point to be settled is, whether this willing is justifiable.
Mr. Sully makes the victory for optimism too easy when he
claims the simple normal action of the senses as positive
pleasure, and asserts that labour as such brings more pleasure
than pain. Self-culture and mental improvement likewise are
regarded by him as in themselves pleasurable. And, no doubt,
in many cases the victory our reason gains over our instincts or
over our bad impulses and habits, is accompanied by a pleasurable
^ feeling of satisfaction ; but in other cases the suppression of
impulses condemned by reason is so painful that the succeeding
pleasure would be no equivalent for it, if the future consequences
were not taken into account. Besides, reason does not always
get the victory, having often to be contented with such gains as
only vanity can find satisfactory. Notwithstanding this, Mr.
Sully conceives the way to happiness as a state of happiness
itself, though he has to admit (p. 349) " that the quality of the
happiness reached by most of those who are undoubtedly worthy
to be called in a sense happy is anything but high if measured
by an ideal standard ". The question, then, as to what chance
the majority have of securing this modest happiness becomes ths
more pressing. Mr. Sully allows further that " there are many
persons who cannot, by any stretch of probability, be pronounced
happy," the fact of suicide, of struggle with want and difficulty,
and of sickness everywhere, sufficiently proving this. As one of
the hindrances to happiness, he mentions the " gloomy tempera-
ment which seems to incapacitate one for accepting any of the
cheering gifts of life," and adds, " oftener it is a weakness of
active impulse and of will which shuts the person out from all
those fields of interesting occupation which are the sole guarantee
of an enduring happiness ". Thus millions of men never have
the opportunity of tracing a reasonable plan of happiness, though
their heart craves intensely for it ; and they struggle painfully
to seize it by single unsystematic, and therefore useless, efforts.
Now to us it seems quite as great a misfortune to miss the path
to happiness, as to have no path at all. Not only are there
many who refuse to see the way to happiness, there are also
many who will their own misery and with full consciousness
tread the path to unhappiness. And what more tragical fate
than to be forced by one's inmost nature to struggle for that
which to the straggler brings nothing but pain and destruction ?
Mr. Sully takes too superficial a view of the doctrine of
determinism when he says it merely declares " that m-n will not
aim at a thing till they feel the appropriate motives in other
words, till they begin to wish to possess it ". For when the way
which leads to happiness is clearly known, how many obstacles
84 Pessimism.
have to be overcome, how many enemies conquered, before the
goal is reached ! Even the mere protection against want is not
so light a thing as Mr. Sully seems to think. Those who suffer
from hunger and cold in our large towns, and the starving
thousands of India, are they all people who did not will to
work ? Is it the case that the man, whose deepest feelings of
love, friendship and trust in mankind are wounded, can seek and
find satisfaction and happiness in other directions (p. 353) ? Is
sickness, whether of ourselves or those we love, less painful
because, as " wise men," we are sure that under given
circumstances a certain thing may or must happen ? Are " the
rough street Arab " and " the ragged urchin " (p. 351) really less
to be pitied, because in moments, when the stomach does not
rebel, the busy world around them makes them forget their
miserable condition and the fact that within six hours they will
be hungry without the means to satisfy their hunger ? As
regards death, Mr. Sully holds that, so far from being considered
an evil, pessimism should laud it as the saviour from life's
misery ; while the consciousness of the shortness of life and of
the certainty of death, instead of making life less valuable, should
really enhance its pleasure, as long as it lasts. To the pessimist,
who has learnt to look upon life from a philosophical point of
view, his own death is indeed no evil (we say nothing here of
the manner of death) ; the summons to quit the ranks of the
great army of sufferers is welcome, if only it does not bring
too great sorrow to others. The death of those we love is,
however, at all times an evil, even when we comfort ourselves
with the thought that they are now safe from fate's cruel blows,
nor can any pessimistic phrases make it otherwise ; while to
the optimist, death is an evil /car' eZoyijv, whose very thought is
the destroyer of every joy. The frivolous and stupid may
succeed in forgetting it, but never the " wise man," in face of
the thousandfold reminders that surround him.
Turning next to the question of future progress, it is Mr.
Sully's opinion that this " is a much more definite and tractable
problem than that of the relative amount of happiness and
misery co-existing now or at any past period in the world's
history ". And " if progress makes for an increase of happiness,
it matters but little what are the exact proportions of joy or'
sorrow in the world at this fleeting point of time. Provided only
happiness be shown to be possible under certain conditions, the
demonstration that the onward movement of things tends,
however slowly, to the fuller realisation of these conditions
suffices to redeem the world as a whole from the damning
charge of the pessimist." This, however, can only be admitted,
if it be proved, first, that the peculiar conglomerate of feeling
Pessimism. 85
which Mr. Sully calls happiness, seems to an intellectual mind
really preferable to the insensible state of non-existence ; and,
secondly, that what we call progress really acts in the supposed
direction. But this Mr. Sully has not succeeded in proving.
What makes his " wise man " an especially happy man is his
bondage to illusions, his light-mindedness, which in spite of all
present disappointments lulls him again and again in the
flattering hopes of a better future, and his never-ceasing impulse
to action, which prevents him from self-reflection. But if the
man in question is really a wise man, sooner or later the moment
of disillusion will come, and it will then be of no use to assure
him, as Mr. Sully does, that he is and must be happy. To meet
this contingency, Mr. Sully can only suggest a sustained faith in
a happier world to come, or, failing that, at least in a happier
future of posterity. It is this future that we will now for a
little consider.
Historical progress is but one aspect of progress in nature
generally. The idea of evolution, long since adopted in
philosophy, has become familiar in natural science, especially
through the labours of Mr. Darwin and his theory of natural
selection. It is not for us here to judge how far this theory, as
a mere mechanical principle, is able to account for the origin of
species. Suffice it to say that modern philosophy, with
Hartmann at its head, acknowledges the fact of the progressive
influence of natural selection Now in man evolution seems to
be limited to a higher development of the brain and a finer
construction of the nervous system. This improvement is the
correlative of a higher intellect, a superior mind, which is the
true mainspring of historical progress. Were history determined
by the natural passions only, there would be nothing new under
the sun ; all progress depends on an increase in intelligence,
producing new motives to which the lower passions attach
themselves. It is not, however, the case, as Mr. Sully seems to
think, that the operation of natural selection within the mental
sphere tends to make the process of evolution at all less cruel.
When the earliest prehistoric races overcame their animal
kindred, from which as yet they differed but little, by greater
versatility and shrewdness, or when they fought among
themselves with teeth and fists, the pain of defeat in such rude
struggles was no greater than now when we fight with lead and
iron or the arts of diplomacy, or when by superior industry one
nation compasses the ruin of another. The extinction of one
species by another more prolific does not seem to have been
attended by more suffering than is involved in the rivalry of
races, even though the doomed race is allowed slowly to starve
according to peaceful treaty and amid assurances of the kindest
86 Pessimism.
regard for its true welfare. Such things will continue as long
as the evolution of nature and mind goes on. The tearing teeth
give way to the persuasive tongue and the skilful pen ; the bare
fist and the stone-weapon are replaced by gun and rifle, and
these in their turn may give place to the votes of an international
congress. But in every case those who succumb must suffer,
though the pain may be transferred almost entirely from the
physical to the mental sphere. Individuals or races are
evermore acquiring a predominant intellectual influence over
others, and a two- fold suffering is the natural result. The
exercise of power is repressed in the superior few by the
multitude of inferiors, while these find it troublesome and
dangerous. Thus both sides are supplied with motives for a
struggle, which is none the less a real struggle for existence,
because its objects are ideas. The sympathy and benevolence
referred to by Mr. Sully (p. 387) cannot and will not prevent
this struggle ; at the best they will only serve to heal the
wounds which it has caused. All that humanity joined to
prudence can do, is to alleviate and limit existing evils ; and it
is only when benevolence has ceased, because there is no sphere
for its activity, that we can say that a positive step has been
taken towards general happiness. According to Hartmann, the
action even of the best form of government is but of a negative
character. Mr. Sully, on his side, would credit the state of
the future with unlimited powers, including even the checking
of over-population. Now many states have indeed tried to
restrain pauperism by putting obstacles in the way of matri-
mony, but the result has always been the same the multipli-
cation of illegitimate births and prostitution. Or, if men should
"become so prudent as to restrain their sexual impulses from a
regard to their own comfort, and from pity for the generations to
come, then the process of training for such wisdom would
certainly be a severe one, and what would be gained in ease from
family cares would be dearly paid for by the pain resulting from
the suppression of instinct. While, if the very instinct of
generation could by a " scientific mind " be supposed eradicated,
who can appreciate the effect upon the relation of the sexes a
relation from whose soil have sprung the most venomous thorns
but also the sweetest blossoms of happiness, and which has
supplied the most stirring motives to human activity ?
No doubt, knowledge is expanding in all directions, and with
the increase of knowledge of nature there is an increase of our
power over it. But hitherto all positive increase of general
wealth has had the character of a robbing of nature, and a time
will come when the productiveness of the whole earth can no
more be increased. Nevertheless, pessimists do not deny that
Pessimism. 87
increase of knowledge, directly as well as indirectly, tends to
lessen and even remove many evils, and Hartmann, in particular,
joins with his pessimism a political and social optimism that
seems quite beyond the comprehension of Mr. Sully. It is
generally admitted that epidemics may be prevented, or, where
they already exist, may be confined within narrower limits by a
more rational sanitary policy and improved medical art, while
many diseases may be made wholly to disappear by proper
physical training and the discovery of new remedies. Yet as
long as the doom of death lasts, sickness and infirmity with its
attendant sufferings will go before. Hartmann does not question
the progress of the medical art, but only doubts whether it can
keep up with the rapid increase of the more complex nervous
diseases, and of that sensibility which causes slight disturbances
of the normal functions to be more acutely felt than were
greater disturbances in the earlier stages of man's existence,
in consequence of the finer nervous organisation which is the
condition of higher intelligence.
The future will doubtless heal many wounds which now seem
incurable. Even the social question will some day find a
solution, though no one dare say whether it will be by gentle or
by violent means. But the great sources of suffering will still
abide in the future, for the reason that they spring from the
very conditions of life. In fact, just in proportion as the
different evils arising from passing social and political conditions
are found to vanish, will the fact become more and more evident
that life itself is the worst foe of happiness. Even if
Mr. Sully had succeeded in proving that in the far-off future
those existences that we call happy will become the majority,
the fundamental idea of pessimism would still be far from being
refuted. Should it be the doom of organic creation to perish by
a general refrigeration, surely the sum total of pain arising from
the pressure of more and more unfavourable climatic conditions
on the animal and vegetable kingdoms would be infinitely
greater than during the period of improving conditions ; for with
every backward movement a developed consciousness would
have to be repressed. And, even if the cooling of our globe
were to cease at the stage most favourable to human life and
progress, the existence of a happy race during an indefinite
future would tell against pessimism only on the supposition that
the happy humanity of the future and the suffering humanity of
the past and the present are one and the same. This is the idea
involved in the ' panlogism ' or ' panthelism ' of Hartmann, but
has no place of right in the materialistic automatism and
will-dualism of Mr. Sully. If there is no absolute unconscious
spirit as the entity common to all the separate conscious minds,
88 Pessimism.
the distant future is absolutely nothing to me of the present ; it
is only what I myself suffer or enjoy that can incline me to
pessimism or optimism. After me may come the deluge or the
millenium, but it is a matter of indifference to me, if my Ego is a
mere cerebral phenomenon, the product of an aggregation of mere
material atoms.
We will not follow Mr. Sully in his inquiry into the
internal and external sources of pessimism and the causes of
its rapid dissemination, but only note that he has too
intelligent and keen an eye for natural, political and social
shortcomings to throw himself unreservedly into the arms of
optimism. He considers that, according to the side from which
they are regarded, the facts may land us either in optimism or
pessimism. In this we agree with him, but not when he goes
on to say that the main source of pessimism is an abnormal
sensitiveness to pain, and that pessimism itself is to be regarded
in a large measure as a pathological phenomenon, which will
cease to exist when the medical science of the future shall succeed
in overcoming the peculiarities of temperament in which it is
rooted (p, 444). With certain limitations this may be true in
cases of unreasoned pessimism Weltschmerz, but not of philoso-
phical pessimism, which, uninfluenced by subjective feelings,
rests exclusively on objective observation, and counts individual
sensation as an object among other objects. Whatever can in
this way be alleged against pessimism, can with equal force be
alleged against optimism, and there is no reason why defects of
temperament should be easier to eliminate in the one case than
in the other. Nor is the attempt to hold the balance between
optimism and pessimism that most worthy of " the man of philo-
sophic mind " (p. 463) ; it should rather be to find the synthesis
of both. To the eye of cool reason the world seems as good as
possible because it is a real logical process ; in the eudaemonistic
point of view, it is worse than no world, because the path whereon
the logos strides from victory to victory is a path of suffering to
the creature.
So far as the "how" and the "what" of the world is
concerned, Mr. Sully's own "meliorism" does not differ from
Hartmann's social and political optimism ; but if meliorism
includes the hope that the future will justify the fact that a
world exists, it merely illustrates what Hartmann calls " the
third stage of illusion".
We may finally remark, in thus closing our long criticism of a
"criticism," that it is not because they have to pay high taxes, or to
do military service for their country, nor yet from any humiliating
consciousness of the superiority of Trench civilisation and
luxury, that so many Germans confess to Hartmann's pessimism ;
Philosophy in the United States. 89
but because a time of material prosperity and of fulfilment of
national hopes and wishes is a fit time to show how small an
influence a little more or a little less of luck in external
conditions can have on the value of life. And, if we have suc-
ceeded in convincing some readers that German pessimism has
not been quite annihilated by Mr. Sully, and that it might still
be worth their while to study its true meaning in the works of
Schopenhauer and Hartmann, our labour has not been in vain.
0. PLUMACHER.
XOTE. It is impossible to explain such remarks as those which Mr.
Sully has thought fit to make on Hartmann's style and method at pp.
454-7, except on the assumption that he has a rooted prejudice against the
great German thinker. They could hardly have been penned if Hart-
mann's works had already (by translation) become generally known. In
dealing with the opponents of Hartmann, his taste in the matter of style is
somewhat less delicate, else he would hardly call the flat witticisms of J.
C. Fischer "pleasantly satirical," and find" the attack of a certain Dr.
Stiebeling " rather effective " (p. 204). He does indeed speak of an
anonymous work, Das Unbeu'usste vom Standpunkt der Physiologie ud
Dsscehdenzthforie (1872), as " a much more thoughtful demonstration of
the unteuability of Hartmann's biological assumptions " ; but he evidently
little suspected what was to be revealed in a second edition (1877), that this
work, whose truly scientific character was fully recognised in Germany,
was the production of none other than Hartmann himself ! Hartmann has
thus given unmistakeable proof of being no mere layman in natural science;
and, in particular, he has shown that it was from no ignorance of what
the mechanical principle of Darwinism is able to explain that he felt himself
bound to reject it in part, and to declare the necessity of adopting in>u-:id
a spiritualistic teleological principle, to which the other is but as means to
end.
VI. PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNITED STATES.
THERE are nearly 300 non-Catholic colleges in the United
States, most of them chartered by the legislatures of their
respective states, and conferring the degree of A.B. upon their
students at the end of a four years' course, and A.M.
three years after graduation. In nearly all these institutions
certain studies, a?sthetical, logical, historical, most commonly
ethical, most rarely psychological, are roughly classed as
philosophy and taught during the last year almost invariably
by the president. The methods of instruction and examination
are so varied that it is impossible in the space at our disposal
to report in detail upon the nature and value of the work
done in these institutions. More than 200 of them are
strictly denominational, and the instruction given in philosophy
90 Philosophy in the United States.
is rudimentary and mediaeval. More than 60 which in the
annual catalogue claim to be non-sectarian are, if not pervaded
with the spirit of some distinct religious party, yet strictly
evangelical. Indeed there are less than half a dozen colleges
or universities in the United States where metaphysical thought
is entirely freed from reference to theological formulae. Many
teachers of philosophy have no training in their department
save such as has been obtained in theological seminaries,
and their pupils are made far more familiar with the points of
difference in the theology of Parks, Fairchilds, Hodges and the
like, than with Plato, Leibnitz or Kant. Many of these colleges
were established by funds contributed during periods of religious
awakening, and are now sustained with difficulty as denomina-
tional outposts by appeals from the pulpit and sectarian press.
The nature of the philosophical instruction is determined by the
convictions of constituencies and tmstees, while professors are
to a great extent without independence or initiative in matters
of speculative thought. The philosophical character of some
institutions is determined by the conditions attached to
bequests. A few are under the personal and perhaps daily
supervision of the founders themselves, who engage and discharge
the members of their faculties as so many day-labourers, and
who are likely to be religious enthusiasts or propagandists.
The traditional college-regime in the United States was
designed to cultivate openness and flexibility of mind by intro-
ducing the student hastily to a great variety of studies, so that
his own tastes and aptitudes might be consciously developed as
guides to ulterior and more technical work. The method of
philosophical indoctrination, in striking contrast to this, seeks
to prevent the independent personal look at things, and to
inoculate the mind with insidious orthodoxies which too often
close it for ever to speculative interests. The great open ques-
tions of psychology and metaphysics are made to dwindle in
number and importance as compared with matters of faith
and conduct. Some of the professorlings of philosophy are
disciples of disciples of Hopkins, Hickok, Wayland, Upham,
Haven. Most have extended their philosophical horizon as far
as Reid, Stewart, Hamilton. Many have read Mill's Examination
of Hamilton, chapters of Herbert Spencer, lectures of Huxley
and Tyndall, and epitomes of Kant, Berkeley, Hegel, and
Hume. Others, fewer in number, have studied compendious
histories of philosophy like Schwegler and Ueberweg, have read
Mill's Logic and Taine, have dipped into Kant's Critique, and
have themselves printed essays on Spencer, Leibnitz, Plato, &c.,
in religious periodicals, have perhaps published compilations on
mental or moral science, and are able to aid the sale of small
Philosophy in the United States. 91
editions of their works by introducing them into their own
classes as text-books. Others, fewer yet, to be spoken of later,
have had thorough training, and are doing valuable and original
work. It is, in any case, plain that there is very small chance that
a well-equipped student of philosophy in any of its departments
will secure a position as a teacher of the subject. He may find a
career as a writer, editor, or instructor in other branches, or he
may bring his mind into some sort of platonising conformity with
the milder forms of orthodoxy and teach a philosophy with
reservations. That most of the instructors find the limita-
tion of their field of work galling is by no means asserted or
implied. Many of them feel no need of a larger and freer
intellectual atmosphere. They have never been taught to
reason save from dogmatic or scriptural data. Where little
science is taught there is a certain dignity attached to their
department above all the others, which. is as unfavourable to
their own advancement as it is to the spirit of persistent inquiry
on the part of the students. Summary and original methods of
dealing with speculative questions are far more commonly found
than philosophical erudition or careful criticism. Yet there is
an almost universal complacency in the degree of liberality
attained which is in strange and indeed irrational contrast to the
feeling with which a philosophy which is entirely emancipated
from the theological yoke is regarded. Andover is well pleased
to be thought freer from the rigidity of dogma than Princeton,
and Oberlin claims more warmth of feeling and less tyranny of
creed than either. While slight differences among the philo-
sophical idola of orthodoxy are thus disproportionately magnified,
all these institutions unite in impressing upon their students
the lesson that there is an abyss of scepticism and materialism
into which, as the greatest of all intellectual disasters, those who
cease to believe in the Scriptures as interpreted according to the
canons of orthodox criticism, are sure to be plunged.
The spirit and aims of philosophical instruction in very
many of the smaller colleges have found an admirable exponent
in the Boston Monday lectureship of the Rev. Joseph Cook, whose
discourses, now published in several volumes, have had an im-
mense influence upon the semi-theological philosophy of all such
centres of learning as we have just characterised. In these
forty-minute lectures before immense popular audiences, art,
literary criticism, politics, religious history, science and systems
of thought are discussed with much display of erudition and
with great similitude of candour. Long lists of names and title-
pages are read, succinct and often epigrammatic summaries of
philosophical and religious systems and tendencies are given ;
recent discoveries in science are explained or illustrated by
92 Philosophy in the United States.
diagrams and by illuminated microscopic preparations, until the
hearers are convinced that, by a short and easy method now
first displayed, the very kernel of truth has been shelled from
books and nature by a master-hand. Then, with much liberality
of interpretation, scriptural doctrines are compared with these
results, all in a conciliatory spirit : but wherever the teachings
of science or philosophy are judged to vary from those of Scrip-
ture, the supreme authority of the latter is urged with all that
intensity of a fervid and magnetic personality which makes
dogmatism impressive and often even sublime. The mere brute
force of unreasoned individual conviction, which Hegel so wittily
characterises as the animal kingdom of mind, has a peculiar
convincing eloquence of its own in religious matters, which,
acceptable as it often is to faith, has long been one of the
stumbling-blocks in the way of philosophy in America.
Another reason for the backward condition of philosophy in
most of these institutions is found in their poverty. A few of
them were established by real-estate companies to help the sale
of laud. By the negligence of the more worthy members of
trustee-boards, together with mistaken provisions to fill vacancies,
others have fallen under the control of ward-politicians, and pro-
fessorships are retained or declared vacant by a scarcely better
than popular suffrage. Still others are under the immediate
control of state-legislatures, which have it in their power to
reduce or even to withhold the annual appropriation. Nearly
all of them are poorly endowed, and some are entirely without
funds save those accruing from tuition-fees ; and thus, so numer-
ous are they, so sharp is the competition for patronage, and so
quick and sagacious is parental jealousy of any instruction which
shall unsettle early and home-bred religious convictions, that it
is not surprising that there is little philosophical or even
intellectual independence to be found in these institutions.
Again the faculty or corps of professors generally consists of
from three to ten men, or occasionally ladies, who must instruct
in mathematics, natural and physical science, ancient and two
or three modern languages, political and literary history, oratory,
theme-writing, &c., and who are thus obliged to spend from
three to six hours per day in the class-room. Thus fatigue,
coupled with the dissipation of teaching miscellaneous subjects,
generally renders original thought and research impossible even
where otherwise it might have led to valuable results.
While thus business conspires with Bethel to bring mental
science into general disfavour, the average American college is
in no position to lead or even to resist popular opinion and
sentiment, supposing it inclined to do so. The shrewd practical
money-making man, even in one of the learned proles-
Philosophy in the. United States. 93
sions, can make little use of philosophy ; indeed it is liable to
weaken his executive powers and make him introspective and
theoretical The popular philistinism which we have heard im-
pressed as a weighty philosophical motto in the exhortation,
" Look outward not inward, forward not backward, and keep
at work," and which seems no more rational than the super-
stitious aversion to science in the Middle Ages, has been
strangely efficacious against philosophical endeavour here.
Hence all branches of mental science have come to be widely
regarded as the special appanage of a theological curriculum,
where despite the limitations above described a little speculation
is a trine less dangerous than for a practical business man.
The above, however, we hasten to say, is the darker side of
the picture and is truer in general of Western than of Eastern
colleges. The most vigorous and original philosophical instruc-
tion is almost everywhere given in ethics, though like nearly all
other subjects it is taught from text-books. Those most commonly
used are Alexander's Moral Philosophy, Hopkins's Law of Love
and Love as a Lav:, Wayland's and Fairchild's Moral Science.
Calderwood's and Peabody's treatises have lately been introduced
into three of the larger institutions. Portions of Cicero's De
Ojficiis we also find in three catalogues as part of the required
course in ethics. The work with text-books is commonly
supplemented by lectures where ethical principles are applied
to law, trade, art, conduct, &c., in a more or less hortatory
manner. The grounds of moral obligation are commonly
deduced from Revelation, supplemented by the intuitions of
conscience, which are variously interpreted. The practical
questions of daily life are often discussed in the class-room with
the professor with great freedom, detail and interest. Current
social or political topics are sometimes introduced, and formal
debates by students appointed beforehand by the professor, and
followed by his comments, may occasionally take the place of
regular recitations and lectures. In one large institution each
member of the class in ethics is required to write a thesis
during the senior year, to be read before the class on one of such
topics as the following, which we copy from a printed list : " Is
it right to do evil that good may come ? " " Is falsehood ever justi-
fiable, and if so, when ? " " The moral character of Hamlet."
" My favourite virtues and why ? " " How far is Plato's
Republic truly moral ? " " Discussion of the conflict of duties,
e.g., in Jephthah, Orestes." " The Utilitarianism of J. S. Mill."
" How far may patriotism justify the motto. Mi/ country right
or wrong." " The moral difficulties in the way of civil service
reform." That the subjects thus attempted are far too vast and
general for thorough discussion by the students who essay them
94 Philosophy in the United Slates.
cannot be denied, but it is possible that definite and permanent
centres of interest in the infinite questions of ethics may often
be thus established in the most immature minds. On the
whole the average student completes his course in moral science
with the conviction that there is a hard and fast line between
certain definite acts and habits which are always and every-
where wrong, and others which are right ; that above all motives,
circumstances, insights, the absolute imperative of conscience
must determine the content as well as the form of actions.
The psychological nature and origin of conscience are ques-
tions which have excited very little interest.
The theory of the syllogism is taught in nearly all the
colleges from elementary text-books, of which Fowler's Deduc-
tive Logic and Jevons's smaller treatise, which have lately
come into quite general use, are the best. As a rule but little
time is devoted to work in this department, and the methods of
induction are often entirely ignored.
Mental philosophy is usually taught during perhaps half the
senior year from such text-books as Bowen's abridgement of
Hamilton's Metaphysics-, The Human Intellect, by President
Porter of Yale College, which has been epitomised in a smaller
volume ; Haven's, Upham's and Wayland's Mental Philosophy ;
Everett's Science of Thought ; Hickok's Rational and Empirical
Psychology. Schwegler's Outline, of the History of Philosophy, of
which Seeley's translation is far superior to that of Stirling, is
coming into use in the larger institutions. Locke's Essay,
portions of Berkeley, of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and
even Mill, Hamilton, Spencer's Psychology, Bain, and Taine, are
also occasionally introduced.
^Esthetics, so called, is taught in many colleges from various
text-books, such as Day, Bascom, Kames's Elements of Criticism,
and compendiums of art-history. An immense range of topics,
from landscape-gardening and household-furniture to painting,
poetry, and even music, are summarily treated, and more or less
arbitrary psychological principles are laid down as fundamental
canons of taste. The work done in this department we regard
as not merely worthless, but as positively harmful. No attempt
is made to explain the ulterior causes or the nature of i'eelings
of pleasure and pain ; and without museums, galleries, or even
photographs, little can be learned of the history or principles
of art.
Butler's Analogy, Natural Theology, the Evidence of Christi-
anity, Pedagogics, and the Catechism, are taught in a few
institutions as a part of the philosophical discipline. The
question of the order in which the above studies should bo
pursued, was lately brought forward in a general convention of
Philosophy in the United States. 95
college officers, but has attracted little attention. In at least
four of the larger theological seminaries, courses of lectures on
the history of philosophical speculation are given by the
professor of systematic divinity. In very many of the higher
schools and colleges for female education, especially if they
are under evangelical control, instruction is given in mental
science. In the annual catalogues of the very smallest and
poorest of these colleges, we have seen one teacher dubbed
professor of mental, moral and physical science, and in another
of natural and intellectual philosophy. Literature, history,
mathematics, and more often political economy, may be found
as part of the work of the instructor in philosophy.
The serious and introspective frame of mind which religious
freedom and especially pietism tends to develop ; the enterprise
and individuality which are characteristic of American life, and
which have shown themselves in all sorts of independent
speculation ; the principle of self-government, which in the
absence of historical precedents and tradition inclines men to
seek for the first- principles of political and ethical science, have
combined to invest semi-philosophical themes with great interest
even for men of defective education. From the pulpit and even
in the adult Sunday-school class or the debating society, in the
club-essay and the religious press, metaphysical discussions are
often heard or read, and not infrequently awaken the liveliest
discussions. Yet, on the other hand, dogmatism and the
practical spirit have combined thus far quite too effectually
to restrain those who might otherwise have devoted themselves
to the vocation of thinking deeply, fearlessly and freely on the
ultimate questions of life and conduct. If " philosophers in
America are as rare as snakes in Norway," it is because the
country is yet too young. The minds of business and working
men, whether sceptical or orthodox, have short, plain, and rigid
methods of dealing with matters of pure reason or of faith, and
are not always tolerant of those who adopt other and more
'unsettling' ones. If, however, we may find in Hegel's Pheno-
menology a program of the future, the hard common sense
which subdues nature and organises the objective world into
conformity with man's physical needs will, at length, when it
has done its work, pause in retrospect, and finally be reflected as
conscious self-knowledge which is the beginning of philosophical
wisdom. As a nation we are not old enough to develop, and
yet too curious and receptive to despair of, a philosophy.
As we pass either from the smaller to the larger or from the
Western to the Eastern institutions, we find in general a much
better condition of things. The older Edwards, the influence of
whose writings is still very great upon the religious pliilosophy
96 Philosophy in the United States.
of !N~ew England and the Middle States, did much to rationalise
Calvinism and to inspire confidence in the verdicts of reason.
In his great work on the freedom of the Will, he taught that the
essence of right and wrong lies in the nature of acts and motives
and not in their cause, that spontaneity and not self-determina-
tion is the characteristic of a free act. Subjectively, virtue is
the love of being in general. Adam's sin was not imputed to
his descendants, but its effects were naturally transmitted as the
withdrawal of higher spiritual influences. The new birth is not
the advent of a new but the new activity of an old principle.
The disciples of Edwards Dr. Dwight, C. G. Finney, E. A.
Parks, Horace Bushnell, Moses Stuart, and many others have
modified and widely extended his opinions.
Deserving of special mention are Mark Hopkins and L. L.
Hickok. The latter, lately professor of philosophy in Union
College, N.Y., has written text-books entitled Rational Psycho-
logy, Moral Science, Empirical Psychology, Rational Cosmology,
Creator and Creation, &c., some of which are made the basis of
instruction in Amherst College. On the ground of a modified
Kantianism he attempts to reconcile an original interpretation
of post-Kantian idealism with orthodox theology. His subtle
mysticism has found many admirers. Mark Hopkins, long
president of Williams College, though laying claim to no great
scholarship even in his own department, brings with singular
independence and individuality the skill of nearly half a century
of paedagogic experience, and a most impressive force and sweet-
ness of character, to enforce in a direct Socratic way the lesson
that philanthropy is the substance of both religion and morals.
His influence, not only on many generations of students, but
wherever his lectures and text-books have been read, has been
considerable.
At Yale College, philosophy is taught mainly by President
Porter on the basis of his compendious text-book above named,
but with auxiliary lectures, books of reference, &c. Although
a clergyman of the congregationalist denomination, he has
devoted a life of study largely to philosophy, and is a vigorous
expositor of the Scotch-Kantian speculation as opposed to
Darwinism and materialism. 1
The influence of W. E. Canning, Theodore Parker, E. W.
Emerson, and the considerable body of Unitarian writers, has
been most wholesome in stimulating and liberalising speculative
thought, especially at Harvard University where the most
1 Dr. Porter has also published a brief historical sketch of philosophy in
the United States, with an exhaustive bibliography, in Ueberweg's History \
of Philosophy (translated by Professor G. S. .Morris of Michigan University)
Vol. II., pp. 422, ff.
Philosophy in the United States. 97
extended course of philosophic study is now offered. The
amount of work required of all students is much less than at
Yale, and instead of the topical method, by which sensation,
representation, reason, &c., are followed separately through
ancient and modem systems, the historical method is adopted.
Jevons's Logic and Locke's Essay, each two hours per week,
are prescribed for all students during the junior year. But in
addition to this, five optional courses are offered in the last
annual catalogue as follows : (1) Cartesianism, Descartes, Male-
brauche, Berkeley, Hume ; (2) Spinoza, Leibnitz and Kant,
BouiUier's Histoire dc la philosophic Cartesienne, Kant's Critique
of Pare Reason, Schwegler's History of Modern Philosophy,
Lectures on French and German Philosophy ; (3) German
Philosophy of the present day Schopenhauer's Die Welt als
Wille un-'l Vorstcllung, Hartmann's Philosophic des Unbeu-ussten ;
(4) Psychology Taine On Intelligence, Recitations and Lectures ;
(5) Ethics Grote's Treatise on the Moral Ideals, Cicero's DA
Officiis, Lectures. Each of these courses occupies three hours
per week through the year, and all, especially the first two, are
largely attended. The fourth course has been organised only
two years, and is conducted by the assistant-professor of
physiology. It was admitted not without some opposition into
the department of philosophy, and is up to the present time the
only course in the country where students can be made familiar
with the methods and results of recent German researches in
physiological psychology : the philosophical stand-point of Dr.
James is essentially that of the modified new-Kantianism of
Eenouvier. Professor Bo wen, who has been for many years at
the head of the philosophical department, has recently published
his lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy in the form
of a text-book, a review of which has already appeared in MIXD.
He is a very lucid expositor, especially of Kant and Schopen-
hauer, and a vigorous antagonist of materialism and infidelity :
his philosophical stand-point is essentially theistic and his
method eclectic. Assistant-professor Palmer, who has for some
years taught the first course, and more recently Kant's Critique, is
purely objective, impersonal and historical in his expositions,
which are remarkably acute and thorough. Professor C. C.
Everett, of the theological department, lectures on the history of
German philosophy from a modified Hegelian stand-point.
How independent and original his interpretations have been
may best be seen in his Science of Thought. John Fiske,
formerly lecturer on philosophy in the university, and widely
known by his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy as the American
expositor of Herbert Spencer, was the first to elaborate the
doctrine that the development of sympathy and philanthropy
7
98 Philosophy in the United States.
was due to the prolongation of the period of human infancy.
Following Mr. Spencer's sociological researches, he has more
recently turned his attention to historical subjects. Chauncy
Wright, whose philosophical papers have lately been edited by
Professor Norton, was a man of great philosophical acumen,
whose untimely death was most unfortunate for philosophy in
Cambridge. It is impossible, even after a careful study of his
writings, either to epitomise his views or to account for his
influence upon those who came in contact with him. The
latter was no doubt largely due to the uniform sweetness
of his disposition, to his unusual powers of ready conversational
exposition and illustration, and to the extent and variety of his
mental acquisitions. His most considerable essay, on the
" Origin of Self-Consciousness," unfolds the view that when a
subjective sequence of mental terms or states can be held along
with, though distinct from, an objective sequence, involving
thus at least four terms in all, self-consciousness may be first
said to exist. How this comes to pass and how thence the
higher faculties are developed, is unfolded with most character-
istic analytic subtlety. With an almost Coleridgean power of
abstract ratiocination, favoured by his mathematical profession,
he combined the tastes of a student of nature. His correspon-
dence with Mr. Darwin, more lately printed among his letters,
shows how carefully he had pondered the details of the theory
of natural selection, the expression of emotion, &c. It can
scarcely be doubted, however, by those who attempt to shell
out the kernel of his speculations, that vagueness and even
ambiguity most seriously impair the value of his work. Finally, no
account of philosophy in Cambridge would be complete which
failed to mention the name of J. E. Cabot, a member of the
visiting board of the University in philosophy, and widely
known for the extent of his learning and the breadth of his
sympathies and opinions.
President Le Conte of the University of California, most
favourably known for his acute contributions to the phenomena
and theory of binocular vision, has for some years instructed
his classes from the text-books of Bain, Spencer, Carpenter, &c.
It is also hoped that the new University of Baltimore will soon
establish a chair of physiological psychology and another of the
history of philosophy. A special professorship of the former
department is more or less definitely contemplated by several of
the larger institutions.
Outside of schools and colleges, philosophical interests have
taken on the whole a wide range. Treiidelenburg, Schleier-
inacher, Krause, Schelling, Fichte, Herbart and Lotze have all
found more or less careful students and even disciples among
Philosophy in the United States. 99
men of partial leisure in the various professions, who have
spent the last year or two of student-life in Germany. Above
all these, however, stand first the influence of Hegel, which since
1867 has been represented by the quarterly Journal of Specu-
lative Philosophy, edited by Win. T. Harris of St. Louis, and
secondly that of Herbert Spencer and other English evolu-
tionists, which has been greatly extended by the Popular Science
Monthly, edited by Dr. E. L. Youmans of New York. Mr.
Harris is a pronounced Hegelian, adopting in the main the
intrepretation of Eosenkranz. As superintendent of the public
schools of his city, he has had but little time for original contri-
butions to his Journal, but all English students who wish
to understand Hegel's Logic, particularly the third part, should
not fail to read Mr. Harris's compendious articles as part of the
necessary propaedeutic. He has gathered about him a circle of
young men who have been led by his influence to interest
themselves in German speculations, and whose contributions are
found in nearly every number of the Journal. Unfortunately
it has never quite paid its expenses, and the editor himself has
year after year made up the deficit from his own purse. Yet
the quality of the original articles has steadily improved, and
the influence of the Journal seems on the whole to be increasing
in the country. From the first a large portion of each number
has been given to translations from Greek, French, and especially
German philosophers. Important chapters of Fichte, Kant,
Trendelenburg, Eosenkranz, and especially of Hegel's Aesthetics,
Phenomenology, Logic, &c., have appeared here for the first time
in English. Many convenient epitomes of more extended works
by the above and other writers have also been published. The
editor has from the first carefully studied the bearings of
philosophical speculation upon methods of education, and the
high character of the schools under his care and the wide
interest felt among teachers in his annual reports, bear witness
to the discretion with which abstract principles have been
utilised as practical suggestions. German paedagogical methods
have also been introduced to the notice of teachers in the pages
of the Journal. Among its earlier more prominent con-
tributors Mr. Kroeger has lately turned his attention to trans-
lating Fichte, Mr. Schneider to Shakespearian criticism, and
Mr. Davidson to Aristotle, whose Mctnphysica he is now trans-
lating with new interpretations in Athens.
The appearance of such a journal in America, and above all
in a great centre of western trade, supported by enthusiastic
self-trained thinkers who had the hardihood to attempt to
translate into Anglo-Saxon the ponderous nomenclature of the
absolute idealism of the Wissenschaftslehre and the Hegelian
100 Philosophy in the United States.
Logic, has been often spoken of as surprising and even
anomalous. The explanation, however, may not be far to
seek. There is perhaps no spot in America where during the
last quarter of a century illustrations of the powers of the
human mind over nature have been so numerous and so im-
pressive as in St. Louis. In a city so young and so large,
the geographical and commercial centre between west, east,
and south, the inference that in a more than poetic sense
thought is creative and man is the maker of the world, is not
merely congenial, but to a certain degree spontaneous and
irresistible. Again there is such a pleasing sense of liberty in
the perpetual recurrence of dialectic alternatives, and yet of
security, inspired by the regularity with which the beats and
clicks of the triadic engine are heard, and above all there is
such a largeness and scope in the formula of Hegel, as if the
Universe itself might be ' done ' once for all by reading a few
thousand pages, that it is no wonder his sun should rise upon the
new as it sets in the old world. Where every thing is an open
question it is pleasing to feel that " all progress is advancement
in the consciousness of freedom". But this is not all. No one
can spend a week among the philosophical coteries of St. Louis
without feeling still more perhaps than by reading the Journal
that these causes, aided by the influences of reaction from a
severely practical and business life, have awakened the faculty of
philosophy to a most hopeful and inquiring receptivity. There
seems scarcely a doubt that, should Mr. Harris decide to open
his Journal to psychological as well as to metaphysical dis-
cussions, and in preference to the aesthetical selections which
have been so often weary and unprofitable, it would soon
become not only self-supporting but remunerative.
One of the most acute of the so-called " right wing " Hegelians
is Professor Howison of the Massachusetts Technological School
in Boston. His course of lectures on the history of philosophy
is extended and thorough, though attended largely by ladies.
He has lately delivered a course of public lectures in the Lowell
Institute on the Logic of Grammar mainly in the spirit of
Aristotle and Trendelenburg.
In Germany it is said that Hegelianism has been an excellent
Vorfrucht to prepare the philosophical soil for the theories of i
evolution. It limbers and exercises without fevering the mind, i
making a safe and easy transition from the orthodox to the J
scientific stand-point. Even its adversaries often admit that as
a mental discipline at a certain stage of philosophical culture it i
is unsurpassed. However this may be, it is certain that the f
theories of Herbert Spencer, G. H. Lewes and other English '
evolutionists, which have exerted such an immense influence in |
Philosophy in the United States. 101
the United States during the last decade, are not indebted to
Hegelianism, but are represented almost entirely by scientific
men not especially interested in the history of speculation. If the
worst side of the American college is the philosophical, its best
is the scientific department. The value and thoroughness of
the work done here is probably too little appreciated abroad.
While in some of the smaller colleges it is poor enough, in
many others the professors have had a thorough European
training and lack only leisure and library and laboratory oppor-
tunities for valuable and original work. With comparatively
few exceptions, all the most competent teachers of natural or
physical science either tacitly accept or openly advocate the
fundamental principles of evolution. Even the most orthodox
institutions are often no exceptions to this rule. One of the
largest of these long and vainly sought for a professor of zoology
who would consent to pledge himself beforehand to say nothing
in favour of Darwinism. In eight or nine out of more than
thirty of those institutions which the writer has visited,
instructors in this department are allowed to teach the principles
of Huxley and Haeckel, if they wish, unmolested. It must be
said, however, that very often the adoption of the formulae of
the development-theory is so premature as seriously to interfere
with the patient mastery of scientific details, or, through the
students' impatience with other methods, to lower the standard
of work and attainment in other departments. In a country of
such remarkably rapid development as our own, where the
ploughboy is never allowed to forget that he may become a
millionaire or even President if he wills it earnestly enough,
the catchwords of evolution often excite an enthusiasm which
is inversely as the power to comprehend its scope and impor-
tance. Many of the more semi-popular aspects of Herbert
Spencer's philosophy have been admirably presented by Mr.
John Fiske in courses of lectures in Harvard University, in
Boston, New York, and in several of the Western cities. In
the periodical, especially the religious, press, criticisms almost
without number have been published. Professor Bowne of the
new Boston University has elaborated his strictures of Herbert
Spencer into a small volume which is one of the most subtle
and forcible criticisms of the First Principles and the Psychology
that have ever proceeded from an essentially evangelical stand-
point
About a year ago Mr. C. S. Peirce, assistant in the United
States Coast Survey, began in the Popular Science Monthly a
series of papers entitled " Illustrations of the Logic of Science,"
which is still progressing. The author is a distinguished
mathematician, and this discussion, in which he long ago
102 Philosophy in the United States.
interested himself, promises to be one of the most important of
American contributions to philosophy. Thought, he premises,
is excited by the irritation of doubt, and ceases when belief
is attained. Feigned hesitancy, whether for amusement or
otherwise, stimulates mental action. The production of belief
is thus the sole function of thought. It involves moreover the
establishment in our nature of a rule of action or a habit.
Beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to
which they give rise. There is no distinction of meaning so
fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.
Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects. To attain
the highest degree of clearness we must consider what effects
that may have practical bearings we conceive the object of
our concern to have. Our conception of these effects is then
the whole of our conception of the object. In calling a thing
hard, e.g., we say that it will not be scratched by many sub-
stances. We may indeed say that all hard bodies remain soft
till they are touched. There is no falsity in such a mode of
speech. The question of what would occur under circumstances
which do not actually arise is not a question of facts, but only
of the most perspicuous arrangement of them. (Cf. Helmholtz,
Physiol. Optik, ss. 431-443.) If we know the effects of force, we
are acquainted with every fact which is implied in saying that
force exists, and there is nothing more to know. All the effects
of force may be correctly formulated under the rule for com- *
pounding accelerations. Processes of investigation, if pushed
far enough, will give one certain solution for every question to
which they can be applied. The general problem of Probabilities,
which is simply the problem of Logic, is from a given state of
facts to determine the universal probability of a possible fact. The
probability of a mode of argument is the proportion of cases in
which it carries truth with it. But it springs from an inference
which is repeated indefinitely. The number of probable infer-
ences which a man draws in his whole life is a finite one, and
he cannot be certain that the mean result will accord with pro-
babilities at all. A gambler, an insurance company, a civilisa-
tion, although the value of their expectations at any given
moment, according to the doctrine of chance, is large, are yet
sure to break down at some time. The fact of death makes the
number of our risks and impressions finite, and therefore their
mean result uncertain. Yet the idea of probability assumes that
this number is indefinitely great. Hence Mr. Peirce infers that
logicality inexorably requires that our interests should not be
limited. They must not stop at our fate but must embrace the
community. Logic is thus rooted in the social principle. He
who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the world is
Philosophy in the United States. 103
illogical in all his impressions collectively. Interest in an
indefinite community, recognition of the possibility of this
interest being made supreme, and hope in the unlimited con-
tinuance of intellectual activity are the indispensable require-
ments of Logic. After laying down three fundamental rules
for the calculation of chances, which are all he is willing to
recognise, and deducing from his definition of the probability of
a consequence rales for the addition and multiplication of
probabilities, he comes to the discussion of what Mr. Venn dis-
tinguishes as the conceptualistic in opposition to the materialis-
tic view. The former, as expounded by De Morgan, regards
probability as the degree of belief which ought to attach to a
proposition ; while, according to the latter, it is the proportion
of times in which an occurrence of one kind is in fact accom-
panied by an occurrence of another kind. He concludes that
the conceptualistic view though answering well enough in some
cases is quite inadequate. The problem proposed by the con-
ceptualists he understands to be this : Given a synthetic
conclusion ; required to know out of all possible states of things
how many will accord to any assigned extent with this conclu-
sion. This he regards as only an absurd attempt to reduce
synthetic to analytic reason, and believes that no definite solu-
tion is possible. As all knowledge comes from synthetic
inference which can by no means be reduced to deduction, it is
inferred that all human certainty consists merely in our knowing
that the processes by which our knowledge has been derived
are such as must generally lead to true conclusions. In dis-
cussing the order of nature, Mr. Peirce concludes that although
this universe ought to be presumed too vast to have any
character, yet the spirit of science is hostile to any religion
except one like that of M. Vacherot, who worships a supreme
and perfect ideal whose non-existence he finds as essential to
the conception of it as Descartes found its existence to be. Any
plurality of objects have some character in common which is
peculiar to them and not shared by anything else. A chance-
world is simply the actual world as it would look to a polyp at
the vanishing point of intelligence. If we do not limit ourselves
to such characters as have for its importance, interest or obvi-
ousness, then any pair of objects resemble one another in just as
many particulars as any other pair. The division of synthetic
inferences into induction and hypothesis, the discussion of Mill's
doctrine of the uniformity of nature, and of the assumption of De
Morgan's Formal Logic, are very suggestive and interesting ;
but we have no space for further quotations and must refer the
reader to the original papers.
Perhaps the most general characteristic of American intel-
104 Philosophy in the United States.
lectual life is its heterogeneity. Not only lias each religious
sect or denomination its own revered and authoritative
founders or reformers, its own newspapers and literature, and
often its own set of duties and associations, beyond the limit
of which the thoughts and interests of its more uneducated mem-
bers rarely pass, but also many semi-philosophical sects have a
more or less numerous representation. Swedenborgianism has
many churches and expositors, the best of the latter being Mr.
Parsons and Mr. Henry James, father of the well known
novelist. The sort of life produced under the influence of this
system is broadly sympathetic, charitable, intelligent, and in
every way admirable. Its disciples in America have succeeded
in making it in the best sense of the word a practical system.
Again, the later speculations of Comte in the Politique Positive
have found a number of admirers in New York and else-
where. The voluminous works of S. P. Andrews best illustrate
the iucoherency and assumption of this rather insignificant
coterie. What might be called its right wing contents itself
with the discussion of revolutionary, social and economic
theories, particularly of the relation of labour and capital, while
its left shades off by insensible gradations into all the vagaries
of spiritualism. The general sect of spiritualists is very large
and has produced a vast and dismal body of literature. Most
physiologists and psychologists are now convinced that here is
one of the most interesting fields for scientific observation, such
as will never be made by spiritualists themselves, but no
serious study of the phenomena has as yet been attempted.
On the whole, in view of the intellectual conditions of the
United States, it is not to be wondered at that minds of a
philosophical cast are often found to be eclectic and perhaps
hypercritical. Probably in no other country is a man of high
culture tempted by so many and varied considerations to
criticise or instruct rather than to add to the sum of the
the world's intellectual possessions by doing original work.
The influence of German modes of thought in America is very
great and is probably increasing : Du Bois lieymond observed
in a public address some years ago that no two countries could
learn so much from each other. Scores of American students
may be found in nearly all the larger German universities.
Most of even the smaller colleges have one or two professors
who have spent from one to three or four years in study in
that country, whose very language is a philosophical discipline.
The market for German books in the United States is in several
departments of learning larger than in Germany itself, though
this is partly, of course, to be accounted for by the number of
German residents. The Hegelianism of St. Louis was not only
Philosophy in the United States. 105
first imported but has always been to some extent supported by
native Germans.
It has been urged that a nation, like ours, which inherits a
ready-made language and a rich literature which it has not itself
developed, is apt to be superficial in thought and shallow in
sentiment. But it is surely forgotten that this is a heritage to
which every generation is born. .Besides, language knows no
political or geographical distinction, and even the best literature
is no longer national. And may we not, at least, modestly
claim that enough philosophical thinking has been done to
show that we are not behind in power of mental assimilation ?
Protestantism in America has its well-developed grammar of
dissent, and has been in the past an invaluable philosophical
discipline. The American, perhaps, even more than the English,
Sunday might almost be called a philosophical institution. A
day of rest, of family life and introspection, it not only gives
seriousness and poise to character and brings the saving fore-,
after-, and over-thought into the midst of a hurrying objec-
tive and material life, to which its wider sympathies and
interests and new activities are a wholesome alternative, but it
teaches self-control, self-knowledge, self-respect, as the highest
results of every intellectual motive and aspiration. In its most
developed forms, especially among the Unitarians, Protestanism
has more or less completely rationalised not only the dogmas of
theology but their scriptural data, and now inculcates mainly
the practical lessons of personal morality and the duty of dis-
criminative intellectual, political and aesthetical activity.
Finally we shall venture to call patriotism a philosophical
sentiment in America. It is very deeply rooted and persistent
even in those who take the most gloomy view of the present
aspect of our political life, who insist that the Constitution needs
careful and radical revision, and who are not disposed to over-
rate the magnitude of events in our national history thus far.
It is philanthropic, full of faith in human nature and in the
future. And if, according to a leading canon of the new psycho-
log}-, the active part of our nature is the essential element in cog-
nition and all possible truth is practical, then may we not ration-
ally hope that even those materialisms of faith and of business
which we now deplore, are yet laying the foundations for a
maturity of philosophical insight deep enough at some time to
intellectualise and thus harmonise all the diverse strands in
our national life ?
G. STANLEY HALL.
VII. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS. .
THE ESTABLISHMENT OP ETHICAL FIRST PRINCIPLES.
I cannot but think that the readers of ethical treatises the
remark applies to Utilitarian and Intuitional moralists alike must
often be perplexed by the manner in which their authors deal with the
propositions which they present as first principles. -They begin by
declaring that first principles are, as such, incapable of proof, and
then immediately proceed to make what at least an untutored mind
can hardly distinguish from an attempt to prove them. The apparent
inconsistency is indeed easy to explain ; for all, or almost all, soi-disant
ethical first principles are denied to be such by at least respectable
minorities ; hence we naturally expect our moralist not merely to
propound his first principles, but also somehow to provide us with
rational inducements for accepting them. Still, the dilemma in which
he is placed is a somewhat serious one, and seems to me to deserve
more systematic examination than it has yet received. On the one
hand, it seems undeniable that first principles cannot stand in need
of what is strictly to be called proof : they would obviously cease to
be first principles if they were exhibited as dependent for their
certainty on the acceptance by the mind of certain other truths. Yet,
on the other hand, when we are dealing with any subject where there
is a conflict of opinion as to first principles, we can hardly refuse to
give reasons for taking our side in the conflict : as rational beings
conversing with other rationals it seems absurd that we should not be
able to explain to each other why we accept one first principle rather
than another. And how can these reasons be valid if they do
not prove the first principle which they (to use Mill's phrase)
" determine the mind" to accept 1
To find a way out of this difficulty we require, I think, to take
Aristotle's distinction between logical or natural priority in cognition
and priority in the knowledge of any particular mind. We are thus
enabled to see that a proposition may be self-evident, i.e., may be
properly cognisable without being viewed in connexion with any other
propositions ; though in order that its truth may be apparent to some
particular mind, there is still required some rational process connecting
it with propositions previously accepted by that mind.
For instance, I may begin by regarding some limited and qualified
statement as self-evident, without seeing the truth of the simpler and
wider proposition of which the former affirms a part ; and yet, when
I have been led to accept the latter, I may reasonably regard this as
the real first principle, and not the former, of which the limitations
and qualifications may then appear accidental and arbitrary. Thus, to
take an illustration from the subject of Ethics, with which I am here
primarily concerned, I may begin by laying down as a principle that
" all pain of human or rational beings is to be avoided " ; and then
afterwards may be led to enunciate the wider rule that " all pain is to
be avoided " ; it being made evident to me that the difference of
Notes and Discussions. 107
rationality between two species of sentient beings is no ground for
establishing a fundamental ethical distinction between their respective
pains. In this case I shall ultimately regard the wider rule as the
principle, and the narrower as a deduction from it; in spite of my
having been led by a process of reasoning from the latter to the
former. Or again (as I have elsewhere argued) 1 I may start with the
egoistic maxim that " it is reasonable for me to take my own greatest
happiness as the ultimate end of my conduct " ; and then may yield to
the argument that the happiness of any other individual, equally cap-
able and deserving of happiness, must be no less worth aiming at than
my own ; and thus may come to accept the utilitarian maxim that
" happiness generally is to be sought " as the real first principle ; con-
sidering the egoistic maxim to be only true in so far as it is a partial
and subordinate expression of this latter.
This then is one species of the rational processthatwe are considering;
by which we are logically led to a conclusion which yet when reached
we regard as a first principle. We start with a proposition which
appears self-evident; we reflect on it and analyse it into a more
general proposition with a limitation ; concentrating our attention on
the limitation, we see that it is arbitrary and without foundation in
reason ; we deny its validity and substitute for our original principle
the wider statement of which that affirmed a part.
There is another quite different process by which a similar result
may possibly be reached. We may be able to establish some general
criteria for distinguishing true first principles (whether ethical or
non-ethical) from false ones ; and may then construct a strictly logical
deduction by which, applying their general criteria to the special case
of ethics, we establish the true first principles of this latter subject.
How far such a methodological deduction is actually in our power, I will
presently consider. At any rate, I should maintain that there is no third
way of establishing ethical principles. The premisses of our reasoning,
when strictly stated, must, if not methodological, be purely ethical :
that is, they must contain, implicitly or explicitly, the elementary
notion signified by the term " ought " ; otherwise, there is no rational
transition possible to a proposition that does affirm " what ought to be ".
It may be true that in the development of human minds judgments
of the former kind are found among the antecedents of the latter ;
e.g., a man may be actually led by contemplating purely physical facts
to enunciate a moral law ; but I know no way of exhibiting this process
as logically cogent, and consequently valid for all minds.
This point will, I think, be easily admitted when it is considered in
this abstract way ; but I find it frequently ignored in current ethical
arguments. E.g., many writers seem to hold with Mill 2 that the
psychological generalisation that all men desire pleasure can be used to
establish the ethical proposition that pleasure is what we ought to aim
at. In Mill's argument the paralogism is partly concealed by the
1 Cf. Methods of Ethics, III. c. 13 and IV. c. 2.
3 Cf. Utilitarianism, c. 4.
108 Notes and Discussions.
ambiguity of the word "desirable "; for if by "desirable " we merely
mean what can be desired, the inference that pleasure is desirable
because it is actually desired is obviously both irresistible and insig-
nificant. But if we are seeking (as Mill is) for an ethical principle,
from which practical rules may be deduced and which therefore must
contain implicitly the notion " ought," I cannot see how we are logically
to reach such a principle through the most extensive observation of
what men actually desire. And the same may be said of all attempts
to construct an ethical system on a basis of physical fact ; or on the
basis of anj r other kind of psychical facts except ethical beliefs. We
may affirm a priori that there must be a gap in all such reasonings
where the notion " ought " is introduced which does not admit of
being logically bridged over.
Let us now examine the question above-reserved ; viz., whether it
is possible to state any general characteristics by which true first
principles may be distinguished from false ones ; besides, that is, the
characteristic of being self-evident to the mind that contemplates
them. Such criteria would certainly be useful, if they can be found :
since the history of thought makes it only too clear that the human
mind, philosophic and unphilosophic, is liable to affirm as self-evi-
dently true what is afterwards agreed to be false. No doubt the
Cartesian condition of " clearly and distinctly conceiving " whatever
we affirm to be self-evident affords a partial protection against such
errors ; by carefully conforming to it we may often avoid mistaking
mere habitual assumptions, or beliefs inadvertently accepted on
authority, for intuitive truths. But though this precaution is a
valuable one, it is certainly not adequate : as an inspection of the
first principles of Cartesian physics will sufficiently show. It is
therefore important to examine what Reid and others have to offer
in the way of further criteria. Of these there seem to be chiefly two
which have obtained a wide currency and on which considerable
stress has been laid by thinkers of more than one school ; viz., (1)
Universality (or approximate universality) of acceptance, "consent
of learned and unlearned," and (2) Originality, as inferred from the
early date at which certain beliefs make their appearance in any
particular mind. I propose to consider each of these separately.
First, however, I would observe that it makes a fundamental
difference whether these or any similar criteria are used as supple-
mentary to the characteristic of apparent self-evidence, or as substitutes
for it. It seems to me a cardinal defect of Reid's philosophy that he
leaves this difference in the back-ground, and does not always make
it clear from which of the two points of view he is arguing. Regarded
in the former light, I should quite admit the importance of the crite-
rion of " consent," the logical value to any individual mind of the
agreement with other minds in any given intuition. It may be
thought, perhaps, that so long as any proposition presents itself as
self-evident, we can feel no need of anything more, though we may
afterwards come to regard it as false : since self-evidence, ex i~i
termini, leaves no room for any doubt that a supplementary criterion
Notes and Discussions. 109
could remove. But this view does not sufficiently allow for the
complexity of our intellectual processes. If we have once learnt,
either from personal experience or from the history of human thought,
that we are liable to be mistaken in the affirmation of apparently
self-evident propositions, we may surely retain this general conviction
of our fallibility along with the special impression of the self-
evidence of any proposition which we may be contemplating ; and
thus, however strong this latter impression may be, we shall still admit
our need of some further protection against the possible failure of
our faculty of intuition. Such a further guarantee we may reasonably
find in " general consent " ; for though the protection thus given is
not perfect since there are historical examples of untrue propositions
generally accepted as self-evident it at least excludes all such error
as arises from the special weaknesses and biases of individual minds,
or of particular sections of the human race. A proposition which
presents itself to my mind as self-evident, and is in harmony with
all the rest of my intuitions relating to the same subject, and is also
ascertained to be accepted by all other minds that have been led to
contemplate it, may after all turn out to be false : but it seems to
have as high a degree of certainty as I can hope to attain under the
existing conditions of human thought.
The case is very different when the argument from " consent " is
used not to confirm but to override my individual judgment as to the
self-evidence of any proposition. Even so it may afford a sufficient
ground for a practical decision : certainly if I found myself alone
contra mundum, I should think it more probable that I was wrong
than that the world was, and such a balance of probability is enough
to act on : but I could not treat the proposition in question as suffi-
ciently known for purposes of scientific reasoning. For the argument
establishing it would equally establish the defective condition of the
individual intellect that failed to see its truth : and would therefore
afford a general probability of error in any exercise of that intellect
on the subject to which the proposition related.
Let us pass to consider the second of the above-mentioned criteria,
Originality. It seems to me that the stress laid on this by Reid and
other writers is chiefly due to a psychological assumption now almost
exploded ; viz., that the human mind exists at biith in a condition
which, though imperfect, in so far as undeveloped, is at least free
from positive faults : in which, therefore, the exercise of its cognitive
faculties, so far as it is capable of exercising them, must result in
truth. It is hardly necessary at the present day to point out how
entirely this assumption lacks scientific foundation : since not only is
this original uncorrupted state of the human intellect nowhere given
in experience, but we do not find any approximation to it as we trace
back the history of any individual man, or of the human race
generally, to its sources. Indeed there probably remain but few
thinkers who conceive themselves in a position to urge the ascertained
originality of any belief as positive evidence of its truth. There seem,
however, to be still some who would apply the criterion negatively ;
110 Notes and Discussions.
holding that if we can explain the derivation of an apparently self-
evident belief, we thereby show its apparent self-evidence to be
illusory. This view I propose briefly to consider.
The supposed explanation must consist in stating either (1) the
physical or (2) the psychical conditions of the mental phenomenon
which is said to be derived. N"ow on the physiological question I speak
with all diffidence : but I believe that physiologists have no such
knowledge of the bodily conditions under which true and false beliefs
respectively are produced, as could possibly justify us in invalidating an
apparently self-evident proposition on physiological grounds ; except
in the case of mental derangement revealed by physical symptoms,
or of beliefs that are normally received through the operation of
the organs of sense. A clairvoyant may have reason to distrust his
visions because they come with his eyes closed ; but I am aware of no
similar grounds for discrediting ethical intuitions.
It will seem then that the explanation that is to invalidate the
self-evidence of an apparent intuition must be psychological. Now
it is universally held, by English psychologists at least, that we know
Mind only as a series of transient phenomena except so far as we
are allowed to know the permanence, identity, and free causality of
the subject of these phenomena ; a point which does not now concern
us. At any rate the psychological " derivation " of any belief or other
mental phenomenon can be at most an account of the transient
psychical facts whether beliefs or merely feelings which experience
shows to be invariable antecedents of the phenomenon explained.
We have no ground for supposing these antecedents really to persist
in their consequent under a changed form, when they have apparently
passed away. 'It is necessary to lay stress on this, because several
writers of the Associational school assume the right of transferring
chemical conceptions to psychical change ; and regard mental pheno-
mena as " compounded " of their antecedents just as a piece of matter
is conceived to be composed of its chemical elements. I have never
seen any justification for this procedure. Certainly the analogy of
material chemistry fails to justify it. When the coexistence of the
two antecedents oxygen and hydrogen is followed by the appearance
of the heterogeneous matter called Avater, we have two distinct reasons
for conceiving the oxj r gen and hydrogen to have a latent existence in
the water ; first that the weight of the water exactly corresponds to
the weight of the oxygen and the hydrogen, and secondly that we
can reverse the process of change and exhibit the water as the im-
mediate antecedent of the oxygen and hydrogen. But neither of
these reasons exist nor any other that I am aware of for attributing
more compositeness to any mental phenomenon than we can discern
in it by direct introspective analysis.
If then it be admitted that the so-called " explanation " of an
apparent intuition can only consist in a statement of its antecedents,
not its elements, we have to ask in what way such a statement can
affect the question of its truth or falsehood. Some writers really seem
to think that the mere fact of a belief having been caused is a ground
Notes and Discussions. Ill
for distrusting it, unless we can show that its causes have been such
as to make it true. But this doctrine lands us at once in universal
scepticism ; since the premisses of any such demonstration must be
beliefs, which having been caused will themselves require to be proved
true. Unless indeed it is held that the ultimate premisses of all
reasoning are uncaused ! a paradox which I have no ground for
attributing to the writers in question. Otherwise if all beliefs are
equally in the position of having had invariable antecedents, it is
obvious that this characteristic alone cannot serve to invalidate any
of them.
If therefore an apparently self-evident proposition is to be discredited
on account of its derivation, it must be not merely because, as a
psychical phenomenon, it is the consequent of certain antecedents,
but because it can be shown from experience that these particular
antecedents are more likely to produce a false belief than a true one.
I am far from denying that such a demonstration is possible in the
case of some propositions that have been put forward as self-evident
ethical principles: but I do not remember to have ever seen it
systematically attempted.
HZXRT SIDGWICK.
MB. BALFOUB OX TRAXSCEXDEXTALISM.
I should like to say a few words about Mr. Balfour's paper on
" Transcendentalism," which appeared in MIXD XII. Mr. Balfour is
a vigorous critic, but I do not think he is sufficiently familiar with
Kant, or with any mode of thought which can, in Kant's sense, be
called ' transcendental,' to make his criticism in this case very effective.
I shall not therefore follow him througn all the questions he discusses,
but confine myself to a few leading points.
(1) Mr. Balfour's main stumbling-block is Kant's expression,
:onnen' (must be capable), and, like Schopenhauer, he thinks
that the second word takes away all the force of the first. If it cannot
be said that the object of knowledge must be thought as object to a
conscious subject, but only that it must be capable of being so thought,
this, he thinks, destroys the whole transcendental argument. " The
rules which thought was supposed to impress on nature, according to
which nature must be, because without them she would be nothing to
us as thinking beings, these rules turn out after all to be of only
subjective validity. They are the casual necessities of our reflective
moments, necessities which would have been unmeaning to us in our
childhood, of which the mass of mankind are never conscious, and
from which we . are absolved during a large portion of our lives "
(Mixo. XII., p. 489). Will Mr. Balfour carry out this argument to
its legitimate consequences ? Logicians tell us that a conclusive
argument must be capable of being stated in logical form, and shown
to be in accordance with logical laws. Will Mr. Balfour then
maintain either that every one who reasons correctly knows these laws
112 Notes and Discussions.
as the scientific logician knows them, or that these laws are " of
subjective validity," " the casual necessities of our reflective moments " ?
Again, not only Kant, but Hamilton, Mill, Spencer, and indeed
almost every modern writer on the theory of knowledge, maintains
that we know things only in their relation to each other. Yet tho
very emphasis with which they think it necessary to insist on this fact,
if there were nothing else, would be sufficient to show that it is a fact
hidden from the ordinary consciousness of men. On the contrary, to
that consciousness things seem to be known in themselves and apart
from all relations, till such 'transcendental' writers show that it is not so.
Now will Mr. Balfour say that the doctrine of the relativity of the
objects' of knowledge is merely " of subjective validity " ?
(2) But Mr. Balfour tries to fortify his argument by saying that
Idealists, of all men in the world, as they hold that the esse of things
is their intelligi, ought to hold that there is nothing in the thought
of the individual of which he is not conscious (p. 487). Now,
Idealism is based on the truth that the only intelligible meaning of
objectivity or existence, is objectivity for a thinking subject, and that
of an object external to thought we can say nothing. But this no more
implies that the individual subject must have brought to consciousness
all that is involved in his knowledge of objects, than it implies that
every individual subject must be omniscient. The truth is that Mr.
Balfour has never realised the difference between the so-called Idealism
of Berkeley and the Idealism of Kant. This is manifest from the
whole course of his paper, and particularly from some of his criticisms
on Kant's ' Refutation of Idealism '. Thus (p. 498) Mr. Balfour says :
" The real question is this Does being in space and outside the body
imply that the extended and external object is outside of mind, and
other than one of the series of conscious states 1 " And then he
proceeds to accuse Kant of a confusion between the id$a of externality
to consciousness, and the idea of externality in the sense of existence
in space (which, it may be remarked in passing, Kant has expressly and
clearly distinguished, Kritik, ed. Eosenk, p. 299), because he only
attempts to show that the explicit consciousness of the external object
in the latter sense is prior to the explicit consciousness of the self as
an object, and does not attempt to show that there is an existence of
things in themselves independent of consciousness. But if Mr.
Balfour had understood what Transcendentalism implies, he would
have seen that its effect is to make the latter problem meaningless,
and to substitute the former for it. (Of. Mr. Green's article in
Contemporary Review, Dec., 1877, p. 30.) No doubt there is an
occasional uncertainty in Kant's language, especially in the first edition
of the Kritik, for which I have elsewhere tried to account (Phil, of
Kant, pp. 545, 621, &c.).
(3) Closely connected with this is another misunderstanding. Mr.
Balfour begins his article by questioning Kant's own account of tho
' Transcendental Logic' as having to do with the explanation of the fa k
of knowledge and not with the proof that knowledge is possible : cK
as being, in Mr. Green's words, ' a theory of the process which without
Notes and Discussions. 113
theory we already perform '. This, Mr. Balfour thinks, is " misleading
if not incorrect," for " Transcendentalism does attempt to establish a
creed ". Mr. Balfour, in short, finds it difficult to see how Kant's
criticism should lead to any important theoretical conclusions, if it
merely explains an assumed fact. But this difficulty arises from an
insufficient appreciation of the result of such an enquiry into the
nature of knowledge. The laws of Logic are reached simply by
bringing to clear consciousness, or, in Kant's words, " bringing to
conceptions," the principles involved in our actual thinking and
reasoning, yet, when thus made conscious, they enable us to correct
its errors. An illogical reasoning may be shown to be inconsistent
with itself, because inconsistent with the principles upon which all
reasoning depends. And if it be the fact, as Kant shows, that a self
or ' combining consciousness ' is implied in every determination of
objects as such, it is to be expected that this fact, when brought to
consciousness and reflected upon, will essentially modify our views as
to the nature of these objects. It will have important bearings, e.<j.,
upon the possibility of a materialistic explanation of the world.
(4) As Mr. Balfour has thus misunderstood the nature of the
transcendental method, it seems scarcely necessary to follow him in
his criticisms of special points in Kant Some of these criticisms
indeed have been anticipated by those who have adopted Kant's
method, but who have attempted to carry out the application of it
more consistently than Kant himself ; others imply the same
misconceptions which have been already referred to. I may point
out, however, that before any one can do justice to Kant's deductions
of Substance and Causality, he must put himself at Kant's point of
view ; in other words, he must consider these deductions in the light
of what has preceded them, especially of the ' Deduction of the
Categories,' and the ' Schematism of the Conceptions of the
Understanding '. The order of Kant's thought leads him to show :
firt, that objects as such cannot be given in sense ; secondly, that,
therefore, their determination as objects is by acts of mental synthesis,
for which the forms or rules are supplied by thought itself, so that
objectivity is the same thing as conformity to general rules of
synthesis, or, as Kant expresses it, " objective validity and necessary
universality are equivalent conceptions"; and thirdly, that these rules
are the pure conceptions of the" understanding, which, however, as
applied to the matter of sense, are schematised in relation to time.
Thus, e.g., the purely logical relation of Beason and Consequent is
schematised as Causality, i.e., as Succession of one event after another,
according to a universal rule. Xovv, it is quite useless to attempt to
criticise the ' Analogies of Experience ' without reference to these
previous steps. For want of such reference, Mr. Balfour actually
(p. 502) criticises Kant as having overlooked the very distinction
:i which his argument rests the distinction between mere
succession and succession according to a universal rule.
I shall add one word of explanation. The aim of Kant in the Kritik
prove that the mere particulars of sense cannot be made objects of
8
114 Notes and Discussions.
knowledge except as determined by the universal (cf. Phil, of Kant,
p. 267). In the ' ^Esthetic ' he shows that the present time and place
(the ' here ' and ' now ') can be known as such only in relation to other
times and places, and therefore as parts of one time and of one space.
In the ' Analytic ' he goes on in the same spirit to show that this
determination of times and places in relation to each other and to the
unity of time and of space, is itself impossible except through
synthetic acts of thought whereby phenomena are determined in
relation to each other and to the unity of -experience. Of these acts,
the principal are those which Kant calls the ' Analogies of Experience '.
The defect of Kant's statement, as I have tried to show (Phil, of Kant,
pp. 460-62) is that he separates the principles of Substance, Causality
and Reciprocity too absolutely from each other, and hence seems to
encourage the notion that the substance of things is a mere identity
underlying difference, and that the transition from cause to effect is a
mere movement from one phenomenon to another quite different from
it. But for such errors we find the corrective in Kant himself, as, e.g.,
where he tells us that the substance of phenomena lies in their
permanent relations to each other (Kritik, pp. 231-2 ; Mctaph.
Anfanqsyriinde, passim}. Kant indeed finds such permanent relations
only in external experience, but on this point I have said enough
elsewhere (Phil, of Kant, pp. 474 ff.).
(5) In conclusion I would observe that Mr. Balfour also is ' among
the prophets ' of Transcendentalism. For (p. 493) he admits that
" change is unthinkable except for what Mr. Green calls a ' com-
bining ' and, therefore, to some extent, a persisting consciousness " ;
and he admits further that some " recognisable permanence through
change " is necessary " to make change in time intelligible by
contrast," though he says at the same time that " the smallest
recognisable permanence is enough ". It is such a little one ! How
can Mr. Balfour be allowed at once to use, and to repudiate, the
transcendental method 1 And in reference to the .above admissions,
how will he deal with his own dilemma 1 Will he venture to afhrm
either that the persisting consciousness, of which he speaks, is only a
" casual necessity of his reflective moments," or, on the other hand,
that every one who is conscious of a permanent object must also have
explicit consciousness of a persistent self ]
EDWARD CAIRD.
(1) The whole value of Mr. Caird's first criticism depends on a confusion
between performing an act and formulating the fact of its performance. I
neither assert nor dispute the proposition that all knowledge, is relative. But
if it be true, I readily admit that it is not the less true because it is not a
truth recognised by the mass of mankind. This admission, however, in no
way weakens the force of niy criticism on the transcendental method, for
my contention is that, in many of the cases of so-called transcendental
necessity, the relation under which we are told an object has to be thought
before it can be anything to a thinking being, is one under which by the
majority of mankind it is not thought. I do not say that the majority of
mankind never formulate the fact of their so thinking it : I say that as a
Critical Notices. 127
separate souls, but through being so overmastered by the idea of the
new (or revived) mechanical philosophy as to ignore the subjectivity
of mind in his eagerness to express all experienced change in terms of
motion. Locke's speculations, too, as to whether it might not have
pleased the Deity to " superadd to matter a faculty of thinking," such
as he had analysed it phenomenally, are obviously not less alien from
the ancient metaphysical doctrine in Bacon's or any other version. In
truth, after Bacon, it was not only the distinction of lower and higher
souls that disappeared, but (by the growth partly of physical and partly
of psychological science) the whole of that earlier way of thinking,
which Bacon himself had been content to pass on.
Take next Prof. Fowler's remark, on occasion of Bacon's enumeration
of mental faculties and naive statement of their mutual relations, that
" the sharp line of demarcation drawn here and in similar passages
between the office of the so-called faculties was a common feature of
the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and has
only been replaced in comparatively recent times by a more just
appreciation of the complexity of our various mental operations and of
the number of elements which go to make np some even of those
psychical acts which at first sight appear the simplest ". Here it is
not expressly stated that the English psychologists in these centuries
were led by Bacon to divide the mind into ' faculties ' ; but if it had
been remembered that it was precisely the English psychologists,
beginning with Hobbes in the very generation after Bacon, who first
took up the ground they have always since maintained against the
' faculty '-hypothesis, there could hardly have been a stronger proof
given that Bacon exercised no influence at all upon the most
characteristically English movement within modern mental philosophy
the continuous pursuit of psychological inquiry in the spirit of
positive science. When, therefore, after particularising some others of
Bacon's antiquated psychological notions, Prof. Fowler proceeds to
say that " it is impossible not to see in these speculations, crude as
some of them are," the beginnings of much of the later English
psychology which became so famous in the hands of Locke, Hume,
Reid, and others," one can only express surprise that he should be
ble to see it, at least as regards Locke and Hume. 1 As for the
anticipations which Prof. Fowler thinks he finds in Bacon of later
ethical ideas, it is perhaps sufficient to note his own admission that
Bacon " nowhere expressly discusses the fundamental question of
.Is, such as the grounds of Moral Obligation or the nature of the
d Faculty," in short, attempts neither of the characteristic tasks
that English thinkers have set before them in the one other department
1 The case is different with Reid, who was a strenuous upholder in
British psychology the reviver of the ' faculty '-hypothesis ; and Reid, we
know, had an unbounded veneration for Bacoii. It is not indeed necessary
to suppose that he borrowed from Bacon iii this particular. Still it is
significant that his view of the mind's 'faculties' or 'powers,' however
elaborately worked out, is almost as naive and unscientific as Bacon's own.
128 Critical Notices.
of mental philosophy, "besides psychology, which they have specially
cultivated.
Altogether, it can by no means "be maintained that Bacon's greatness
lay in his definite anticipation of coming achievements in science or
philosophy. Science and philosophy, it is not too much to say,
Avould be to all intents and purposes exactly where they are, though
he had never been or never written ; and there are other names in
Bacon's century of which it would be rash so to speak. Does Bacon
therefore fall out of the first rank of philosophical thinkers 1 That
is a question of a rather vain description, which different people
will answer differently ; but the most strenuous of his depreciators
will find it hard to name another thinker of the second class who
can be compared with him for breadth of view. As a preacher in a
time of intellectual uprising, he has never had an equal.
EDITOR.
Histoire de la Philosophic en Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu' a Locke.
Par CHARLES DE REAIUSAT. Paris : Didier et Cie, 1875.
The author of this work was a profound student and a friendly
critic of the philosophic literature of our island. His essay on Reid
and his monograph on Bacon are widely known and appre-
ciated. He himself was an independent member of the modern
spiritualistic school of his country, and may be said to have occupied
a place somewhere between Hamilton and Cousin. In relation there-
fore to the school which is usually considered peculiarly English, he
is such a critic as the wise would wish to have an opponent and
likely to see our faults, but far enough away from our domestic
quarrels to be unprejudiced, and sufficiently assured of his own
ground to feel it safe to be generous. He rates the empirical philo-
sophy less highly perhaps than its native adherents, but more highly
than its native adversaries.
The salient feature of M. de Remusat's Philosophic en Angleterre is
the extent to which it treats of writers who, in a philosophical con-
nexion, must be called second-rate. Whole chapters, or large portions
of chapters, are given to such men as Hooker, Pemble, Culverwell,
Chillingworth, Baxter, Whichcot, John Smith, More, Barrow, Taylor,
Tillotson : so that, to judge from the table of contents, one might
almost expect a history of English Latitudinarian Theology rather
than of what is usually considered to be Philosophy. But this is in
many ways advantageous : we are shown the philosophical side and
the philosophical importance, such as it is, of men whose claims in
this respect are generally overlooked, and we are forcibly reminded of
a fact of the utmost moment in the history of philosophy, but which
historians and critics are shy of . recognising the close relationship
between modern philosophy and Christian theology. There are also
accounts of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Cudworth, and others, all
interesting figures and well worth remembering, but of whom a
Critical Notices. 129
busy student of speculative thought, without leisure for the luxuries
of his calling, may be excused for wishing to learn something without
reading through their works. As for Sir Thomas Browne, he is
out of place amongst writers whose mode of thinking may be called
for the most part approximately coherent. Besides there is no way
of making his acquaintance but at first hand, and no attempt at
an analysis or redaction of his sentiments can be regarded in a
serious light.
On the other hand the greater lights of the period are imperfectly
reflected in this book, though the existence of the separate work on
Bacon explains why he receives only a few pages in this one. The
author's judgment of him remains the same, and is summed up in the
following passage, of which the first sentence so resembles one which
I have written elsewhere, that I would certainly have quoted had I
then been acquainted with it. " C'est un grand esprit plutot qu'un
grand philosophe. On verra que Locke malgre ce qu'il peut avoir
perdu d'autorite, est plus pres de ce dernier titre que lui, car s'il
n'eut pas existe, 1'histoire de la philosophie n' aurait pas exactement
suivi le meme cours, tandis que 1'eloquent appel de Bacon au genie des
sciences lui a valu plus d'admiration que d'influence." Locke gets a
fourth of the whole work ; but this chiefly consists of a good sketch
of his life, and an account of his adversaries and influence, together
with criticisms from the author's point of view, some of which we
will presently consider. Xo account of his philosophy is given, on
the ground that it may be found in any history of the subject : though,
I confess, I do not know where to look for a sufficient one. It is too
apt to be assumed that Locke's philosophy is an item of popular
information. Hobbes, who on the whole hardly deserves to be sub-
ordinated to either Bacon or Locke, is somewhat meagrely treated :
and this seems to me to be one of the flaws of the book. A chapter
of some forty pages is allotted to him, but it is mainly biographical ;
and the author excuses himself from expounding Hobbes's doctrines
by saying, that only a detailed account could do justice to the philo-
sopher's systematic genius, and that that is more than the doctrines
deserve : in which statement the first clause is better than the second.
M. de Re'musat cannot forgive Hobbes his political absolutism and
his " atheism" constructive atheism, say rather; for overt atheism is
as far from Hobbes as from Bunyan, and in these pages the charge of
atheism is urged against him a little too freely and persistently. Our
French critic finds it difficult to understand how English liberals can
forgive Hobbes his politics and speak highly of him as a thinker.
But it seems that in Hobbes's case the common fate of men has been
reversed : the good that he has done lives after him ; the evil is
interred with his bones. The idea of a return of absolutism in this
country seems to most Englishmen so absurd that they can listen
quite good-hum ouredly to its advocates. Perhaps, however, we should
spare a thought for others. But even if absolutism should return,
whether here or elsewhere, it can hardly stand upon Hobbes's
basis ; and as for his name and authority, innumerable enemies have
9
130 Critical Notices,
abused him too successfully to leave much influence to that. Besides/
the strength of tyranny lies not in the arguments of its apologists, but in
the character of its slaves. So that we may feel free to admire what-
ever good was to be found in Hobbes : his daring and powerful
speculation, at once radical and systematic, a notable and precious
possession in a country where such work is rare ; his great manner of
exposition, in which rigour is always tempered with humour and
sound sense ; and the many truths and countless suggestions every-
where embedded in his writings. Nor is it possible to overestimate
his importance as a force in the literature of his age, both generally
by setting an example of proof by reasoning, instead of by merely
quoting authorities (though none could manipulate the authorities
more ingeniously), and especially by inciting the advocates of more
truly reasonable opinions to try to show that reason was on their side.
Hobbes's admirers need never regret to have checked his career along
the road to oblivion, even if Leviathan, besides being reprinted,
should again be read.
Nor are all M. de Kemusat's particular criticisms of Hobbes in his
best manner. At the beginning of the chapter appropriated to him,
he writes : " Je ne sais qu'un philosophe de quelque renom qui puisse
etre appele Baconien, et qui represente sans nuance et sans restriction
I'empirisrne ou le sensualisme absolu : c'est Thomas Hobbes." But it
strikes the reader that a Baconian is not quite the same as a repre-
sentative of absolute empiricism and sensationalism ; and that
precisely in as much as these characters differ, Hobbes was not a
Baconian. Few writers so abound in conceptions hastily caught up,
arbitrarily defined, and worked out ruthlessly in contempt of negative
instances.
Almost on a level with Hobbes, M. de Reinusat finds a place for
Lord Herbert of Cherbury : I do not know that it is overestimating
the case to call this neglected thinker the hero of the work ; and the
author has entirely devoted to him another very instructive essay.*
He here observes that Herbert anticipated, rather than prepared the
way for, the later Scotch and French philosophies, which have
followed without imitating him. And in a resume of English philo-
sophy previous to Locke, our author finds generally that the writers,
some of whose names I have enumerated above, agree for the most
part in recognising, although in a somewhat confused and imperfect
way, the leading principles of Common Sense and Eclectic Rationalism.
This is naturally an interesting observation to one who is himself an
adherent of those principles ; but since little or no influence passed
on directly from these early writers to Reid and Cousin, their import-
ance in the history of philosophy is that they were the negative pre-
paration for Locke, whose polemic is too commonly supposed (in spite
of internal evidence of the contrary) to have been almost wholly
directed against Descartes. Perhaps even Locke's perceptions of
* Lord Herbert de Cherbury, sa vie, ses ceuvres ou les origines de la tMologie
naturelle et de la philosopliie de sens commun en Angleterre. Paris : 1874.
Critical Notices. 131
Descartes were not a little disturbed by preconceptions established in
his mind by Lord Herbert and others. It would have been equally
interesting to have shown how far amongst his immediate English
predecessors Locke's own positions were anticipated.
M. de Remusat is quite ready to be generous to Locke, whose
empire in France was, it seems, " put an end to at the beginning of
this century". Locke's theology satisfies, and his politics please, our
author ; though his psychology is of course inadequate. It is neces-
sary, says M. de Remusat, to recognise if not exactly innate ideas (an
unfortunate phrase) still principles of reason implied in all experience
and not derived from it, or, say, the reason itself. Xoticing Con-
dillac's position, that ideas, reminiscences, judgments, and abstractions,
are only transformed sensation, he remarks : " Mais dans ces termes
memes, il faut un transformateur. Ce transformateur, c'est 1'entende-
ment." But surely this is misleading language. In order that sensa-
tions may be transformed there is needed, properly speaking, not a
transforming agent, but conditions of transformation. These condi-
tions may sometimes be merely the cessation of a present stimulus, as
when a flash of light has passed and left only an idea of it much less
vivid and definite ; or they may be the lapse of time and intervention
of other feelings, whereby our reminiscences decay ; or they may be
the relations into which given sensations enter with others and with
ideas, as in judgment and abstraction. L T nder such conditions sensa-
tions are transformed as a matter of fact : but how the understanding,
or the reason, or the will, or the ego interferes with the process or
assists it, I do not know, and begin to despair of being made to con-
ceive. Scientific psychology seems to require us to renounce these
entities and all their works.
M. de Remusat thinks that Locke's excessive fear of recognising
innate ideas has paralysed his sagacity and prevented his finding in
our faculties the truths which their activity presupposes. Unless, he
says, there exist certain truths to which our faculties are related, it is
plain that they are only a fortuitous and meaningless play. " Citons
en exemple la faculte du raisonnement : que veut-elle dire, si eile no
suppose que la conclusion sort des premisses, que la consequence se lie
au principe 1 " If this question is put to an adherent of Locke's
school, he will reply that reason, regarded as a mental process, is, in
Mill's words, " from particulars to particulars," and has nothing to do
with the relationship of premisses and conclusion : a relationship which
is incidental, not to the process of reasoning, but to a special mode of
formulating in language the result of an already completed ratiocina-
tion, together with the proximate conditions of its validity. In an
act of reasoning an inference is suggested by certain data with which
it happens to be associated ; and this some will perhaps consider to
presuppose the laws of association. The validity of an inference de-
pends upon the existence of a constant relation between facts, corres-
ponding with the relation between itself and its data : in so far then
as an inference involves belief, some will maintain that it presupposes
the law of the relation between these facts. In the same sense it
132 Critical Notices.
might be said that whenever a substance combines chemically with
another, it presupposes the law of combining equivalents. That is the
sense in which the universal precedes its particulars ; which it does,
in the opinion of empiricists, no more in thought than in fact.
But I refrain from further criticisms of detail upon a work whose
faults of detail are few, whilst sincerity and painstaking research are
everywhere manifest in it, and in which well matured judgments and
discriminating reflections are so thickly strewn throughout that should
a reviewer begin to draw attention to them he need never make an
end of commendation. I can, however, imagine a reader complaining
that it is on the whole less a history of philosophy in England from
Bacon to Locke, that an account of certain English writers of that
period who were more or less tinged with philosophy. And these,
moreover, are for the most part in relation to philosophy not repre-
sentative English writers. Their notions and methods are those of
the men who do not swim in the stream, but in the eddies and back-
water of English thought : the stream does not bear them along with
it, and they are more and more lost sight of and forgotten. M. de
Kemusat truly says of them tnat they lack elevation less than profun-
dity. How familiar is the transcendental figure that slights his country's
philosophy and dares not be other than elevated ! Still although a
record of second-rate opinion is hardly a history of philosophy, it may
be of great use for illustrating the position of those thinkers in whom
philosophy has culminated : it would be very useful if it only showed
with what a mass of prejudice the better opinion had to struggle.
CARVETH BEAD.
Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiqucs. Par ERNEST RENAN. Paris,
1876.
Curious for the insight it gives into the mind of the most widely-
read of Erench philosophical thinkers, this work deserved a passing
notice earlier. The Dialogues are three in number, bearing the
respective titles Certitudes, Probabilities, Dreams. The first is
sustained among three friends all belonging to that school of thinking
whose fundamental principles are worship of the ideal, negation of the
supernatural and experimental investigation of the real ; and the
certainties to which the chief speaker, Philalethe, gives utterance differ
only in the setting from characteristic opinions of M. Kenan's own
expressed in the esssays and letters, written a number of years ago,
that are now reprinted (from the Revue des deux Mondes) as the
Fragments of the present volume.* Some also of the probabilities and
dreams, referred each to a new speaker in the second and third
1 These are (1) ' Sciences of Nature and Historical Sciences ' letter to M.
Berth elot, with his reply ; (2) ' Ideal and Positive Science' ; (4) ' Meta-
pliysic and its Future '. A letter to M. Gue"roult on the theistic question is
also included (3).
Critical Notices. 133
dialogues, may be found not dimly indicated in those earlier papers;
but as M. Renan somewhat anxiously disclaims personal responsibility
for them in their present form, it is nobody's business to fasten them
upon him. He would have the dialogues generally to be regarded as
no more than free conversations between the different lobes of his
brain, and of course it should not be forgotten that dreams are but
dreams, not always wishes, and much less convictions. They were
written during the agony of the Commune, and hence their sombre
cast. Hence also, it is implied, the degree of their variance from the
political ideal of the last years in France ; for M. Renan has by him
in his desk, from before the time of the coup d' etat, and will some
day publish an essay on the ' Future of Science,' more comforting to
people of democratic faith. He hopes, besides, to publish in the future
a new book of Hypotheses, in which he will proceed on a method
partly employed in the present work, and by an ideal construction of
different world-systems, each lacking some capital element involved
in the present frame of things, will seek to impress the true character
of each.
The certitudes of the first dialogue are but two : (1) In all parts
of the universe within human ken there is no trace of the action of
higher beings than men; at the same time (_') the whole world is
working towards an end. It is urged, as M. Renan has urged before,
that if there were external beings intervening in terrestrial affairs their
action could not fail to be perceived : either therefore there are none
or, if any actually exist in other worlds, they are powerless to make
their existence known across space. But though, so far as appears,
there is in the detail of events within the universe nothing expressly
intentional apart from the action of men and animals, but everything
happens according to general laws from which no single exception for
special ends has ever been established, yet, on the other hand, nothing
is more clear than that the whole of ^Nature is in travail, working
darkly towards a goal. The proof here led is in the vein of Schopen-
hauer. Philalethe sees a manifestation of Will, conscious or unconscious,
in all the phenomena of life, high and low ; he finds that all particular
manifestations from the lowest to the highest subserve no ends of
individuals but of species only ; he thinks of Xature in general as the
great Egoist that is for ever duping the individual for the well-being
of the whole ; and he parts from Schopenhauer only on the point of
the feelings with which the self-conscious victim, man, should bow to
the might of the universal process. Xot the spirit of revolt, but
resignation, gratitude, and love should fill the miiid that'has awoke to
the conception of the unknown aim whither all is tending.
It is thus certain to Philalethe (and M. Renan) that the universe as a
whole reveals an obscure consciousness, spontaneous, analogous to that
which presides over the development of the embryo or animal. What the
new protagonist, Theophraste, in the second dialogue, thereupon essays
is to indicate the probable outcome of this world-process. The obscure
spontaneous consciousness, he thinks, is destined to become a clear
reflective consciousness. The desire everywhere manifested to be, the
134 Critical Notices.
universal thirst for consciousness, means that the Ideal will of necessity
become realised, and it is ever being realised more and more. All that
is good in the universe generally and in the history of humanity
becomes capitalised and increases, while things that are not good clash
with one another and pass out of being. It may or may not be on
earth and by the immediate effort of mankind : where and when in the
inh'nity of space and time it will be brought to pass, cannot be guessed ;
but here or there, at one time or another, Reason will finally reign,
Science will become absolute, and absolute Science means infinite
Power. The development in time of a true reflective world-
consciousness this is Avhat M. Kenan must be supposed to think at
least probable. Can there be any more particular speculation as to its
nature 1 Theoctiste in the third dialogue stands forward to reply with
dreams.
The dreams, hoAvever, turn out to have reference only to a possible
development of man on earth : what might be, if it should be
elsewhere and under quite other than human conditions that the
world-ideal becomes realised, we are left to guess. On earth, as life
actually is, the collective character of animal existence by relation to
the component living cells points to the reality of corporate human life
in a town a church a nation ; and as the (so-called) individual man
or animal is higher in the scale of life or consciousness than the cell,
so the corporate existence is to be ranked higher than the life of the
individual. Thus, then, a future consciousness of humanity in general
may be conceived, infinitely superior to aught that UOAV exists ;
humanity becoming, as it were, a great tree, with individuals for
shoots, and the consciousness of each being taken up into the
consciousness of all. Xow, in this relation, there are three conceivable
solutions of the problem of humanity, which may be metaphorically
described as (1) the democratical, (2) the aristocratical and (3) the
monarchical. In accordance with the first of these the higher conscious
life to be the ideal may be realised by the conversion of all
mankind to reason, but this democratic solution is not at all probable.
How, for instance, shall women be made rational women whose
business it is to be " good and beautiful " 1 The attempt to ciiltivate
the many can end only in the extinction of culture. Indeed, the
aim of humanity, as things are now, is rather to produce great
men with a public to comprehend them, and this at the expense of
ignorance in the masses. More likely by far, therefore, is the
aristocratical evolution, namely, that out of mankind should arise a
limited class ^of beings perfectly rational, with the omnipotence that
comes of omniscience. Powerful enough to make earth a hell to
mankind in general, and so in a manner realising the worst terrors of
old religion, they yet, as guided by perfect reason, would act like
veritable gods. It would probably be only after a period of fearful
struggle with the common intelligence of the mass of men that Science
could thus gain the upper hand, but once attained its supremacy might
become for ever established by incarnation in such a special order of
beings. There is no conception worked out more elaborately in the
Neu) Books. 135
Dialogues than this one of a spiritual oligarchy wielding material
power, and it strikes the reader as something more than a bare dream
of M. Eenan's.
It has to contend, however, with the third conception of the
world becoming at last one single conscious centre, in accordance with
the monarchical ideal in politics and the religions notion of a single
Deity. But whether this final term of the ' deific evolution ' is to
be viewed as excluding all such finite personalities as now exist or as
being the resultant of them all, is left undetermined. The dreamer's
first privilege of incoherency and inconsistency is indeed put much in.
force all through ; and, from the point of view of sober pliilosophical
criticism, it is extremely difficult to understand the nature of that
divine consciousness which is thus to be. It is averred most
positively (p. 89) that a consciousness is complete only when it results
in an individual identity in a single sensorium constituted by a
nervous mass moving a determinate organism ; and this, we know, is
the description of a man or animal, without prejudice to the biological
truth that the organism is an aggregate of quasi-independent living
cells. What then of the consciousness which M. Eenan claims,
within actual experience, for such a corporate entity as a town, church
or nation 1 It is called superior, but at all events it cannot be
" complete ". Can then any consciousness that is predicated of the
universe present or to came be " complete " either, if no analogue for a
brain can be assigned or supposed for it 1 And if not complete, is
there any meaning in describing the more and more perfect outcome
of the world-process in terms of consciousness at all ? Some feeling
of this difficulty was probably in M. Eenan's mind, when before the
end of the dialogue he makes Theoctiste say that consciousness is after
all, perhaps, a secondary form of existence, and that the word has no
sense when applied to the All, the Universe, God (p. 140) ; that it is
not consciousness (which has relation to space) but the Idea or Ideal
that alone eternally exists. He has urged the same before in the
reprinted fragments (see especially p. 253). But then what becomes
of the fundamental argument'of the work the " certainty " that the
end to which the whole universe tends iji the production of a
consciousness (p. 24) 1
The book cannot be said to have much philosophical importance,
but it discloses very vividly something of the fermentation of thought
going on in these days.
EDITOR.
136 New Books.
IX. NEW BOOKS.
[These Notes are never meant to exclude, and sometimes are intentionally pre-
liminary to, Critical Notices of the more important works later on. ]
Paradoxical Philosophy : A Sequel to the Unseen Universe. London :
Macmillan, 1878. Pp. 235.
The anonymous " Editors " of this work disclaim, in regard to its
conversational form, " any thought of imitating Peacock or Mallock
far less Christopher North, Bunyan, or Plato," and, in point of fact,
they do not succeed in attaining the literary level of even the least
of these writers. NOT can it be said that the poverty of execution is
compensated by novelty of ideas. The book comes after the Unseen
Universe, but is in no other sense a sequel to that widely-read pro-
duction. At one place, a short and, on the whole, well-pointed
statement of the materialistic view of the universe, put into the
mouth of a " Dr. Hermann Stoffkraft," calls forth (from " Stephen
!Fairbank") a brief rehearsal of some of the main positions in the
earlier work to the almost utter confusion there and then of the
worthy German. All the rest is mere by-play of the order before
indicated. There is not the least attempt to make the argument of
the Unseen Universe less irrelevant to the momentous conclusions
which it was, evidently in good faith, intended by its distinguished
authors to support. And yet, "in the compilation of this small
volume," such as it is, the Editors say they " have to record with
gratitude the assistance rendered to them by various members" of a
certain Society called the " Paradoxical ".
The Art of Scientific Discovery; or, Tlie General Conditions and
Methods of Research in Physics and Chemistry. By G. GORE,
LL.D., F.RS. London: Longmans, 1878. Pp.648.
" The object of this treatise is to describe the nature of original Scientific
Eesearch, the chief personal conditions of success in its pursuit, the general
methods by which discoveries are made in Physics and Chemistry, and the
causes of its failure ; and thus to elucidate, so far as possible, tlie special
mental conditions and processes by means of which the mind of man
ascends from the known to the unknown in matters of science. . . .
The book is divided into five parts the first containing a general view of
the subject ; the second, general conditions of research ; the third, personal
preparations of research ; the fourth, actual working in the art ; and the
fifth, various special methods of discovery, classified and illustrated by
numerous examples."
Education as a Science. By ALEXANDER BAIN, LL.D. (International
Scientific Series), London : Kegan Paul & Co., 1879.
The four articles bearing the above title, contributed by the author
to MIND, make the psychological introduction to the present volume,
being almost one-fourth of the whole. The remaining three-fourths
discuss the more special educational topics. A chapter is devoted to
the explanation of a number of terms and phrases that play a leading
New Books. 137
part in the various discussions : Memory, Judgment, Imagination,
Information and Training, &c, Xext is a chapter on Education
Values, or an estimate of the comparative worth of the usual subjects
of instruction : a large space being given to Science. Under the
designation, Sequence of Subjects (Psychological and Logical), a
number of matters have been brought to the foreground to lighten the
burden of the chief topic the Methods of Teaching. This topic is
then entered on ; and includes, among the more obvious points, a
minute handling of the Object Lesson, the scope of which the author
considers to stand in want of being more carefully assigned than has
yet been done. A separate chapter is devoted to the Mother Tongue,
Then follows a discussion of the utility of Latin and Greek ; to which
is appended a proposal for a Renovated Curriculum of the higher
studies. Finally, a long chapter is given to Moral Education, and a
shorter one to Art. " The general strain of the work is a war not so
much against error as against confusion." The author takes " every
opportunity of urging that the division of labour in the shape of dis-
joining incongruous exercises, is a chief requisite in any attempt to
remodel the teaching art ".
Education : Intellectual, Moral and Physical. By HERBERT SPENCER.
Cheap edition. London and Edinburgh : Williams & Xorgate,
1878. Pp. 171.
Besides being largely read in the United States, Mr. Spencer's
Education has been translated into French, German, Italian, Russian,
Hungarian, Dutch and Danish, and he wishes now by this cheap
edition to make it accessible to a wider circle of readers at home.
The text is reproduced without change, more pressing occupations
standing in the way of the revision it would otherwise have under-
gone.
The Localisation of Cerebral Disease. Being the Gulstonian Lectures
of the Royal College of Physicians for 1878. By DAVID
FERRIER, M.D., F.R.S. London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1878.
" These lectures are intended to serve as the complement from a clinical
and pathological stand-point of the author's work on " The Functions of
the Brain". They retain the form in which they were delivered as the
Gulstonian Lectures of the College of Physicians, but have been revised and
supplemented by numerous additional facts and illustrations."
The Principles of Human Knowledge : being Berkeley's celebrated
Treatise of the Xature of Material Substance (and its relation
to the Absolute), with a brief Introduction to the Doctrine and
full Explanations of the Text ; followed by an Appendix with
Remarks on Kant and Hume. By COLLYXS SYMOX, LL.D.
London : Tegg, 1878. Pp. 220.
Dr. Symon claims that this is " the only edition with explanations
that has ever been prepared by an adherent of Berkeley," and further
that he is the only adherent " who has been found to raise his voice
against the increasing misrepresentations of hostile editors and adver-
138 New Hooks.
saries ". Who exactly these are is never expressly stated by Dr.
Symon, but in his Introduction he sets out (not for the first time)
with a particularity that leaves nothing to be desired, a list, in thirty-
six propositions, " of the egregious blunderings that are to be met
with in books upon this subject among the other nations of Europe
as well as among ourselves ". In an appendix he seeks to trace back
to Hume through Kant and Reid the origin of the misrepresentations
of the true Berkeleyan doctrine ; Hume, as he has managed to dis-
cover, having first, when he was " an attorney's clerk in Edin-
burgh (!), attacked the doctrine of Phenomenal Matter as pure
nonsense, and next, when he found this of no avail, having turned
round and allowed the doctrine to be true, but (like the " merry
Scotsman " he was) pretended that it lent the most admirable support
to Scepticism. The fault of Reid and Kant, when their turn came,
lay in their not seeing that Hume " was merely and undisguisedly
sarcastic and in jest, never in earnest, in what he wrote on Metaphy-
sics ". They took him for a serious writer, and this has been ever
since believed Avithout question, till now when the strange misconcep-
tion is for the first time pointed out by Dr. Symon. Berkeley's
treatise itself is, in the present edition, split up into three parts and
these again into chapters, corresponding with the main divisions of
the argument, Besides explanatory headings and notes, there is also
given in a " General Index" at the end a restatement of the editor's
interpretations in alphabetical order of topics.
Rene Descartes : His Life and Meditations. A new Translation of
the Meditationes, with Introduction, Memoir, and Commentary.
By RICHARD LOWNDES. London: F. Norgate, 1878.
Lighting some little time ago on Kuno Fischer's History of Modern
Philosophy, Mr. Lowndes was drawn afresh to the study of Kant,
Leibnitz, and Descartes particularly Descartes, and conceived the
design of translating the Meditationes, apparently in ignorance at that
time of Prof. Veitch's version (which is hardly " scarce ") and the
earlier version of Molyneux, though they have since become known to
him. He gives the following account of other parts of his work :
" The Introduction, for which the materials have for the most part been
stolen from Fischer, and the concluding observations, or Commentary, are
simply intended to fix the place of the Meditations in the history of philo-
sophy, by exhibiting, on the one side the state of the science at the time
the Meditations were written, and, on the other, the manner in whicli the
problems and solutions of Descartes are taken up into the system of Kant."
Philosophical Fragments, written during Intervals of Business. By
J. D. MORELL, LL.D. London : Longmans, 1878. Pp. 278.
Following the lines of thought taken up in his previous works, the
author here gives first a sketch of German Philosophy from Leibnitz
down to the present time ; secondly, a chapter on the Theory of
Knowledge, in which he seeks to prove that the inductive method is
" the real and proper method for the human intellect to follow even
in the most recondite and metaphysical researches " ; thirdly (in the
New Books. 139
form of three lectures) " an application of some of the modern doc-
of psychology to the principles of Education " ; finally, a post-
script on the latest phase of Hartmann's Philosophy.
Final Causes : By PAUL JANET, Member of the Institute, Professor
at the Faculte des Lettres of Paris. Translated from the French
by William Affleck, B.D., with Preface by Eobert Flint, D.D.,
LL.D., Professor of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. Edin-
burgh : T. & T. Clark, 1878. Pp. 508.
This work, by the present leader of French spiritualistic philosophy,
has already, in its original form (1876), been critically noticed in
MIND, ]STo. VI. Translated now for English readers, it is first of all
prefaced by the author himself, who is particularly gratified " to be
introduced in England by way of Scotland, that country of profound
reason, where wisdom has always been mingled with a certain
agreeableness and good grace commanding sympathy ". " Great
Britain (he adds) has always been the claasic land of final causes : it
is there that national theology originated, has been developed, and
has held its ground with honour down to our days." The present
work, however, is " not a treatise of natural theology, but an analytical
and critical treatise on the principle of final causes itself " ; " its
foundations, authority, limits and signification " being sought " by
confronting it with the data and conditions of modern science as well
as with the doctrines of the boldest and most recent metaphysics ".
Prof. Flint, who adds another preface, says of the book that,
" although not an absolutely exhaustive treatise on final causes, seeing
that it does not attempt to trace their presence in the regions of
intellect and emotion, morality and history, it is the most compre-
hensive work which has been written on the subject ". He further
defends it against some of the strictures passed by M. Janet's critic in
MIND ; in particular urging that the main idea of the book was not
seized, namely, that final causes are not inconsistent with causation,
and maintaining against the critic (Mr. Sully) that our knowledge of
design in nature is related to our knowledge of conscious thoughts and
volitions in each other, since the only evidences for the existence of
other human minds are evidences of design.
The Ethics of Posit iviam : A Critical Study. By GIACOMO
BARZELLOTTI, Professor of Philosophy at the Liceo Dante,
Florence. New York : Somerby, 1878.
Prof. Barzellotti's essay, La Morale nella Filosofia positiva, when it
appeared in 1871, drew considerable attention in this country as the
work of a well-informed and equitable, if not exactly sympathetic, critic
of English Ethical Science. The Essay was predominantly a criticism
of English ethics ; the word ' positive ' being used in the wider sense
now not uncommon, as synonymous with ' scientific ' (that is to say,
'in the spirit of the natural sciences'), and English philosophy
appearing to the author most to conform to that description. In a
new preface (pp. xxiv.) written for the present translation, the author
140 New Books.
seeks to reply more especially to Mr. Sidgwick's criticism of his essay
in the Academy of 1st July, 1872. Charged with confounding
Egoistic and Universalistic Hedonism under the common term of
Utilitarianism and with representing the whole history of ethical
controversy as a duel between Intuitionists and Utilitarians, he
maintains that to him, trying theoretically to account for moral
obligation, only two principles could appear " distinct and irreducible,
viz., the principle of absolute obligation and the opposite principle of
relative or conditional obligation the principle of happiness, of the
useful, of interest whether general or individual ". On another point
remarked upon by Mr. Sidgwick, namely, the assertion that no moral
investigation properly so called can be based on the doctrines of Comte,
Prof. Barzellotti is willing to accept his critic's statement that Comte
did not so much pretermit introspective observation as practise it in
the unreflective, unanalytical way of common life. Still he finds
Comte's radical fault to be that, " from the fact objectively observed
that human beings act on each other through their social relations by
virtue of certain impulses, he passes to the conclusion that they must
consequently act so and so in virtue of a moral necessity " ; though the
fault is shared by all " the followers of inductive morality ". The
translation is by Signer E. Gandolfo in conjunction with Miss I. I .
Olcott.
Des Societes Animates : tude de Psychologic compared. Par ALFRED
ESPINAS. 2nd Edition. Paris : Germer Bailliere, 1 878. Pp.
588.
M. Espinas's remarkable study in comparative psychology, reviewed
in MIND IX., appears now in a second edition, increased by about
half its original size. The increase consists mainly of a compre-
hensive Historical Introduction (pp. 155), in which the author seeks
" to pass under review the principal systems of social philosophy, in
their main features, so as to discover the various solutions of which,
the problem of social life in general admits, and also to determine
what theories have been broached, Avere it only incidentally, by philo-
sophers on the subject of animal societies in particular."
/
La Morale ft Epicure et ses Rapports avcc les Doctrines contemporaries.
Par M. GUYAU. Paris : G. Bailliere, 1878. Pp. 290.
" This volume is the first half of a Memoir couronne in 1874 by the
Ji Academe des Sciences Morales et Politiqnes, its publication having been
delayed till now by the author's ill-health. The original Memoir,
which was very long, had for its subject the Utilitarian Morality and
extended from Epicurus to the English school of the present day.
After having recast and completed all that concerned Epicurus and
his direct successors, the author thought it right to make of this
a separate volume. Epicurus is one of those philosophers whose ideas
are most powerful in the present time ; he is one of the most modern
of the ancients, and his ethical system, sometimes so ill understood,
has seemed to the author worthy of a special and conscientious study.
JV0K- Books. 141
The second part of the original Memoir will be published presently
under the title Let Morale Anglaise contemporaine (Evolution et
Darwinisme)."
L'idee moderne du Dro'd en Allemanjc, en Angleterre et en France.
Par ALFRED FOUILLEE, Maitre de Conferences a 1'Ecole Normale
Superieure. Paris: Hachette, 1878. Pp. 364.
The author who has already left his mark on contemporary
philosophy by an original treatment of the ethical question of Liberty
and Determinism (La liberte et le dttermimsme, 1872 ; see MIXD VI.,
p. 372), makes here a new application of his characteristic method.
According to him,
" Philosophy in the 19th century has set itself to analyse the ideas on
which men have hitherto rested their moral, social and religious beliefs,
. . . and among the ideas which have to become transformed, if they are
not to disappear, the notion of Right or Law is one of the foremost,
inseparable as it is from the notions of Liberty and Duty. The older
spiritualism can no longer be maintained ; the metaphysical entities to
which it appealed are as impotent in the question of Right as in that of
moral liberty. Must the conception of " Rights of Man " then be rejected,
even as a pure ideal \ Has Germany or England been better inspired than
France in referring the whole civic and political order to a simple
combination of forces or of interests, and in opposing the principle of
aristocratic inequality to that of democratic equality ? Perhaps we shall
come to see that each of the three points of view taken by the chief modern
peoples has its relative truth. Perhaps it is possible to construct a new
theory of Right, at once naturalistic and idealistic, and comprehensive
enough to reconcile all the adverse systems."
Prolegomena zu einer anthropolorjischen Philosophic Yon Dr.
FRIEDRICH vox BARENBACH. Leipzig: Earth, 1879. Pp. 386.
This is the first part of a new Foundation of Critical Pilosophy, to
be followed by other parts having each a certain independence but
all subserving the one end of establishing by the side of the special
sciences a philosophy in the strictest sense scientific. The present
first part has for its special subject the " Axioms of the Critical Theory
of Knowledge". The author's conception of philosophy, as bound to
be anthropological, does not essentially differ from that which has
long prevailed in this country, though it is carried out by him
according to the critical method of Kant, instead of being based, as in
England, both before and after the time of Kant, on the results of
psychological inquiry. In following Kant's lead, however, the author
does not neglect the later works of English thinkers.
Fjxcerpta e LH>ro Alfredi Anglici " De Motu Cordis" item Costa-Ben-
Lui-ae " D" Differentia Animae et Spirit us " Liber translntus a
Johanne Hitpalensi. Als Beitrage zur Geschichte der An-
thropologie undPsychologie des Mittela]ters,nachhandschriftlicher
Ueberlieferung herausgegeben und mit einer einleitenden Abhan-
dlung und Anmerkungen versehen. Yon Dr. CARL SIGMUXD
BARACH. Innsbruck : "VYagner, 1878. Pp. 139.
142 New Books.
This is the second part (the first was noticed in MIND Y.) of the
Bibliotheca Philosophorum Mediae Aetatis, designed in a most
praiseworthy manner to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the
philosophical literature of the Middle Ages. Prof. Barach seeks in
the present issue to give an insight into the anthropological and
psychological thought of the period, selecting the work De Motu
Cordis of Alfred Anglicus, hitherto imprinted, though freely referred
t} in the MS. form by Haureau and others. More than half of the
whole work is given in selected excerpts, the rest being omitted only
because it consists of mere repetitions or because of the hopeless
corruption of the text. There is added a Latin translation of the
Arabian treatise, also hitherto unprinted r of Costa-Ben-Luca Do
Differentia Animae et Spiritm, from which Alfred chiefly drew and
which was otherwise much considered in the Middle Age. Costa-
Ben-Luca was a Christian physician and philosopher of Baalbec and
Bagdad, living from 864 to 923. Alfred's date has given rise to much
question. Prof. Barach, after a careful investigation, assigns 1220-27
as the period of his literary activity. The treatise De Motu Cordis is
truly mediaeval in being based on the record (mostly defective) of
earlier opinions rather than on fresh and original observation, but it
is full of historical interest as showing how marked was the desire,
before the modern period, to establish a definite relation between mind
and the bodily organs. Prof. Barach quotes in regard to it Haureau' s
striking observation on Scholasticism generally " La scolastique,
c'est la reVolution qui se prepare ".
Phdnomenologie des sittliclien Bewusstseins. Prolegomena zu einer
jeden kunftigen Ethik. Von EDUARD VON HARTMANN. Berlin,
1879. Pp. 871.
This work (which appears ten years after the publication of the
Philosophie des Uribewnssteri) is intended to prepare the way for a
scientific system of Ethics, by a critical review of the facts of our
moral consciousness, and statement of the principles which they seem
to imply. The first division of the book (100 pages) is entitled
" The pseudo-moral consciousness as propaedeutic for Morality," and
is subdivided into (1) Egoistic Pseudo-morality and (2) Heteronomous
Pseudo-morality : in other words, the principles of Individual
Happiness and an external authoritative Rule of Eight. The
remainder of the book is divided into three parts : (a) The springs of
Morality, or the subjective moral principles, (/;) Moral Ends, or the
objective moral principles, and (c) The foundations of Morality, or the
absolute moral principles. In the first part we have a discussion of
the Morality of Taste or the esthetic springs of action, of the Morality
of Sentiment, and of the function of Keason. with regard to Conduct.
The objective principles are two the social eudaemonistic and the
evolutionary (the development of culture), their combination furnishing
the conception of a moral world-order as TG'XOC. The last hundred
pages treat of the absolute principles needed for the support of
empirical moral ends.
New Books. 143
Ge-schichte der philosophischen Termino7t\jie. Im TTmriss darges-
tellt. Von RUDOLF EUCKEX, Professor in Jena. Leipzi^ : Yeit,
1879. Pp. 226.
The author fell upon the idea of this work in the course of a
general investigation into the history of philosophical notions. The
question of terminology was inevitably involved with this, and it
seemed to him that a separate treatment of it might be useful ; more
especially as, six years ago, he had been moved to propose in the
Phibjsophische Monafehefte that some learned society should under-
take the production of a dictionary of philosophical terms, and mean-
while, though the proposal had been highly approved of in many
quarters, nothing had been done towards its realisation. The present
attempt has not been made with any notion of its being more than a
beginning. The history of philosophical terminology is traced suc-
cessfully among (1) the Greeks, (2) the Romans and the Schoolmen,
(3) the Moderns, (4) the Germans. There follows next a discussion
of the history of particular terms; and the necessary index is supplied
at the close.
Yon Dr. CHRISTOPH SIGWABT, o.b"., Professor der Philo-
sophic an der Universitat Tubingen. 2ter Band. Die Metho-
denlehre. Tubingen: Laupp, 1878. Pp. 612.
The concluding volume of the author's comprehensive treatise. It
has given him, he says, great satisfaction to find that in one chief de-
partment of methodology, the theory of induction, Professor Jevons's
views in the Principles of Science are in essential agreement with his
own ; but he has been more sparing than Professor Jevons in his
references to the history of science, preferring to illustrate the abstrac-
tions of Logic by things familiarly known.
Die Physiologic des Schonen. Yon S. BYK. Leipzig : Schafer,
1878. Pp. 286.
An analysis of the Beautiful and description of its various forms
in nature and art, embodying the results of long-continued observation
and reflection, and written down by way of mental recreation in the
interval between the composition of the first and second parts of the
author's VonokratiscJie Philosophic der Griechen. The author claims
as an advantage in treating the subject, that he neither has a meta-
physical system of his own nor is prepared to subscribe absolutely to
to the system of anybody else.
i sorrernennoi filosofskoi muisli v Germanii. Ocherki iz pntesh-
estviga za granitsu. (Characteristics of Contemporary Philo-
soplti'-al Thought in German//. Sketches from a foreign journey.)
By P. MILOSLAVSKY, Professor of Philosophy in the University
of Kazan. Kazan, 1878.
The author sends the following statement :
" In the argumentative part of this work it is contended that a scientific
philosophy cannot be constructed a priori without reference to scientific
144 New Books.
experience. By scientific and philosophical analysis of mind and hocly it
has been established that human knowledge cannot be absolute, but it is no
less true that our nescience is relative also : in the nature of external things,
and of the organism with its mental endowment, there is no more ground
for absolute nescience than for absolute science of anything. Now, if
all natural phenomena whatever were appropriated by different classes
of special inquirers, there could be no qiiestion of a philosophy in-
independent of the sciences. But it is not to be forgotten that all special
scientific inquiries, and the phenomena of human knowledge generally
from prehistoric times to the present day, themselves constitute a particular
class of real and natural phenomena ; and these, while not to be confounded
with the related subjects of psychology or logic, are left for special investi-
gation by the philosopher. Philosophy, in fact, may be viewed as itself a
positive natural and special science, having for its subject the methodical
scientific investigation of the relations and laws of human knowledge and
the world as known. From this point of view there is no philosophical
problem, even the most perplexed, that may not admit of scientific resolu-
tion, and only such a Philosophy is able to bring into organic unity the
separate philosophies of ' religion,' ' history,' ' right,' ' art,' &c."
1ST. GROTE. Snovidcnia Jcak Predmet naoutsclmarjo Analisa (Dreams
as an Object of Scientific Analysis). Kiev, 1878. Pp. 68.
The author is professor of philosophy in the Institute of Prince
Besborodko, JSTjeschin, Russia, and this was his inaugural thesis. It
is an attempt to treat dreams in a strictly scientific spirit, to the
exclusion (1) of the prehistoric view, found still among savage tribes,
which ascribes to dreams an objective reality, and (2) the symbolic
view, which regards them more or less as porttens. The scientific
explanation seeks to assign their physiological conditions in the nervous
system and their psychological constituents in the foregone experience
of the individual. Physiologically, dreams are due to disordered brain
activity, some parts being excited or over-excited while others are more
or less exhausted. This being so it is a mistake to suppose, with
Volkmann, that dreams afford, subjectively, a revelation of the true
moral character of the individual. They are rather to be viewed, with
Maury, as a rudimentary form of mental alienation.
The Colour-Sense, its Origin and Development : An Essay in
Comparative Psychology. By GRANT ALLEN Triibner and Co.
" Starting with the objective nature of Colour as depending on frequenc
of aither-waves, this forthcoming work endeavours to determine the cause
which led to the evolution among animals of an organ capable of differen-
tial stimulation by the different colours. It traces the mutual reactions of
insects and flowers, and of birds or mammals and fruits ; collects the
evidence in favour of the existence of a colour-sense among articulates and
vertebrates ; and discusses the mode in which it most probably arose.
Then, after considering the nature of Taste, it points out the reasons for
believing that a taste for bi'ight colours exists only amongst fruit-eating or
flower-haunting animals, and that they alone show secondary marks of its
effects in the sexual selection of brilliant mates. Coming down to man, it
combats the " Historical Development" theory of Geiger, Magnus, and
New Books. 145
Gladstone; asserts the community of coloiir-perception throughout the
whole race ; and gives evidence from ancient art-products and modern
savage life. A chapter is then devoted to the aesthetic value of colour ; an. 1
th work closes with an inquiry into the growth of the colour- vocabulary."
The Realistic Assumptions of Modern Science examined. By THOMAS
^IARTIX HJERJERT, M.A., late Professor of Church History au.l
Philosophy in the Lancashire Independent College, Manchester.
London : Macinillan & Co., 1878.
" This forthcoming work is an attempt to show that Realism, wheu
followed out to its logical consequence-;, confutes its claim to represent
things as they are, and demonstrates tlur. its assertions can be valid only
within the limits of phenomena, or respecting things as they seem.
Various Dualistic Theories of Mind and Matter having been examined, the
futility of all attempts to explain the connexion between brain-changes
and thoughts is pointed out, and the conclusion is arrived at that it u
absolutely impossible to combine inovem -nts and thoughts, as we conceive
them, into one self-consistent scheme ; but that dealing with the facts of
the material world, as physical science deals with them, we can find no trace
of, no room for, any facts of consciousness. This conclusion is confirmed by a
consideration of the failure of Realistic Science to explain the connexion
of a sensation with its distant object, the realisation of a purpose, the
rational character of mental life, the moral and spiritual nature of man,
the facts of memory and an enduring Ego, the conceptions of Time, Space,
and Energy, and our conviction of the existence of an external Power as the
cause of sensation. The argument proceeds to show that it is necessary to
transcend phenomena, and recognise efficient cause or power in order to
escape Idealism and arrive at anything external ; and that Positiviste
violate their fundamental principle in assuming phenomena to be extcr. al
and to have occurred in succession. It is contended that it is in virtue of
inferences which transcend phenomena that we recognise external force
; or efficient causation, or believe in the existence either of a permanent
or of other minds like our own ; and that the belief in a God is a
conviction resting upon similar grounds, and one that must stand or larl
according as those other conclusions are accepted or rejected. It is further
maintained that personal attributes furnish the loftiest conceptions we can
frame of the Divine Being; and that such conceptions, whilst necessarily
relative, are as real and reliable as any knowledge we can possess."
MISCELLANEOUS.
MR. GEORGE HENRY LEWES, died at his residence the Priory,
North Bank, on the 30th November, after an illness of ten days, and
was buried at Highgate Cemetery on the 4th December. One of the
foremost philosophical workers of his generation has thus most un-
expectedly and almost suddenly been removed at the time
when he could least be spared. Mr. Lewes, in the execution of his
comprehensive philosophical enterprise, was just approaching those
" Problems of Life and Mind" with which he had acquired an excep-
tional fitness to deal. It had been, he tells us. his original intention
to include in his last published (third) volume, The Physical Basis of
Mind, an exposition of the part he conceived the brain to play in
physiological and psychological processes, but this he had to postpone
till it could be accompanied by a previous survey of the psychological
processes that would make the exposition intelligible. Such a survey,
if it included a detailed treatment of the relation of the individual
mind to that " social medium" which the author in his first volume
had so impressively accentuated in general terms, might be expected
to mark a real advance in pyschological science ; while his original
researches into the nervous system, protracted through many years,
could not fail to give him a familiarity with the necessary physiological
data hitherto enjoyed by few professed psychologists. Fortunately,
there is reason to believe that the composition of the expected fourth
volume is left in an advanced state, and it is, moreover, understood
that the work of editing this and Mr. Lewes's other philosophical
remains will be undertaken by one who is not more fitted for such a
task by knowledge of her life-companion's inmost thoughts than by
surpassing native endowment. Mr. Lewes was born in London in
April, 1817, and was educated by Dr. Burney at Greenwich. After
being employed for a short time as a merchant's clerk and having also
begun the study of medicine, he went abroad in 1838 to learn the
German language and study philosophy. Returning home in 1839, at
the age of 22, he adopted the profession of literature and for many
years displayed extraordinary versatility as journalist, reviewer and
author. The stages of his advance as a philosophical and scientific
writer are these : Biographical History of Philosophy from Tholes
to Gomte in 1845, 2nd edition enlarged in 1857, 3rd edition still more
enlarged and with the new title History of Philosophy in 1867, 4th
edition in 1874; Comic's Philosophy of the Sciences in 1853; j
Physiology of Common Life in 1859-60; Aristotle: a Chapter from \
Hie History of Science in 1864 ; Problems of Life and Mind, 3 vols., I
in 1875-7.
Mr. HERBERT SPENCER has deferred the continuation of hia
Principles of Sociology, and is now engaged upon the Principles of
Morality, which has always been designed as the crownir.g work in .'
his " System of Philosophy ".
Miscellaneous. 147
Mr. "W. C. COUPLAND has undertaken (for Messrs. Triibner) the
translation of Hartmann's Philosophic des Unbewussten.
Dr. MAUDSLEY has retired, after fifteen years' service, from the
joint-editorship of The Journal of Mental Science, published by au-
thority of the Medico-Psychological Association. Dr. T. S. Clouston
who was associated of late years with Dr. Maudsley, has now associ-
ated with him in the editorship (since the number of October last)
Drs. D. Hack Tuke and Geo, H. Savage.
MR. MALCOLM GUTHRIE, who sent us word a year ago of the
formation in Liverpool of a club for philosophical reading, now sends
a copy of a printed program for 1878-9, according to which the
club is now definitely constituted under the title of *' Society for the
Critical Examination of Modern Philosophy," meaning " the
systematic study and discussion of such Philosophical Works as may
from time to time be decided upon by a majority of the members, the
subject for each evening to be introduced by a member in a critical or
expository statement of a section of the work under consideration."
The Society meets once a month at the Royal Institution, Colquitt
Street. Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. L, is the subject of
study for the present session.
MR. DAVID STME writes as follows from Melbourne :
" I was much interested in reading the Rev. "W. Cunningham's essay on
" Political Economy as a Moral Science" in the July number of MIND. * In
that e.-say Mr. Cunningham lays down the following propositions :
1. That things in themselves have no place in Political Economy, but
only things as known and as used.
2. That value, therefore, is not an inherent quality in a commodity, but
only a relation.
3. That economic phenomena are not the effects of one force, but of
many ; that these forces are not physical but mental, and that Political
Economy is therefore not a physical, or an exact, but a moral science.
It is only due to myself to state that the above propositions are fully
stated, and for the first time as far as I am aware, in my Outlines of an
Industrial Science, published (by Messrs Henry S. King & Co.) about two
years ago. Mr. Cunningham, however, appears not to have seen my work
a gratifying fact in one respect, proving as it does that we have both
arrived at the same results by independent investigation."
MR. C. EVANS, writing from Llandaff, sends the following on
" Temperature and Touch" :
" Might not experiments upon parts of the body, as feet or arms, which
are ' gone to sleep help to furnish a solution of the puzzling question as to
the connexion between touch and temperature ? Among the arguments
brought forward in support of the view that feelings of touch and feelings
of temperature do not come from the same nerves, I have never heard this
kind of test mentioned. Yet if, e.g., one's foot is so sound ' asleep' that one
cannot feel the pressure of the floor when using it to stand on (the foot
being shod as usual or incontact with a carpet), is it not the case that if one
steps on a cold surface, as stone or polished wood, the foot that is asleep
gives at least as strong a sensation of cold as the other foot, which is not
148 Miscellaneous.
THE JOURNAL OP SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY. Vol. XII. Iv>. 4. F. A.
Heury ' Christianity and the Clearing-up'. J. Royce ' Schiller's Ethical
Studies'. R. H. Worthington 'Jacobi and the Philosophy of Faith'.
Hegel 'On Romantic Art' (transl.). G. B. Halsted 'Statement and
Reduction of Syllogism'. Notes and Discussions.
RKVUE PHILOSOPHIQUK. Sine Annee, No. X. H. Taine ' Geographic et
Me"canique ce"rebrales'. Carrau ' Moralistes Anglais contemporains : M.
Lecky'. Seailles ' Philosophes contemporains : M. Ravaisson'. Notes et
Documents ' La Conscience sous 1' action du Chforoibrme, d' apres H.
Spencer'. ' De la Duree des actes psychiques eleuientaires, d'apres Kries
et Auerbach'. Analyses et Comptes-rendus. Revue des Periodiques
e"tranger*. Correspondance. No. XI. A. Dastre ' Le probleme physio-
logique de la vie'. G. Compayre ' La psychologic de 1' enfant, d'apres des
publications re"centes'. H. Joly ' La jeunesse cle Leibniz a 1' Universite
de Leipzig'. Notes et Documents ' L' Intelligence animale, d'apres M.
Romanes'. ' Note sur le sens musculaire, par le Dr. G. Pouchet. Analyse*
et Comptes-rendus. Notices bibliographiques. Rev. des Period. No. XII.
C. S. -Peirce 'La Logique de la Science' (I.). ' A. Penjoii ' La Meta-
physique ph4nomeniste en Angleterre : M. Shn;lworth-Hodgson' (I.). P.
Regnaud Etudes de Philosophic indienne, F Ecole Vedanta'. Variete*
' Les Etudes psychologiques en Allemagne: M. Lazarus,' par Th. Reinacii.
Analyses et comptes-rendus. Rev. des Periodiques etrangers.
LA CRITIQUE PHILOSOPHIQUE. Vllme Annee, Nos. 33-45. C. Reriou-
vier ' La question de la certitude : Le pari de Pascal et le pari de M. W.
James ' (33) ; ' Des notions de matiere et de force dans les sciences de la
nature ' (33, 36, 37, 38) ; ' Une pretendue conversion' (34); 'Examen critique
des principes de psychologic de H. Spencer : La question de 1' originc des
connaissances ' (34) ; L' immortalite conditionelle ' (40); ' L' esprit reVolu-
tionnaire avant la revolution ' (44). F. Pillon ' Les chatiments corporels
dans!' education ' (35) ; ' M. Wallace et le Darwmisme ' (43, 44). Ch. Dollfus
' Dieu et la vie future ' (39). Biblographie (37, 38, 39, 40, 41).
ZEITSCHRIFT FUR PHILOSOPHIC, &c. Bd. LXIIL, Heft 2. G. Glogau
' Darlegungu. Kritikdes Grundgedankens der cartesianischen Metaphysik'.
E. Dreher ' Zum Verstsindniss der Sinneswahrnehmunger'nn (V.) Re-
censionen. Bibliographie.
ZEITSCHRIFT FUR VOLKERPSYCHOLOGIE u. SPRACHWISSENSCHAFT. Bd.
X., Heft 4. Dr. G. Glogau ' Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik und
Ethik im Lichte der neueren Psychologie' (II). M. Kulischer ' Das coni-
munale Eigentum in Russland'. M. Kulischer ' Der Handel auf den
primitiven Culturstufen'. Beurteilungen.
VlERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FUR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE. Bd. II.
Heft 4. C. H. Schneider 'Warum bemerken wir massig bewegte Dinge
leichter als ruhende?' H. Vaihinger 'Das Entwickelungsgesetz der
Vorstellungen iiber das Reale'. (2.) H. Weissenborn ' Ueber die neueren
Ansichten vom Raum und von den geometrischen Axiomen' (III.)- R-
Avenarius ' In Sachen der wissenschaftlichen Philosophic' (II.). Recen-
eionen. Entegegnungen u. Berichtigungen. Selbstanzeigen. Philoso-
phische Zeitschriften. Bibliographische Mittheilungen.
Correction. Dr. Wm. James, the writer of the first article in the present
Number, wishes to withdraw the footnote standing first on p. 17.
No. 14.] [April, 1879.
MIND
A QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
L LAURA BEIDGMAX.
IN 1837 a delicate light-haired girl, nearly eight years old,
who at the age of 26 months had lost sight, hearing, and to a
great extent the senses of smell and taste, from an attack of
scarlet fever, was brought from her rural home in Xew Hamp-
shire to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. During
her long illness all recollection of her babyhood had been com-
pletely effaced. Her parents had communicated with her by
the simplest signs addressed to her only sense of touch. A pat
on the head expressed approval, on the back disapproval. She
had been taught to sew, knit, braid, and assist in trifling ways
about the work of a farmhouse. Dr. Howe began her instruction
by pasting on common objects chair, spoon, stove, &c., their
names printed in raised letters. After she had associated the
name and the object the labels were taken off, and she was
taught to select the object for a corresponding name and rice
versa. After a few days, when she had thus learned a small
number of names and objects, Dr. Howe gave her a pin and a
pen and made her feel his hands as he spelled from disconnected
letters the two corresponding words. After repeating this pro-
cess scores of times she suddenly seemed to understand that the
signs were complex and must be observed separately, and at last
she was able to select from a pile of letters those which spell ' pin '
or ' pen ' according as one or the other object was given her
11
150 Laura Bridgman.
This was an immense step. She was now easily taught the
names of many other things and to set up types of raised letters,
and impressing them upon paper to produce a copy which she
could read on the reverse side. After nearly two years of such
exercises she was taught words indicative of quality, as ' hard '
and ' soft,' and, later, moral qualities, commencing with the
figurative use of the words ' sweet ' and ' sour/ which as tastes
she could slightly distinguish. It was difficult to explain to her
why these should precede the substantive, and especially so to
make her understand general or abstract expressions of quality,
as 'hardness,' 'softness'. Next she was taught words expressive of
simple space-relations ' on,' ' in,' ' under,' &c., and later and very
easily the use of verbs expressing tangible actions, as ' walk,'
' run,' ' sew,' first in the present indicative and then in other moods
and tenses. Instruction in writing which began at this point
was at first very puzzling to her, but when she suddenly caught
the idea that thus she might communicate with persons whom
she did not actually touch, her enthusiasm was great and her
progress rapid. Counting, the .divisions of time, the simple
rules of arithmetic, and, later, fractions and the computation of
interest, the elements of algebra and geography, &c., she has
been able to comprehend quite clearly,
We have no space to epitomise further the history of her
education contained in Dr. Howe's Eeports, 1 unfortunately now
mostly out of print. His work was so ingenious and successful
that it still remains one of the greatest triumphs of paedagogic
skill, and his studies of his pupil during the most interesting
period of her education may be called almost classical for the
psychologist. Few princes have had more devoted pains be-
stowed on their education. Besides Dr. Howe's personal and
constant supervision, an accomplished lady-teacher, who has
lately published an interesting sketch of Laura's Life and Edu-
cation, 2 was engaged for years expressly for her. Laura's
curiosity has always been boundless, and she is so demonstrative
and affectionate, and so pitiable from the afflictions which have
made her famous, that the number of her personal friends and
acquaintances has become surprisingly great, while not a few
ladies have learned the deaf and dumb alphabet mainly in
order to converse with her. The philanthropic interest of Dr.
Howe in his pupil (whom he described as living in isolation
from all that is best in the intercourse with men and nature, as
if at the bottom of a deep well striving to grasp the slender
I* l The last Report, issued jiist before Dr. Howe's death, was reprinted in
MIND II., pp. 2(53-7.
2 Life and Education of Laura Deweij Bridgman. Ey MARY SWIFT
LAMSON. Boston : N.E. Pub. Co. 1878.
Laura Bridgman. 151
cord by which he at last slowly drew her up into the world of
human fellowship) was contagious, and thirty years ago his
annual reports of her progress were translated into several
European languages and read by thousands with an interest and
a sympathy which has been described as creditable to humanity.
Her native modesty and conscientiousness, her remarkable
cheerfulness and love of every sort of sport and play which she
can understand, scarcely less pronounced now in the woman of
forty-nine than it was in the girl of sixteen, the amazing
rapidity with which she comprehends and uses the deaf and
dumb alphabet (sometimes receiving through the hand of an
expert teacher every word of a public address as it is given with
the loss of scarcely a letter), the decided enlargement of her head
in the frontal regions during the early years of her education,
her dreams in the finger-language, her curious and expressive
vocal sounds, gestures, and facial expressions, the readiness with
which she remembers old acquaintances after the lapse of years
by the mere touch of the hand, these and many other facts
have been cited and commented upon by scores of writers until
it is hardly extravagant to say that comparatively few compre-
hensive treatises in any department of mental or moral philo-
sophy or psychology written in Europe or America during the
last quarter of a century can be found without the mention of
her name. Her education has of course always been chiefly in
language ; yet, like all the blind, and still more those who are
both deaf and blind, she is quite nominalistic in her modes of
thought, and by no means a mere parrot or word-monger. A
word to her, though not a mere flatus vocis t is yet only a repre-
sentation of something definite, specific, and for the most part
tangible. It has been often conjectured that intensity and
range of emotion depend in some measure upon the intensity and
range of the voice, the mobility of the features, &c. The capa-
cities of the hand, physiologically the most objective part of the
body, are so different as an organ of expression from those of
the larynx that, if this be at all true, we can see here an addi-
tional reason why her strange consciousness is at every point so
like yet so unlike our own, that we might compare the two as
Mr. Herbert Spencer conceives things per se may be related to
our perceptions of them, viz., as solid objects casting their shadow
upon a cylindrical surface where lines and angles are all repre-
sented, but in such changed relations and proportions that there
:i element of incommensurability between thing and thought
at every point.
For years Laura was encouraged to write down every day her
experiences, acquisitions and reflections, and her teachers were
also in the habit of keeping a diary of her progress. She has
152 Laura Bridgman.
also at different periods of her life written three " autobiogra-
phies," two of which are mainly devoted to the recollections of
child-life at home. She has had quite an extensive correspon-
dence and many of her letters have been collected and preserved
by friends. Unhappily very little of this copious material except
her own diary and the reports of Dr. Howe has been used by
Mrs. Lamson in her recent sketch. Through the kindness of Dr.
Anagnos, the successor and son-in-law of Dr. Howe, it was all
placed in the writer's hands; and the hospitality of the Perkins In-
stitute for several weeks, together with all needed assistance and
information, was generously offered for further observation and
experiment. A preliminary sketch of some of the methods and
results of these it is now the object of the present article to give.
Most of Laura's life has been passed in an atmosphere of womanly
sympathy, and the question whether or not she should be
submitted to the trifling inconvenience necessary to any psycho-
physiological study of her sensations, which may seem to some
to bring humanitarian and scientific motives in conflict, appears
quite impertinent when we reflect that perhaps no person living
owes more to the kindness of her fellow-beings, and that few are
less able to repay it otherwise.
During the first twenty-six months of her life, before the
illness in which the contents of her eye-balls and ears were
discharged by suppuration, she is described as a somewhat pre-
cocious child with light blue eyes and an almost morbidly active
and sensitive temperament, who had already learned a larger
stock of words than most children of that age. Very many
adults remember distinct events before the beginning of their
third year, and several well-authenticated cases are on record of
those who became blind from the sixth to the eighth year, and
whose memory of visual conceptions and colour-sensations has
persisted through adult years. After carefully questioning her
mother and other relatives who have always been interested in
these questions, and after several short series of indirect and
scores of direct questions addressed to Laura herself with the
request that she would " think hard " and answer in writing
the next day, and after examining the three " autobiographies "
in which she has at different periods of her life striven to recall
all traces of early recollections, no reason can be found to believe
that any thing whatever previous to the long convalescence
which extended from her third to her sixth year has remained
or can ever be recalled to her memory. Yet, when we reflect
on the amazingly rapid self-education of infantile life through
the senses and its fundamental nature, it is impossible to believe
that its effect can ever be entirely obliterated. In fact we may
recognise in Laura's strange and insatiable curiosity, especially
Laura Bridgman. 153
about things which others see and hear, as -well as in the sud-
denness with which insights have so often seemed to break in
upon her mind, some sort of sub-conscious reminiscences flashing
through the sad background of her childish recollections.
Of the next period of her life, extending to the end of her
eighth year, when her education commenced, her memory has al-
ways been wonderfully full and complete . In the " autobiography "
of 1854 more than forty large and finely written pages are
devote 1 to this period, and a comparison of this with the others,
and with her answers to questions based on their contents, shows
that she is able to recount still additional details. There is
every reason to believe that these are veritable recollections, and
that they are not confused with accounts of her childhood
rehearsed to her later by parents and friends. She seems to
have taken the greatest pleasure in recalling and reflecting upon
her early life from the higher standpoint of her anicv.la.te
consciousness, and in recording the events in her quaint and
latinistic style. She remembers that she " often subsisted upon
many sorts of berries with most luxurious milk in the summer " ;
how she loved to " reach a great abundance of sour and sweet
apples suspending on the branches of the trees " ; how " I
enjoyed myself exceedingly in observing her [my mother] spin,
weave and wind yarns, and doing other things exceedingly," and
regretted that "I could not perform the latter for it seemed
prodigious " ; how much " difficulty it yielded me to make
myself understood " ; how in a fit of passion " I rejected the
poor cat vehemently into the fire ". " I was intimately
acquainted with my grandfather, who was my male parent's
father." She describes the capes, ruffles and bindings of her
dresses and those of her friends ; tries to explain the process of
making candles and soap ; remembers pounding up beetles and
caterpillars in her mother's mortar, how she used to dress up a
boot as a doll, her adventures with domestic animals, her sports,
occupations, punishments, medicines and presents, the wrinkles
on the hands and faces of her friends, the slender stock of signs
by which she communicated with others, and how she strove
often vainly to make her wants understood ; and pauses
occasionally in the narration to wonder at and deplore with a
sort of self-pity the ignorance of her early life, or to apologise
for that of a quaint old bachelor-friend, who was very kind to her.
Her psychical processes during these years, complex as they
were, went on and were remembered entirely without the aid of
language, which differs from other series of gestures only in being
more explicit and capable of development, and in introducing
into or imposing upon conscious thought a new logical order.
Gesture in general has been described as a language of roots still
154 Laura Bridgman.
more primaeval than those which philologists seek to determine.
Like articulate speech, it is a reflex of apperception, anc 1 . is
demonstrative or predicative, may be very express, or may be
reduced to the slightest terms of motor innervation, and has its
own distinct syntax, determined perhaps for the most part, as
Geiger believed that of oral language to be, by the order in which
phenomena affected and interested the sense of sight. Hence
in these memoirs of her early life, Laura merely translates a
less into a more perfect series of reactions and innervatic us a
process which probably does not differ so much from the case of
a normal adult recalling and reflectively recording his earliest
recollections, as language through the fingers and their cerebral
centres differs from language through the vocal organs and the
island of Eeil. At least it will be admitted that Laura's
education at first revealed quite as much as it created
intelligence, and we must wonder at her remarkable endowments,
while we none the less admire the ingenious method by which
she was saved from a life of isolation, which would otherwise
almost certainly have ended in morbid irritability, melancholy,
and finally in insanity or idiocy.
It has been often asked whether she is absolutely deaf or
blind, and what is the present condition of her ears and eyes ?
The eminent Boston aurist, Dr. Clarence J. Blake, who kindly
consented at the writer's request to examine her ears, reported
as follows : " Both external ears normal. The right external
auditory canal normal in size and contour, and the skin lining
the passage healthy and showing no marks of previous inflam-
mation-processes. The right meinbrana tympani was entirely
destroyed with the exception of a narrow rim, the remains of the
inferior and posterior portions of the membrane, from which a
thin cicatricial tissue extended inward to the promontorium
over the stapes and fenestra rotunda. The malleus and incus
had disappeared. The mucous membrane of the tympanic
cavity presented a normal appearance with the exception of one
spot on the promontorium covered with a thin crust of dried
secretion about two millimetres in diameter. A band of thin
cicatricial tissue also extended across the anterior portion of the
tympanic cavity. The left external auditory canal was filled
with dark brownish cerumen, on removal of which the passage
was found to terminate at a depth of two centimetres in a
diaphragm of secondary granulation-tissue completely closing
the canal. This diaphragm was concave, very firm, and resisting
gentle pressure with a probe, except at the central or thinner
portions, where it could be slightly depressed. Its outer
covering was continuous with the dermoid lining of the canal."
The tests of her sensations of sound were made first with a tuning-
Laura Bndfjnian. 155
fork, with movable clamps and set in vibration by a spring
hammer. The stem of the fork was placed between her teeth
(false) and pressed against an ordinary telephone-disc, resting
successively upon each niastoid process, over the forehead, at the
junction of the frontal and sagittal sutures, over the vertex and
the occiput. Heavier tuning-forks were afterwards used in the
same way, and also in connexion with a series of Helmholtz
resonators, the points of which were introduced into the ear (for
the use of which and other physiological apparatus the writer
was indebted to the kindness of Professor H. P. Bowditch).
The most piercing tones of Konig's rods and the deafening noise
produced by slipping the moistened fingers over the end of a toy
telephone, one mouth-piece of which covered the external ear,
were tried. A large pasteboard trumpet, like those of a
megaphone, though smaller, fitted to the osseous socket of the
ear, such as has been so useful in some cases of deafness, was
used ; and finally electrical irritations were applied to the external
ear and sent through various parts of the brain. But all in vain.
Once or twice her feeling was described as " like singing " or " as
if some one was speaking," but it was generally very certain that
her only sensation was that of vibration or jar. Her sensitive-
ness for the latter is very acute. She commonly describes herself
as hearing " through the feet ". In this way she distinguishes not
only the step but sometimes even the voice of her acquaintances.
From a rough preliminary experiment it would seem that she
is able to distinguish a musical interval of somewhat less than
an octave by the sense of touch through the end of the index
finger of the right hand, and yet this sense does not appear to
recognise sonorous vibrations of less amplitude than normal
persons can do in the same way ; thus, although she lives in an
absolute stillness, which, according to the speculations of Preyer,
a hearing person can never even for an instant attain, she attaches ,
a very definite meaning to the words ' sound ' and ' hear '. She
also feels of course the vibrations in her own throat when
she makes her " noises ". "With sensations which in this respect
are perhaps scarcely above the average, she is able, without the
distractions which continually enter through the normal ear and
eye, to concentrate attention upon the meagre data until she has
developed a set of perceptions and conceptions so little
incommensurate with the ordinary auditory consciousness that
they do duty for it to a surprising though still slight extent.
Of the physiological basis of this sense of vibration or jarring
almost nothing is as yet known. It appears to have some of
the characteristics of a distinct and specific and some of a
generic sense. Investigations already begun in one of the
German laboratories may increase our knowledge of its nature.
156 Laura Bridgman.
If oscillations as such can be directly felt, then the most generic
fact of the physical world enters consciousness immediately
without passing any " inconceivable chasm ".
Dr. 0. F. Wadsworth, an accomplished oculist of Boston, who
kindly consented to examine her eyes, reports as follows : " On
both sides the lids are sunken, partly on account of lack of the
normal amount of orbital fatty tissue. Partly on account of the
small size of the eye-balls, they remain constantly closed. The
right conjunctival sac is much smaller than normal, somewhat
irregular, and presents an appearance such as is seen after severe
and long continued inflammation. The right eye appears about
one-half the normal size. It is wholly enclosed by the sclerotica,
except over a space at the centre some two millimetres in
diameter, where a less opaque tissue on which a few blood-
vessels are visible represents the altered remnant of the cornea.
The left conjunctival sac is somewhat larger than the right, and
more regular, though still small. The left globe also is a little
larger than the right, and its opaque altered cornea is some four
mm. in horizontal and two mm. in vertical diameter. There
was constant irregular oscillation of the globes (nystagmus)
whenever they were exposed to view by raising the lids, and the
oscillation evidently continued even after the lids were closed."
Possibly this was due in part to the excitement of the visit.
The sensitiveness of the eyes was still further tested by a ray
of sunlight directed to each ball, (after the lids had been raised)
from a heliostat, and gradually concentrated until the point of
almost painful heat was reached ; but with no trace of any but
a slight " stinging " sensation in the left ball. Gentle pressure
and electrical irritation applied both to the orbits and directed
through the visual centres produced no effect whatever. During
her childhood at home she was just able to distinguish lights
and windows in a room and (her mother thinks) to recognise
people dressed in white, but these sensations were so feeble that
she seems almost never to have utilised them in directing her
motions ; and even these seem to have been lost soon after she
went to the Asylum. She has always, however, especially in
bright sunlight, complained of a slight " pricking like needles "
in the left eye. Partly for this reason, but chiefly to cover the
shrunken globes, she wore constantly for many years a band of
heavy green silk bound over both eyes. It is thus manifestly
impossible that any, unless it be the most rudimentary, visual
impressions can have directly entered as factors into her
intellectual development. Hence her notion of colour is even
more purely conventional than that of sound. She remembers
having learned that mosquitoes, the wind, certain animals, and
impacts make a noise, but did not know, or had forgotten, that
Laura Bridgman. I". 7
flies, running water, nibbing the hands, &c., did, and was
uncertain about many other things. So she remembers the names
of the colours of her dresses, flowers, sky, grass, blood, and often
insists that certain garments are too light for winter or too
brightly coloured for one of her age. All this, however, is
merely conventional and verbal. She has never formed any
mental conception of what colour is or is like, as do so many of
the blind. It was never in her mind identified with or even
analogous to any notion or sensation of sound, smell, taste, or
touch, as with so many who have only some or all of their senses.
Whether from her conceptions of space-relations the influence
of previous visual impressions has been entirely lost is one of
the most difficult and important questions. She is far less
" blind-minded " than many of the congenitally blind, yet she
forms conceptions of aggregates with difficulty. She knows that
her room is square, but is not certain that the house is so. She
can form a very poor image of how the grounds with which she
is perfectly familiar would look from a house-top, has a very poor
notion of perspective, knows very little why or how much objects
look smaller at a distance, and is unable to tell without much
reflection how many sides of a hexagonal column can be seen
from one point of view, though she has learned well that rays
of light move in straight lines. In spite of her wonderful
powers of recalling past sensations, even those of her childhood,
she remembers nothing of seeing, though it is quite impossible to
believe that the very many and complex motor reactions and
co-ordinations which a bright child learns by means of this sense
before the age of two years can have been entirely lost. These,
and not the small though essential factors of sensation, constitute
education in its enduring results. She turns the head but very
slightly in the direction in which her attention is excited, but
invariably extends one hand. The irregular motions of the
remnant of her eye-balls have also no psychical significance. But
the occult effects of the early possession of vision are to be
found, if at all, in her wonderful memory for forms and in her
perpetual craving for a fuller and larger knowledge than it is
possible to convey to her, which rises at times almost to question-
mania [&rii.belsucht]. Even on the basis of the Berkeley an
theory it would be expected that a knowledge of the external
world derived through touch and muscle-sense alone would be
more serial than where the broader and more rapid perceptive
processes developed through the visual centres come in, to review,
epitomise and extend impressions from without. The question
also arises whether a person with for years only a very vague
sense of intense light and using this to anticipate tactile impres-
sions, e.g., to avoid the fire and go towards the window, &c.,
158 LaiiTa Bridgman.
would not get through the eye a better because far more service-
able idea of the third dimension of space than of the other two.
The inflammation of the olfactory mucous membrane during
her long illness was severe, and the sense of smell was almost
entirely lost, though it has slightly improved with advancing
years. She has never had the habit which so many blind per-
sons acquire of testing objects by applying them to the nostrils.
There is however no deformity or scarification observable with-
out or from a cursory examination within the nose, and the
yellow pigment of the schneiderian membrane can be faintly
seen by a simple apparatus. According to the very questionable
hypothesis of Dr. W. Ogle, this sense might from the first have
been rudimentary in a person of her complexion. Her mother,
however, does not remember to have noticed during her infancy
either the presence or absence of this sense, although the
latter would probably have been more conspicuous. At present
she loves to smell flowers, and can distinguish a few of the more
fragrant varieties. Eau-de-cologne, ammonia, onions, tobacco-
smoke, were recognised and distinguished only when quite strong,
and the same was true of aromatic flavours. In losing the
sense of smell, in some respects the most delicate and the most
wonderful (perhaps because the least known) of all the senses, she
is deprived of a means of communication with the objective
world of the greatest importance to one in her condition. Julia
Brace and other blind deaf-mutes have been able to sort the
freshly washed clothes of the inmates of a large asylum, and to
select and give to their owners several dozen pairs of gloves
thrown promiscuously upon a table, solely or mainly by the
sense of smell. A hasty experiment with Laura to determine
whether smell was more acute in inhalation or exhalation was
without result. The sense in both nostrils is about equally
intense, and once when eau- de-cologne was applied to one
nostril and tobacco to the other, she recognised both. Whether
this was done more or less readily than would have been the
case if the odour of both had been inhaled with equal strength
by both nostrils at the same time seems by no means certain.
Taste is not so much a single sense as a plexus of senses. To
sensations of cool, biting and astringent substances, pepper,
alum, &c., located in the gums as well as in other parts of
the mouth, she is very sensitive ; to flavours perceived in the
nasal cavity far less so ; and of the four tastes proper she seems
least sensitive to bitter and sour, most so to sweet and salt ;
while the observation that the base of the tongue is most sensitive
to the first of these tastes, the sides to the second, and the point
to the third and fourth appears to have partial verification in
her case. !She also experiences the peculiar taste caused by
Laura Bridgman, 159
electrical stimulation ; she is however very far from being in-
different to the kind and quality of her food, but satisfies the
very moderate demands of her appetite with a deliberate and
almost epicurean discrimination, which suggests the existence
of what Professor Bain describes as sense of relish, quite apart
from taste proper, and felt perhaps most keenly just as food is
leaving or just after it has left the region of the voluntary and
entered that of the involuntary muscles of deglutition. The
circumvallate papillae have about the same superficial appear-
ance as on an ordinary tongue, perhaps smaller but scarcely less
numerous. Both this sense and smell have a strange intermittency,
which resembles that of the higher senses and of the intelligence
itself in many forms of nervous and mental disease. In making
the above observations, both, especially taste, after being con-
siderably acute for several minutes, often seemed suddenly and
unaccountably to vanish and no trace of sensation could be
observed under very strong stimulus. It would be very inte-
resting to know what sort of a curve of fatigue, if any, such
modifications of sensibility follow. It may be analogous to the
speedy rigidity of the hand in contact with the cathode when a
strong galvanic current is sent through both arms, in Bitter's
well-known experiment which Pfliiger has so ingeniously ex-
plained.
From the above we feel justified in inferring that the lesions
of each of the four defective senses were primarily peripheral
and so complete that none but taste has essentially contributed
in developing her consciousness of the external world, while the
functions of the centres, already somewhat unfolded though so
slightly localised as they are in children of two years, adapted
themselves with less than usual loss of power to their new and
unfavourable conditions. The time for such a four-fold affliction
was perhaps the most favourable possible. Had it fallen earlier
the physiological development of the centres might have been
still more dwarfed and the impulse toward mental growth still
feebler ; had it come later, together with a possible diminution
of vicarious and adaptive power, the memory of loss would have
perpetually saddened her now exceptionally happy and buoyant
spirits, and she would never have been able to forget, as she
seems completely to have done, that what others know as a
manifold objective world she is doomed to perceive only as a
play of shadows across the narrow field of a single sense. The
time of her discovery by Dr. Howe and the beginning of her
education at the age of eight seem also very opportune. She
had had time to recover from her long illness, and to learn much
about things concerning which she had already begun to feel a
strong and ungratified curiosity.
160 Laura Bridgman.
Her desire at one time to have a mirror in her room, the
pleasure she experiences in feeling a little music-box as it plays in
her hand, her love of having perfumes and of eating things like
certain jellies, farina, &c., which can have little or no taste to her,
have been called affectations, but are inevitable results of asso-
ciation with normal people. An esprit de corps is as unfortu-
nate among defectives as among prisoners. Among the blind or
deaf Laura has had comparatively few acquaintanceships, con-
sidering that so much of her life has been passed at an asylum.
Only the case of the mirror can be called pure affectation, while
even her "taste " of jellies seems largely due to the purely aesthetic
feelings of touch in the mouth. Wundt's ingenious theory of
facial expression, viz., that it originates in movements calculated
to modify vision, smelling, taste, and in part hearing, is not
favoured by observations on Laura. True, she does not open
the mouth in the ordinary way to indicate great attention or
surprise, and the upper part of the face and forehead, as com-
pared with that of most of the blind, is quite immobile ; but she
can hardly have learned to draw the lips and cheeks toward
either side away from the gustatory surface of the edges of the
tongue because sour is tasted there. Nor can the mimesis of
her nostrils be explained without making large drafts upon the
principle of heredity. All the lower part of her face is ex-
tremely mobile and expressive, as with most of the blind, in
spite of constant effort on the part of her teachers to check
unpleasant excesses. Lack of sympathy and cruelty have been
observed as frequent characteristics of the deaf, and are no
doubt due largely to the fact that human sentiments and all the
finer feelings and emotions are mainly conveyed through the
voice : no one however can doubt, despite the seVeral instances
of cruelty recorded of her .childhood, that Laura's nature is
unusually sympathetic. She often fails to understand readily
the feelings of others, but when they are made clear, the response
is far too quick and hearty to be for a moment considered as
merely conventional.
Local discriminations through the skin are developed with
remarkable and in some respects unprecedented acuteness.
Discrimination of peripheral sensibility in a normal person
ranges from about 68mm. between the shoulders, to -OOOSmm. on
the fovca centralis of the eye. (If we mentally construe all
these forms and# degrees of sense into terms of touch, as they
may perhaps primitively have been, we shall be able to con-
ceive how great is Laura's disadvantage in communicating with
the external world.) Now it is well understood that of
Fechner's methods of measuring sensibility that of the average
error gives the lower, and that of the just observable difference
Laura Bridgman. 1G1
gives the upper threshold- value, while that of the rirjht and
wrong cases gives results which fall near the middle of the thus
quite extended threshold. In choosing the second of these
methods it is desirable that the series of measurements be a
descending one : i.e., the points of the pair of compasses must
be gradually approximated till the sensation of two points gives
place to that of one. In this way the threshold- value is less
than if the series be reversed. Proceeding thus, it was found
that Laura was able to distinguish two points at a distance of
0'502mm. on the point of the tongue an average of twenty-four
observations ; at a distance of 0708mm. on the volar side of the
end of the right fore-finger an average of thirty-seven observa-
tions ; at a distance of l - 2mm. on the inside of the red edge of
the lips an average of eight observations ; at a distance of
l'6mm. on the outside of the lips same number of observa-
tions ; at a distance of 1'olmm. on the end of the second finger
eight observations ; 1'Smm. at the end of the third finger eight
observations ; l'9mm. at the end of the fourth finger. On the
upper lip just above the end of the mouth she distinguishes an
interval of 3'5mm., at the back of the tongue 4mm., on the forehead
between the eyebrows transversely 6'71m. , on the tip of the nose
l'7mm,, on the point of the cheek bone 3'04mm., each of the last
five measurements being averages of twelve observations made
on three different days.
By comparing these results with Weber's tables, it will be
seen that tactile sensibility in most of the places measured is,
from two to three times as great as that of an ordinary person.
In making the above observations, however, it must be noted
that a strange variation of sensibility was observed, which was so
great as to make the preliminary results here given reliable only
in proportion to the number of single measurements from which
they were averaged. Sometimes, with the utmost apparent
straining of attention, the discriminations were less than half
as acute as at others. So great is this variability that it is
hoped that a curve of fatigue may be obtained by which some
approximate comparison with the fatigue- curve of a nerve-muscle
preparation may be made. We may already infer however that
the exceptional acuteness of this sense, in Laura, is centrally and
not peripherally conditioned. It is probably due to the
unusual energy with which she has learned to concentrate
attention upon the sensations of fingers, tongue, &c. It was
often observed that the Empfrndtingt-Kreiae were ellipsoidal and
not round, the longer axes coinciding with that of the body or
limb j 1 and that, when one point of the compasses was rotated
1 Czermak's explanation of this general fact, rir., that these sensory
domains are round in children and become oval because growth is proper-
162 Laura Bridgman.
about the other, at a distance of only one-sixth that of a diameter
of the Empfindungs-Kreis within which they were placed, the
sensation of motion was distinctly felt. The habitual exploring
touch-motions (prufende Tastbewegunrjen) which, as with most
of the blind, are almost irrepressible with her during such
experiments, has perhaps made her more sensitive also in this
respect than others, although this point has never been in-
vestigated. It was very evident, before the writer's observations
were interrupted, that there were strange and sometimes abrupt
variations from the tactile sensibility of a normal person in
certain accessible parts of the skin which were neither scarred,
nor ever in any way, so far as could be learned, injured or
diseased. These spots are so obtuse in the discrimination of
local signs and local colour as to suggest the question whether
certain slight twitches often observed in various muscular groups,
which according to the radical nomenclature of Hughlings
Jackson must be called epileptical, together with certain other
almost equally mild hysterical symptoms, may not have had
the result which is so common in severe forms of these disorders,
viz., partial and more or less distinctly defined dermal ana3sthe-
sis. Laura has in the hands and face a sensitiveness to ordinarily
imperceptible and sometimes imaginary dust which very closely
resembles, save in degree, that described by Charcot and West-
phal as one of the characteristic symptoms of incipient mania.
Her touch is thus so acute that it is not surprising that she
estimates the age of her visitors by feeling the wrinkles about
the eyes, and tells the frame of mind of her friends by touching
their faces, nearly as accurately as a seeing person could do.
From the tonicity of the muscles or the movements of the hand
she conjectures the grade of intelligence of her visitors, and
long ago learned to detect almost instantly the hand of [an idiot
by its peculiar flabbiness. She tells readily the time of day by
feeling her watch, remembers the hands of her friends for years.
A few of the figures of Zoellner and Hering were found to be
as deceptive to the touch of the blind when pricked on paper as
to vision. It has been said, on the authority of Professor Abbott
in Sight and Touch, that if a flat surface be pressed with the
fingers first gently, then hard, then gently, and again hard, gently,
hard, it will seem in the one case convex and in the other
tionately greater in length than in circumference, seems partial. Most of
our motions both of the body and limbs are in a horizontal plane, i.e., at
right angles to the long axis of these domains ; hence that direction grows
more sensitive. Moreover, as Horwicz well remarks in commenting on the
proven inaccuracy of Vierordt's law, frequency of use is a co-factor with
mobility and original nervous structure in determining the sensitiveness of
different parts of the body.
Laura Bridyman. 163
concave : this after many attempts the writer was unable to
verify with Laura or in a single case with a score or two of the
blind.
Her sensitiveness to heat is below the average. She certainly
could never distinguish colours by difference in their powers of
radiating heat. It has been observed that when seeing people
are blindfolded they are able 'to tell which of five or six familiar
and previously named objects is held before the face at a distance
of from one to three or four feet. A book, a folded handker-
chief, a scrap of sheet-iron and a piece of gauze, e.g., all of about
the same surface-measurement, are distinguished in this way,
as well as the side of the face towards which they are held, by
a friend of the writer almost invariably at a distance of four feet
in a darkened room, and with every precaution to avoid giving
any clue to the eye or ear. Is this due to the modification of
half imperceptible sound-waves affecting the tympanum or to
changes of thermal radiation from the skin or to modification
of atmospheric pressure ? Laura has very little of this power,
but observations on the deaf have shown that some of them
possess it to a great degree. Moreover it should not be forgot-
ten that the 'ear is a bad judge of direction ; hence we must
assume that other elements enter in as the data of sensuous
judgment in this phenomenon. Only a cursory examination of
the dermal sensibility to temperature, pressure and electrical
stimulation was made, but this indicated in each of these
respects, and especially the last, a degree of sensibility below
rather than above the normal. Finally, it may be mentioned
that, from a short series of measurements which a lady-attendant
kindly consented to take upon parts of the body usually covered
by clothing, it would seem that here the discriminating sensi-
bility, though decidedly above the average, is much less so than
in the more sensitive parts of the hands and face. In applying
the compasses to one arm a concomitant increase of sensitiveness
was observed on the corresponding part of the other.
To test the sense of equilibrium, an ordinary swing with a
long board, pillowed and provided with a foot-piece, was used,
on which she consented to be rotated, lying upon her back,
her face and both sides. In each of these positions, after
being turned through 180 and then gently placed upon her
feet, there was a very evident disturbance of muscular coordi-
nation, and she insisted that she was very dizzy. On rotating
her through 270, she was hardly able to stand without support
and complained of nausea, describing herself very vividly by
gestures and language as seeming to " turn over " in the same
plane in which she had been rotated, but in an opposite direc-*
tion : of the genuineness of these sensations, her ignorance of
164 Laura Bridgman.
the object of the experiments and of the normal muscular move-
ments of compensation leaves no reasonable doubt. The dizziness,
it was further observed, must be considerable before the power
of correct orientation was lost. She was able to tell more cor-
rectly than several normal persons who afterwards tried the
experiment upon themselves blindfolded, whether she had been
turned through half or three quarters of a circle. She was
equally sensitive to rotation in a horizontal plane. By so ex
tempore a method it is of course impossible to exclude, as Mach
has at least partially done, the influence of tactile sensations
caused by friction, and the process of standing her suddenly
upon her feet after every rotation complicates the disturbance :
but it is impossible to doubt that she is so extremely sensitive
to disturbance of equilibrium, in which both the deaf and the
blind are often deficient, as to compel the belief that, upon the
hypothesis of Goltz and Mach, her labyrinthine impressions are
at least normally acute, and to make a post mortem examination
of the semi-circular canals with their nerve and its putative
centres extremely desirable. She does not appear to be in the
least ataxic, but.it will be remarkable if touch and muscle-sense
have, in addition to all their other vicarious functions, so well
learned to discharge those now generally supposed to be due to
endolymphic pressure. She can walk alone very nearly in a
straight line, and without deviating more often to one side than
the- other, though always with a hesitating but not unsteady
step ; she takes long daily walks with her attendant, looks after
her own room, goes freely all over a large house, and in any
place with which she is familiar knows the points of the
compass.
The more strictly organic sensations are not accessible to
exact measurement. Even the muscle-sense or feeling of inner-
vation, which even in the case of a normal person and still
more in her is so largely instrumental in the work of objective
perception and which seems to be so exquisitely delicate in her
hands, cannot be directly tested. When told to extend the fore
finger and move it as slightly as possible, she makes motions
which the eye can but just detect. When the arm or hand is
taken and moved through a fixed distance, as an inch or a foot,
and she is requested to measure off the distance on a smooth
glass rod, she does so with considerable accuracy, although this,
like all her similarly indicated estimates of distance, are slightly
less than fact. When the compasses are applied to hand, arm,
or shoulder-blade, with their points separated in each case about
three-times the least discernible distance, and she tries to
reproduce these intervals in terms of muscle-sense by measure-
ment on the glass rod, it is found that she invariably judges
Laura Bridgman. 165
the greater distances to be proportionally less than the smaller.
We cannot infer from this that her notion of the form of her
own body is different from the reality on account of the variable
discriminative sensibility of the skin. There are very many
ways in which this tendency would be corrected in the blind. Yet
when asked to make a series of straight marks, e.g., two inches
long and two inches apart, the first pair with the hand in the
ordinary manner of writing, the next in a constrained position
writing on pasteboard pressed against her back and so on alter-
nately, the marks made in the latter position were found, in an
average of over thirty cases, slightly shorter and slightly nearer
together. It would be very interesting to compare these results
with those obtained with a large number of normal persons.
Like many women of somewhat delicate health, she appears
very susceptible to other organic sensations, and though subtle
inferences might be drawn about semi- or sub-conscious states
and processes from her moods which vary considerably, she
seems never to have developed, as a late writer asserts is almost
inevitable among those whose sphere of objective mental life is
abnormally circumscribed, any " liver-consciousness," or " heart-
consciousness," or "stomach-consciousness". She has never, so far
as is known, shown any special trace of hypochondria or hysteria,
or even melancholia, and in everything sexual her education has
been so discreet, that the innocence and purity of her thought and
life are said by those who know her best to be absolute and even
unique. One of the most common notions developed among
the blind when they are left much to associate with each other
is that they have one real advantage over the seeing in that
they are free from all species of optical illusion, and thus,
although they know less, their knowledge is more untheoretical
and realistic. In this way Laura's is in a double sense realistic
and objective. All her knowledge is literally liandgreiflich.
Touch seldom deceives or misinforms and its rapport with things
is most immediate ; hence she clings to all its impressions, even
wnen told they are wrong, with great pertinacity.
The physiological theory of language regards it as originally
an immediate motor reflex of sensations perhaps mainly visual,
and as being thus a more or less complex series of gestures
which soon come to acquire a special auditory significance as a
condition of a remarkable subsequent development. Eegarding
words as gestures, it would once have been comparatively easy
to teach Laura by such manipulation of the organs of speech as
Graham Bell has applied in teaching the deaf to talk. By this
method, with the use of a manipulator, the writer taught her in
half an hour to articulate the words " good day " intelligibly,
but the next day they were quite forgotten. She is now too
12
106 Laura Bridgman.
old and too adept with the finger-language to make a new
method of speech possible. She learned long ago, by feeling the
throat and mouth of others and by their help, to pronounce three
or four words quite well, and has never forgotten how to say
" doctor," " Peter," " money ". She has also half a score of
" noises," designating persons. These seem to be produced by
translating the complex of impressions, or more strictly sensa-
tions, which others excite in her into the movement-feeling of
' throat-gestures,' and thus they are very analogous to cases of
so called ' indirect onornatopoieses '. Still more interesting
however are the instructive and utterly unconscious sounds,
which Dr. Lieber took so much pains to investigate, that do not
designate objects but express her own feelings. These to the
number of nearly thirty the writer attempted, with the kind
assistance of Miss Fuller, principal of the Horace Maim school
of deaf mutes in Boston, to record by the Bell method of visible
speech. They are always accompanied with marked facial and
often manual gestures. She thus often expresses feelings which
she wishes to conceal, as well as shades of feeling too slight and
subtle for the fingers. On being questioned she insisted that
she could " think " three noises even a very loud and disagree-
able howl of anger which she has been heard to utter but two or
three times in her life without making them, but she could not
make them without the feeling. By special request she tried
several times with great complacency to make the " angry
noise," but in vain. She once said, " When I think of Julia 1
think her noise and do not think to spell her name ". Several
of the emotional sounds were made during a dream, the panto-
mime of which was very expressive as she took her after-dinner
nap upon the sofa. She is very positive that her nightly devo-
tions are without vocal or manual signs. The devotions are
very regularly performed and the signs, so far as could be learned,
have never been observed. These interjectional sounds which
her teachers have often striven, but only with partial success, to
repress, are not loud or disagreeable, are readily intelligible,
and, so far as the data for comparison exists, seem neither to have
essentially changed in character or in pantomimic accompaniment,
nor to have increased in number for many years. She feels that
it is " not lady-like " to make them, and is glad to be corrected,
but unless they are quite loud, cannot tell, even if her attention
is directed to the matter, whether she really makes a noise,
without placing her hand upon her throat. Pressing thus on
the throat of several persons successively, she sometimes spor-
tively attempts to imitate their voice with her own in a way
which shows that she does distinguish differences of both loud-
ness and pitch (paradoxical as the language may be) without any
Laura Bridyman. 167
conception or sensation whatever of sound. That her emotional
" noises " have any such philological importance as roots as Dr.
Lieber and others have imagined, seems on the whole very
doubtful. Aphasic patients sometimes use a set of new and
strange sounds as designations of objects or as expressions of
passion consistently and without change for years. True, her
sounds have not been modified, as are the natural cries of those
congeuitally deaf but not blind, by imitating the motions of
lips and tongue which they see others use : but the fact that she
has once spoken is very violating for such a view. Could
however any inference whatever bearing upon this perhaps the
most important and most difficult of all psychological questions,
be drawn from such facts as the above, it would be that language
originated not in the imitation of natural sound nor in the im-
pulse to communicate with others but as a purely physiological
reflex excited by the stimulus of outward impressions acting
upon or through the senses.
She is not apt, like many defectives, to fall asleep if left
alone or unemployed. Her sleep is perhaps lighter and shorter
than the average. Several midday naps were observed. She
first groped about the room to assure herself that she was alone,
then lay down, her face upward and the right or talking hand
folded in the other upon her breast. There was at first a slight
and regular movement of the chin and toes, while the faint pro-
longed sound of 'oo' (as in 'fool') often accompanied expiration;
slight epileptic twitches several times roused her to quite a
pantomime of rapid, troubled and mostly unintelligible gestures;
till at length she fell asleep with long, regular breathing, the
teeth slightly apart, and the tongue pressed against and almost
between them. Just before sleeping, a strong odour of eau- de-
cologne and a drop of sugar solution, which she readily per-
ceives when awake, applied respectively to nose and tongue,
caused no apparent sensation, while the slight touch of a fine
thread upon her face or hand roused her at once. It is possible
she directs her attention to the cutaneous sense of these parts,
as we often ' set the mind ' to wake at a certain strike of the
clock ; or perhaps this sense is the last to fall asleep. Her
sleep seemed almost never untroubled by dreams. Often she
would suddenly talk a few words or letters with her fingers, too
rapidly to be intelligible, just as others often utter incoherent
words or inarticulate sounds. Movements of the lips were also
observed, and the emotional expression of her face was con-
stantly varied. She asserts that she dreams much, but finds it
very hard to recall her dreams ; insists that she has dreamed of
hearing with her ears the angels playing in heaven, of see-
ing the sun so bright that her eyes ached, and of standing in
168 Laura Bridgman.
a large place surrounded by many people and seeing God afar
off. In relating these dreams her manner is very earnest and
intense, but if questioned how the music sounded, how the
objects looked, she could give you no more detailed answer than
" glorious," " beautiful," &c., and often became quite impatient
at the scepticism implied in questioning her closely. She has
many times dreamed of being awakened suddenly by animals
touching her, or jumping upon her bed. If a normal person
dreams in terms of touch, this sense is generally excited only at
the end of a series. The dream begins in terms of sight or
hearing, and rarely goes so far as contact. The suddenness of
so many of Laura's dreams which begin and end in the domain
of touch, thus indicates that her dreams are only in its language.
Most dreams are reflex phenomena due to the irritation of
sensory nerves. Any or all of the five senses may be excited
during the soundest sleep. If attention is directed to the
darkest field of vision we can always see the light-chaos or dust
(Eiyenlicht), or perceive a difference of intensity between the
centre and periphery of the field. It would almost seem that
modifications of retinal circulation, nutrition, temperature, &c.,
have a psychical side accessible to self-observation. Goethe
could always see streaks of mist ; Purkinje saw broad, bending
bands, sometimes moving in concentric circles or breaking up
into arcs and radii. To J. Miiller, these moving spots of mist
seemed coloured, they moved about from side to side of the field
of vision, gradually took shapes quite disconnected from any
objects of recent experience and finally passed into dream-
images. Thus, from the nature of the light-chaos, we may account
for the reduplication of dream-objects swarms of birds, flies,
stars, kaleidoscopic patterns, &c. H. Meyer and Patterson, on
waking suddenly, have seen the after-images of dream-objects
slowly fade through complementary colours. We may infer
from such facts how strongly the higher centres sometimes react
in dreams upon relatively slight stimuli of the lower. Her-
mann further concluded that those who were blinded by lesions
of the peripheral organ gradually lost all distinct visual concep-
tion, first from the waking and later from the sleeping con-
sciousness. Laura never has been and can probably never be
taught to observe and note down her dreams with any such
precautions as Wundt suggests ; but a careful analysis of all
dreams which she now remembers, or which others have
recorded, yields no good ground for believing that she has ever
had any kind of visual or auditory conceptions even while
sleeping, when the immediate sensation is a still more minute,
though perhaps no less indispensable, element of perception thai
in the waking state. Even her sexual dreams, there is every
Lajira Bridgman. 169
reason to believe after the most careful inquiry, have always
been very few in number, and of so naive and unspecific a
character that only a psychologist would designate them by that
name. Xow that she has safely passed the most trying period
of womanhood without more instruction on such subjects than
was strictly necessary for her health, it seems on the whole not
improbable that the strongest of all instincts lias in her failed to
mature, either in the waking or sleeping consciousness, into
any distinct a priori notion of the ways and means of its own
gratification.
Schemer has propounded the curious and improbable theory
that dreams are symbolic of the constitution and functions of
different parts of the body. All dreams, he asserts, are reflexes
of organic feelings, and their types and genera are determined
by the forms and positions of the organs. The intestines, e.g.,
appear in dreams, "after the ego-power is scattered and dispersed,"
as streets and canals, the stomach as an enclosed or sequestered
village or as a dark room with one or two round windows.
The body as a whole is always a building of some sort He
dreamed of two rows of boys in red and white, rushing to fight
each other, retreating and fighting again round after round.
These are explained as the teeth, the involuntary grinding of
which is supposed to have caused the dream. The lungs are
objectified as a pair of regularly beating wings in dreams of
flying, the heart is a fiery furnace, a stove, the sun, &c. Even
colours as of the hair, the blood and bile, are reproduced. Xot one
of Laura's dreams can be satisfactorily interpreted by any of these
rubrics. This test of Schemer's theory is of course not crucial,
but if internal organs are ever represented in the consciousness
of sleep, and especially if they are archetypal there, we should
expect this to be peculiarly so in Laura's case : so that to all
the psychological objections to such a theory her dreams add in
some degree the force of an experimental refutation.
Wundt holds that all dreams, hallucinations, nocturnal
insanities, &c,, are automatic excitations of what he assumes as a
sense-surface in the cortex caused by modifications of its circula-
tion, and that they are thus reflexes, originating in the innerva-
tion-centre of the blood-vessels in the medulla. This may be
true of many toxics and soporifics, and disorders of the blood-
vessels and heart very often accompany or precede mental
disease. It is an assured law of psychiatry that every
functional or mental disturbance brings about anatomical
changes in the brain, and thus dreams may even permanently
affect the sanity of waking-hours. Hence, if we admit, upon
the uncertain hypothesis of Hughlings Jackson, that the develop-
ment or nutrition of cortical cells is determined and limited by the
170 Laura Bridgman.
course of blood-vessels in the cortex, we should expect that the
cells lying nearest them, and which we may fancy to represent the
earlier acquisitions, are more immediately affected than those
distant three or four removes and representing later acquire-
ments and experiences. If this were true, we ought, according
to Wundt, to dream mainly of the experience of childhood,
and not of the preceding day, and it would be at least possible
that forgotten events of early infancy should be reproduced.
Dreaming and waking notions are related as species and genera,
or as a more partial to a more perfect function. Attention, to
the physiologist, is essentially the expression of an instinct.
The mind pushes on from one impression to another by a native
spontaneous impulse of growth and development. If we may
conceive every thing psychical expressed in terms of inner
tension, we may say that the direction and movement of
attention is like the successive waking of the different elements
of psychical life. In the sleeping consciousness, this process is
mainly an automatic and central one. ' Inner work ' has
brought cells into unstable equilibrium, and excitability very
easily becomes excitation. Where the work of repair is not
done, the slight stimuli of the sleeping state is not sufficient to
rouse them : where it is done, the almost spontaneous activity of
rested cells easily raises their processes above the threshold of
consciousness. These are of course fresh and healthy morning
dreams, while only those cells which had suffered the greatest
fatigue, or which, long after the outer senses slept, had been
morbidly prevented from restfully sinking below the threshold
to the inner work of repair by the persistence of mental after-
images of recent events, may be said still to wake. Now in
the waking state the activity of the senses brings to bear
an environment with which the normal action of the centres,
if acting only by their own law of rest and fatigue, is more or
less inconsonant. Not only can attention not always be
accommodated to its object beforehand, but certain centres are
disproportionately exercised. In sleep all the centres have a
greater degree of physiological freedom. Possibly Laura vaguely
strove to express this distinction in a line of one of her so-called
" poems," viz. : " A good sleep is a white curtain, a bad sleep is
a black curtain ". All the intellectual work she has ever known
has been scarcely more than the exercise of what Mr. Spencer
calls the play-instinct. What she lias done has been spontaneous.
The sudden arrest of peripheral activities of the higher senses,
leaving their centres under conditions which perhaps kept them
exceptionally unatrophied, may have raised the level of cell-
equilibrium, so that she both wakes and sleeps on a higher plane
of cerebral rest and nutrition. This at any rate is not inaccordant
Laura Bridyman. 171
with the remark of the physiologist Burdach, who, in comparing
the accounts of ten. blind and deaf mutes, argued that Laura's
remarkable understanding was due to " the creative elaboration of
impressions unprecedentedly limited in variety ".
To distinguish what was native from what was adventitious in
Laura's moral, and especially in her religious, development was one
of Dr. Howe's chief interests. Hehad noEousseau-like expectation
that perfect goodness would result from her unprecedented isola-
tion; still less had he any wish, as was sometimes fanatically urged
against his method, to retard the unfolding of her mind in either
of those directions. He only required her teachers to refer Laura
to him for answers to her occasional questions upon these
subjects, and sought in every way to shield her from dogmatic
indoctrination. The early record of her fresh and original
intuitions, of her curious approaches to questions regarding the
nature and necessity of a First Cause, of the unaccountable
development of her conscience, all so essentially correct yet so
unconventional, excited great interest at a time and among people
where the central question of theology and philosophy was to
determine what factors of consciousness were due to experience
and what were d priori or intuitive. About 1845, soon after his
return from some months' sojourn in Europe, Dr. Howe was
quite disheartened to find the mind which he had laboured so
long and devotedly to develop in the way which he believed to
be at the same time best for it and most instructive to the world,
cobwebbed with the barren formulae and conventionalised by the
shallow sentiments of one of the popular orthodoxies of the day.
" I hardly recognised," he said, " the Laura I had known." We
should not be greatly surprised if his interest in her became
gradually less as she fell more under the influence of her new
spiritual guides, and thus grew month by month less original
and less interesting. Nothing can exceed the crudeness of the
Bible translated into terms of her one sense of touch. " Is not
the Lamb of God grown to a sheep yet ? " " Will Jesus carry us
in His arms so ? " (with the gesture of a mother embracing her
child). " Was not Thomas right wanting to feel the wounds of
the spear?" These and many other similar questions are on
record, attesting at the same time her native curiosity and the
poverty of her conceptions. It would seem, as far as can be
learned, that since the time of her conversion and admission with
immersion into the Baptist Church her disposition has grown
sweeter and her temper more uniform. But when one takes the
trouble to enumerate the facts of the New Testament and the
cardinal Christian doctrines with their standard forms of
illustration, of which she can have even no childish conception,
it is seen how minimal the intellectual element of faith may be ;
172 Harmony of Colours.
while if, on the other hand, with Schleiermacher, we consider
the essence of Christianity to be the formulation of the instinct
of dependence so unprecedentedly strong both by nature and
education in her, we shall possibly wonder less that so many of
her friends have found edification in her numerous conversations
and letters concerning her religious experience and belief.
The above is very far from exhausting even in epitome the
interesting points suggested by the study of this remarkable
case. Laura has very little idea of the interest she has excited
in the world ; is intensely delighted to see her friends, or to
receive any little attention or remembrance from them ; and is
so good-hearted that the writer is pleased to state in closing
that, in spite of the weeks of annoyance to which his experiments
subjected her, she was always cheerfully ready at the appointed
time, and still cherishes only the kindliest sentiments towards
her tormentor.
G. STANLEY HALL.
NOTE. A question of great interest, suggested by the Editor with
reference to a note in Whateley's Logic, is how far has Laura been able
with the help of her means of expression to form concepts proper, and how
far her thinking is able to proceed without the help of her manual marks
and signs. Whateley's statement (foot-note to IntrodiTction, 5) that slight
and unintelligible motion of the fingers can generally be observed when
she is musing by herself, is not in accordance with the writer's observa-
tion. She often sits alone apparently absorbed in thought and reflecting
her emotions in smiles, frowns, &c., and with no movement whatever
of the hand, although the latter is sometimes observed. If we consider
that all impressions above those of touch, which others apprehend in the
form of sensuous images must be thought by her, if at all, as general con-
ceptions, it seems probable that her thinking does range beyond the indi-
vidual objects of her sense without finding signs necessary as instruments
of thought. This conjecture is strengthened by the general intelligence
which appears to have characterised her childhood before her education
began.
G. S. H.
II. HAEMONY OF COLOUES.
IN an acute and interesting article " On Discord," published by
Mr. Edmund Gurney in the last number of this Eeview, there
are one or two very sensible remarks on the difficulty of re-
ducing the effects of colours in combination to simple physio-
logical and psychological laws. These difficulties, as Mr.
Gurney observes, " are almost enough to make one despair of any-
thing like an exact and complete rationale of colour-discords and
affinities". Mr. Gurney is here only concerned with the obstacles
in the way of interpreting the facts : he does not touch on a
Ha rmony of Colon r$. 173
more fundamental difficulty still, that of ascertaining the facts
themselves. When this is taken into account as well, when the
chaotic state of opinion as to what combinations of colour are
harmonious or discordant is fully recognised, it seems as if we
might safely dispense with the precaution wliich Mr. Gurney
takes in introducing the little adverb " almost ".
If, then, anything further is attempted by way of accounting
for the agreeable and disagreeable effects of combined colours, it
must be done in a very different spirit from that of most past
theorists. It has commonly been assumed that there is a close
parallel between colour and tone harmony. But while the
physiology of the ear has supplied a firm basis for musical
science, the physiology of the eye has so far done little to sup-
port any definite principles of colour-combination. As Helm-
holtz, the great authority in both branches of physiology, reminds
us, " it would be absurd to attempt so sharp a definition in
respect of the so-called harmony of colours as we are able to
attain in dealing with musical intervals ". l The object of the
present paper will be mainly to emphasise this truth by ex-
amining into the facts at our disposal, and by criticising the
leading theories put forward. At the same time an attempt
will be made to indicate roughly how much physiology and
psychology can do for our seemingly impenetrable subject.
To begin with the facts, a slight acquaintance with the arts of
music and painting will show that in the latter there are no
simple uniformities of combination answering to the fixed and
definite relations holding between tones. In all known systems
of music, 2 an octave or a fifth is recognised as consonant, a
semi-tone or a major seventh as dissonant. But where are the
chromatic intervals corresponding to these ? Let the reader
spend an hour in studying the illustrations of decorative colour-
ing given by Mr. Owen Jones in his Grammar of Ornament, and
he will be convinced of the truth of the observation. He will
certainly be struck by the great diversity of taste shown by
different peoples, both as to the relative value of single colours
and as to the best order of arrangement. Thus, for example,
the combination of blue and green, which is wholly eschewed in
some styles, seems to be almost a favourite arrangement in
Persian art (tile-patterns). A similar diversity of taste is dis-
coverable among individual colourists. And if this want of
agreement is conspicuous in art, it is still more prominent in
common life. Witness the endless discussions which are carried
1 Physiologische Optik, p. 270.
~ Of course, I refer here only to the music of the West in which discrete
tones are employed.
174 Harmony of Colours.
on among women as to what is correct in the way of colour-
arrangements in dress and in furniture.
Where practice is so diversified we may expect rules to be
conflicting, and this is what we find. Works of practical
instruction in painting afford a curious illustration of this want
of uniformity. For example, the juxtaposition of blue and
green, which is often condemned by teachers of art, is called
by Mr. I'uskin one of the loveliest combinations the eye ever
meets with. 1 Again, red and green, though commonly allowed
to be good, are called an inferior combination by Sir J. G.
Wilkinson. Still more oddly, complementary colours, though
often said to be the most pleasing combination, are excluded
from all art by a German writer (Schiffermiiller) as crude and
boorish.
Is there, then, beneath all this diversity any real agreement,
and if so, to what does this amount ? In order to ascertain this,
it is necessary to make a wide and careful survey of different
branches of art, more especially the decorative arts (mural
painting, ceramic colouring, glass-staining, &c.), which are
not restricted like imitative painting by the facts of nature, nor
controlled like dress by extra-sesthetic influences.
In making this examination it is to be borne in mind that the
properly chromatic relations of colours can only be certainly ascer-
tained when these are taken in fairly equal degrees of brightness.
If one colour is much darker than the other the combination may
please through the contrast of light and dark, even though the
colours do not combine well. Again it is to be remembered that
the presence of a third colour, including black and white,
materially affects the apparent degree of affinity of two colours.
Thus, for example, green and blue seem to be reconciled when
opposed to a large mass of warm colour. 2
Proceeding in this way, one will find that the amount of agree-
ment actually demonstrable is exceedingly small. .First of all
it will be observed with reference to binary combinations that all
the most distinctly marked colours, namely, red, yellow, green
and blue, may occasionally be seen in juxtaposition, though
certain combinations undoubtedly appear much more frequently
than others (as, for instance, blue and red more often than blue
and green). It is to be added that the combinations of colours
which seem to be most popular include both wide and narrow
1 It is only fair to add that Mr. Raskin is here speaking of colours in
nature where effects of lustre, &c., are apt slightly to disguise the relations
of colour. But this does not detract from the value of the observation.
2 It may be added that when a colour serves as a narrow border to a
large area of some other colour the relations of the two cannot be so well
ascertained as when both colours have a considerable area of their own.
Harmony of Colours. 175
intervals in the spectrum-circle. 1 On the other hand, certain
combinations of intermediate hues as, for example, spectrmn-
red and purple-red, yellow and sap-green, appear never or only
very rarely.
If, again, we inquire into the principles which regulate larger
combinations of colours, as triads, &c., the utmost that is clearly
ascertainable is that certain groupings present themselves much
more frequently than others. Thus, for example, it seems
tolerably certain that there is a general preference for the
" primaries," according to painters, namely, red, yellow and blue,
above most other triple combinations,' 2 though it is not at all
clear that they stand alone in this respect, since the combina-
tions red, green and yellow, orange, green and violet, appear
frequently -enough to deserve the name of favourite triads.
Such are some of the principal agreements, or more correctly
approximate agreements, which are discoverable by means of a
careful inspection of art-usage. I purposely abstain from enter-
ing into the still more difficult question what changes with
respect to colour-combination appear to attend the gradual
development of the colour-arts. In order to get at uniformities,
we must have no prejudice in favour of primitive or of advanced
art. It might perhaps be thought that the simple facts of
colour-sensibility would be best reached by confining ourselves
to the lowest stages of art. But we must not assume that
in early art there is a truer appreciation of chromatic harmony
than in later art. 3 In truth, if we must choose between simple
and highly developed art, it would surely be more reasonable to
argue that the feeling for colour-affinity being a finer sensibility
than the feeling for mere colour and its varieties, would show
itself most plainly in the higher stages of art-progress. But for
our present purpose it will be best to treat the question of colour-
harmony as far as possible apart from the development of art.
So much as to the facts, and now as to the methods of inter-
pretation proposed. First a word may be said of the crude
theory put forward by writers on colour that all combinations of
colour should be based on the three so-called " primaries " (red,
1 By the spectrum -circle is meant the circle that would be formed by
uniting the extremities of the spectrum-scale, with the addition of the
colour (purple) formed by combining the extreme ray*.
- Instead of spectrum-red (vermilion), purple may be employed, as in
1 pictures by Paolo Veronese.
3 As is done by Mr. Owen Jones and Sir J. G. "Wilkinson when they
place early art above later because of it? preference for " primaries " (red,
yellow and blue) to secondaries and tertiaries. It does not even follow
that early arti.-ts did prefer the primaries as colours, since they may have
used them because as pigments they were the most manageable.
176 Harmony of Colours.
yellow and blue) as the normal or at least most natural arrange-
ment. This theory is a hasty attempt to find a scientific founda-
tion for artistic rules in physical facts. It fails because it
assumes that the laws of the action of light on the retina can be
gathered from the laws of combining pigments. All students of
optics now know that, when we are speaking of coloured light,
yellow is no primary at all, 1 and that the production of a green
pigment by mixing blue and yellow pigments is not simply due
to an addition of blue and yellow rays, but involves a diminu-
tion of these rays consequent on the combination of different
processes of absorption. For the rest, as has been observed, the
doctrine of the superior value of the primaries does not appear
to be borne out by the facts.
A more genuinely scientific attempt to found a theory of
colour-harmony on physical facts is made by those who
follow Newton in dividing the colours of the spectrum
after the manner of a musical octave according to the numerical
ratios of their underlying vibrations. One of the most recent
exponents of this musical theory of colour is linger. 2 This
writer seeks most elaborately to prove that the best chromatic
intervals answer to the best tonic intervals; e.g., red-blue or
orange-violet answers to the fifth. He also attempts to construct
major and minor colour-harmonies, and even a system of tran-
sient colour-discords. Unger's method is singularly ingenious,
but far from convincing. The latest authorities in physical optics,
as Helmholtz and Brlicke, agree that the spectrum cannot without
forcing the facts be resolved into an octave. 3 For the rest
Unger's illustrations of his theory from the history of art really
prove nothing except that almost every conceivable combination
of colours is to be met with in the works of the masters.
Even were there not these objections to the comparison of the
spectrum with the musical scale for the purpose of discovering
some definite laws of colour-concord, such a comparison would
in the present state of our knowledge be useless. The dis-
coveries of Helmholtz in physiological acoustics go to establish
the conclusion that musical harmony does not directly depend on
the numerical ratios of the vibrations of the notes combining, but
on the absence of beats between these notes and between their
several partial tones. Hence it is vain to make out that colours
1 Professor Maxwell has fully exposed the pretensions of yellow to be
considered a primary element of colour. See a paper " On the_ theory of
Compound Colours," in Philosophical Transactions, 1860, pp. 77, 78.
2 See the full statement of his theory in his work Die bildende Kunst.
3 See Helmholtz's able critique of Newton's theory in Physiolegisclu
Optik, pp. 236-7 ; also Brucke, Lie Physiolocjie der Farben, Introduction, pp. 5
and 6.
Hannony of Colours. 177
which harmonise well stand in a simple ratio to one another
in respect of their vibrations, unless it can be proved further
that these ratios involve the absence of disturbing elements
corresponding to the beats of discordant notes ; and physical
optics does not, I believe, suggest the presence of any such
elements.
But if the physics of light and of sound fails to help us in
drawing an analogy between the effects of colour and tone
combinations, may we not call in the aid of the physiology of
the two organs concerned ? With respect to the eye, recent
research has taught us a good deal concerning the nervous con-
ditions of colour-impression. We may provisionally adopt the
hypothesis of Young and Helmholtz that all our impressions of
colour are built up out of three elementary sensations (red,
green and blue or violet) which correspond to the excitations of
three specifically different classes of nerve-fibres. We may
further suppose that these three classes of fibres are equally
distributed over the retina. 1 Once more we may assume that
the effects of colour-combination are capable of being produced
by the stimulation of different areas of the retina. That is to
say, the eye must be supposed to appreciate two colours in
juxtaposition to some extent at least without moving from one
to the other, and by simply fixating the common boundary of
the two colours. This assumption, which seems to be required
by the facts, does not, however, preclude the supposition that
the pleasing or disagreeble relation of two colours is much more
vividly felt when the eye fixates each colour in succession, or in
other words when each colour successively stimulates the region
of the yellow spot. 2
Let us now see whether these considerations enable us to
trace an analogy between the effects of colour and tone concord.
It may be said that Helmholtz's doctrine of musical harmony
refers this phenomenon to a positive as well as a negative
condition, namely, the presence of certain common elements (the
upper or partial tones) in the combining tones. Similarly, if we
adopt Young and Helmholtz's hypothesis, it follows that in the
case of colours lying near one another in the spectrum-circle,
1 This is not exactly true as the observations of Purkinje and others
shew.
3 Since the comparison of two colours with a view to appreciating their
affinity by the eye at rest is only exact in the case of contiguous colours,
and becomes very imperfect when there is any considerable space between
the colours, we might perhaps hypothetically assume that there is a
sympathetic relation between the nervous elements of contiguous regions of
the retina, owing to which the excitation of one central region affects in a
much lesser degree the closely adjacent regions and in the same manner.
178 Harmony of Colours.
there is a distinct common element, namely, the sensation
answering to the fibres excited in each of these cases. If then
we say that all colour-concord holds between adjacent colours,
and conversely, that all adjacent colours harmonise, we seem to
have a theory of colour-concord analogous to that of tone-
concord.
Such a theory, however, would first of all be clearly opposed
to the facts, since as we have seen, many harmonious intervals
are wide ones, while on the other hand some adjacent colours
are distinctly unpopular combinations. But even if the theory
tallied with the facts it would not bear close inspection. Helm-
holtz's theory of three classes of optic fibres teaches that each of
these is stimulated to some extent by all ordinary impressions
of colour, so that, according to the supposition we are now
considering, the specific feeling of harmony ought to be an
accompaniment of every possible combination of colours. This
is surely a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis.
But besides all this, it is plain that the nervous and mental
processes involved in perceiving a combination of tones and of
colours are too unlike to allow of our drawing any close analogy
between their accompanying feelings. Two complete musical
tones or clangs never fuse into one indivisible tone, and the feel-
ing of harmony arises just because these constituents, though ap-
pearing in some strange way to join in one mass of sensation, do
not (as in the case of the partial tones of a single note) wholly
sink their individual existence. But two impressions of colour,
if they fall simultaneously on the same part of the retina, blend
inseparably in one apparently simple sensation. 1 Thus yellow
is supposed to be the sensation produced by stimulating the two
sets of fibres corresponding to green and to red on the same
retinal area. On the other hand, the so-called effect of colour-
harmony is produced when the two impressions fall on different
retinal areas and, unlike two tones of a musical chord, remain
sharply separated from one another.
There is, indeed, one class of these effects of combined colours
which may be said to bear a close resemblance to musical
harmonies. I refer to the cass in which colours are presented
in such small masses that they partially lose their individual
character and blend in a compound colour. An illustration of
this effect may be found by booking over the column of warm
light cast by a setting sun on the gently undulating surface of a
summer sea. The alternate strips which reflect the rosy light
1 This coalescence has been asserted by Dove and others to take place j
even between the impressions of " corresponding " areas of the two retinas.
See Helmholtz, Physiologische Optik pp. 776, et seq.
Harmony of Colours. 179
and which are shaded by the soft undulations of the surface
appear to blend, especially if the eye is partially closed, and the
effect, on the present writer's feeling at least, is closely akin to
that of a musical accord. Another familiar example of this
phenomenon may be met with in certain wall-papers, where the
colour of the small patches of the pattern runs, so to speak, over
the colour of the ground. 1 Persian shawls owe some of their
iable character to this circumstance of partial blending.
This effect is plainly due to a compounding of the impressions
produced by the two contiguous colours, whether these impres-
sions are supposed to fall on contiguous areas of the retina, or
on the same area (the yellow spot) as the eye involuntarily passes
from one to the other. 2 It is plain that the two colours which
are in this way to blend in part must not be complementary
colours, since in this case the composition of the two impressions
would result in white and not in a third " colour " in the narrow
sense of the word. 3
There is little doubt in my mind that this effect of partial
coalescence of colour-impressions enters into the effects of art
much more than is generally supposed. The peculiar charm of
graduated tint may in part be due to this tendency to fuse small
contiguous masses of colour, for it is hardly possible in looking
at the colours of the spectrum to help imagining that the related
tints do actually commingle. 4 Painters are very fond of judging
of the effects of colour in combination by half closing the eye
and so obliterating the sharp demarcations of the contiguous
tints. It seems likely then that some of the most delicious
effects of colour in combination, as for example those of the
finely modulated pictures of Mr. Burne Jones, involve this
partial blending of individual tints.
Yet while attaching much weight to this greatly overlooked
effect, I cannot claim for it the rank of the central and essential
1 I lately bought a bed-room paper having a small scarlet pattern on a
light buff ground When looked at closely in a small piece in the decora-
tors shop the colours remained distinct, but when the paper was put up
they seemed to blend as an orange tint which was much too fiery-looking
fur a room with a south aspect.
2 If the latter it must be that the first impression remains as a positive
after-image or ocular spectrum during the excitation of the second sen-
sation.
3 I find that for some reason reds suffuse themselves in this way over
other colours, as blues, greys, &c., with special readiness. This may be due
to the greater energy of the impression in the case of the red rays, and the
consequent greater persistence of the after-image.
4 According to this supposition any given tint may be viewed as the im-
pression resulting from the harmonious combination of the adjacent tints on
both sides.
180 Harmony of Colours.
fact in colour-combination. After all, in most cases, colours are
to be seen as perfectly detached from one another. And since
combinations of colours, when so detached, are sometimes called
harmonious, it follows that such blending does not adequately
account for the effects of colour-concord.
So much for the theory that chromatic harmony rests on a
similar basis to that of musical harmony. Let us now glance at
the second order of attempts to place the theory of chromatic
combination on a physiological basis, namely those which set
out from the phenomena of complementary colours. The dis-
position of the retina, after any impression of colour, to see its
complementary hue as observed in the phenomena of comple-
mentary images, and in the mutual influences of contrasted
colours in juxtaposition near their common boundary, was made
use of by Goethe in his celebrated doctrine of colour (Farbenlelire)
in accounting for the aesthetic value of combinations of colour.
He expressed the fact by saying that "every single colour
excites by a specific sensation the tendency to universality,"
whence the peculiar value of complementary colours, and of the
whole scale of colours as seen in the spectrum. Much the same
idea is worked out by Schopenhauer in his curious essay on Colours
( Ueber die Farben). This writer looks on colours as the result
of a qualitative partition of the activity of the retina, and
regards the addition of the complementary hue to a given colour
as the perfection of this activity. The fact that colours in juxta-
position tend under certain circumstances to influence one
another so as to assume the appearance of complementary hues,
was taken by Chevreul as the key to the true laws of chromatic
harmony. Chevreul appears to have exaggerated the import-
ance of the facts relating to the mutual modification of colours
in juxtaposition. Such influences are very limited, and it is
quite conjectural to suppose that contiguous colours always pro-
duce an appreciable modification of hue, through a calling-up of
a negative image or contrast. Indeed this idea seems to be clearly
contradicted by the simple fact that blue and red have their
peculiar force of colour augmented by juxtaposition, whereas, if
negative images were formed, the blue would lose its blueness
and look greenish, and similarly the red would suffer and
approach yellow. His harmony is, in fact, as he himself explicitly
states, the combination of contrasts. Once more, Zimmermann in
his Allgemeine ^sthetik regards the complementary image as a
necessary concomitant of a colour and even as an essential
element of the impression, and by help of this assumption seeks
to institute an analogy between the effect of two complementary
colours, of which each is thus in a sense contained in the other,
and that of two musical tones, say those of an octave of which
Harmony of Colours. 181
the higher is already present in the lower. 1 This same idea of
a complementary activity of the retina is made the basis of a
theory of colour-harmony by E. Heriug. It is also regarded as
the fundamental fact by Mr. Grant Allen in his Physiological
Esthetics.
That complementary colours have a special aBSthetic value
seems indisputable in spite of the attempts of some to disparage
these combinations. 2 Since on Young's hypothesis a comple-
mentary colour is one which brings into action that order or those
orders of nervous fibre which the original colour leaves compara-
tively quiescent, it is certain, as will be seen by-and-by, that the
juxtaposition of the two, whether they fall on the same retinal
area in succession, or simultaneously on contiguous regions
sympathetically related, must have a certain fresh and stimulat-
ing as well as a full and satisfying character for the eye. This
latter effect, it is obvious, should be obtained just as well by a
further subdivision of the colours, for example, of blue and orange
into blue, green and red, (the red being made much more
powerful than the green).
There is, however, great indefiniteness in this notion of
complete retinal activity. At first sight it would appear, when
translated into terms of Young's hypothesis, to involve an equal
excitation of all classes of fibres diffused over the retina. But
this is obviously impossible except by means of a very large
white surface. It would be absurd to contend that two con-
siderable areas of colour in juxtaposition are each perceived in
succession by the whole of the retinal surface. Further, it
cannot, as we have before remarked, be argued that two contiguous
hues are always perceived by the same part of the retinal surface,
and hence the fact that two considerable patches of colour in
juxtaposition are pleasing even when the eye is most at rest,
seems to show that a heterogeneous and partial qualitative activity
of different regions of the retina has this satisfying character
just as much as the complete activity of any given area.
There is another objection to the erection of the complement-
ary relation into a precise scientific principle of chromatic
combination. Two complementary coloured lights are such as
being combined produce the sensation of whiteness. But in
1 It is not of course accurate to speak of the complementary image being
" contained in " an impression of colour. Strictly speaking it is the result
of a second stimulation, objective or subjective, acting on relatively vigorous
and consequently highly susceptible elements.
2 Brucke describes a method by which he secured a series of impressions
of perfectly complementary hues, and tells us that in every case the com-
bination was pleasing (Die Physiologic der Farben, pp. 35, if. ; cf. pp. 204,
205).
13
182 Harmony of Colours.
order that they may produce this effect their quantities must
have a certain proportion. If the one is much more powerful
than the other, the result of combining them is not white but a
whitish* variety of the colour in excess. Now complementary
colours in art are supposed by the advocates of this principle to
be harmonious in an endless variety of proportion, whether the
quantity of each light be measured by the area reflecting it
or by its brightness. This shows that the eye is not, as some
interpreters of complementary hues appear to teach, always
seeking to realise a sort of unconscious perception of white-
ness. The idea that complementary colours are synonymous with
harmonious colours, evidently implies that colours lying near
one another in the spectrum-circle are always discordant. This is
not correct, since, as we have seen, closely related tints frequently
combine with great effect. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly
true that the most plainly and incontestably discordant effects
of colour take place when the combining colours are thus
related. So far as I can make out, the only instance of what is
generally felt' to be real chromatic dissonance is where one colour
is visibly injured or improverished by another, and this only
happens when the colours lie near one another in the spectrum-
circle. In dealing with this class of cases we shall, I think,
exhaust all the truth that resides in the complementary theory,
and at the same time dispose of all the points of resemblance
between colour and tone harmony.
It is important to state that the effects now considered arise
when the colours are produced by reflecting surfaces and not by
the direct rays of the sun. There is good reason to suppose that
the spectrum-rays, however combined, would not give rise to this
unpleasant effect. It occurs frequently in juxtapositions of
coloured fabrics, as for example, a scarlet shawl worn on a
purple dress, or a blue shawl on a violet dress. It may be easily
produced by combining tinted papers such as are used by book-
binders. Thus a strip of chocolate brown paper if placed beside
a bright pink strip seems to loose all its colour. In this way
certain scarlets are apt to look bricky if placed by rose-red, and
some yellows lose their force by the side of warmer tints. 1
It is possible that these effects are to be accounted for on the
same principle as the mutually reinforcing influence of comple-
mentary colours, namely the exhausting effect of light-stimula-
tion. The colour which is injured or "killed" commonly contains
some element conspicuous in the other though in a much feebler
1 So far as I can ascertain, one of the two colours always suffers more
than the other, though in some cases there seems to be a mutually destruc-
tive effect.
Harmony of Colours. 183
degree. The eye feels this element to be taken out of the second
colour and is consequently dissatisfied. What remains is either
a faint and unsatisfying element of another colour (as when a
gamboge yellow looks pale and greenish against a warmer colour),
or an approximation to a dingy colourless grey (as when choco-
late brown is killed by pink).
Again the fact that this effect of impoverishment seems to be
confined to the colours of surfaces suggests the reflection that it
is frequently due to the impurity of the colour which suffers,
that is to say, to an admixture of other elements (faint white
light in the form of grey, &c.). It is certain at least that the
poorer and the less pure a colour when viewed apart, the more
easily will it be killed when placed beside a rich and purer
colour.
Xow after we have frequently experienced this injurious effect
we regard any new juxtaposition of colours in order to see
whether they detract from one another's peculiar excellence ;
and when they do not, we are disposed to call them harmonious.
This idea is certainly one, and perhaps the commonest, meaning
of the phrase " harmony of colours ".
Yet this fact of not injuring one another's characteristic
quality does not exhaust the meaning of the term colour-harmony.
In truth it looks as if writers on colour had been led astray by
the associations of the word harmony. They have assumed that
colour-harmony like tone-harmony must repose on some specific
sensation. But the word harmony in many other connexions
evidently means much the same as affinity, resemblance, or
unity. 1 When for example we speak of an action harmonising
with our idea of a person's character, we mean simply that it
resembles in its nature and motives previously observed moral
qualities. Xow in the same way it may be said that much of
what is meant by harmony in colour is some aspect of likeness
consciously felt. In other words, the beauty of colours in com-
bination may rest to a large extent on a conscious process of
comparison, and involve a distinct perception of relation. In
this sense harmony is the opposite of contrast, and can only be
studied in connexion with this. I purpose devoting the rest of
this paper to a brief consideration of the several ways in which
the complementary aesthetic principles of harmony and contrast
manifest themselves in the pleasing effects of colour in combination.
1 Strictly speaking, the word harmony points rather to a subjective
emotion, to the peaceful feeling of satisfaction which results from the
perception of a certain objective correspondence, unity, or resemblance. I
conceive that the words harmony and unity or uniformity in diversity,
when employed in art, express but two aspects of the same fact, namely,
an emotional and an intellectual aspect.
184 Harmony of Colours,
First of all, then, it will be well to enumerate tlie several dis-
tinguishable qualities or aspects of colour which serve as the
terms of the relations of contrast and similarity. Some of these
are fixed characteristics for each of the individual colours, others
vary in the case of each colour.
Of the fixed aspects the most obvious is the chromatic quality
itself. In order to estimate the affinities of colours viewed as
impressions consciously compared, it seems necessary to set out
with four fundamentally distinct colours, namely, red, yellow,
green, and blue. 1 No one of these is felt as related to the others
by resemblance, while all intermediate colours, as orange or blue-
green, are immediately perceived to be transitions from some of
these seemingly elementary impressions to others. The affinity
between one of these intermediate tints and either of the
adjacent elements, may be called of the first degree. On the
other hand, the relation holding between any two elementary
colours lying next one another in the spectrum-circle may be
styled the second degree of affinity. This second degree does
not involve similarity like the first, but simply expresses the
fact that we may pass from one to the other by insensible
intervals without introducing a third element.
Not only have the several colours their specific colour-quality,
they manifest other similarities which appear to fall into a
regular scale. It is noticeable that there is no scale of height
in colour as fixed by the rapidity of vibrations of the several
hues, and corresponding to the scale of mere pitch in music.
The " lowest " note in the colour-scale, red, is more analogous in
its effect to the higher musical notes. There seems to be a fairly
even decline in respect of energy of sensation. Eed is violent ;
yellow though brighter is less exciting ; green is still less
stimulating, while blue is the colour which best suggests repose.
Of course these characters are greatly modified by variations in
brightness or intensity. They apply to the average tones of these
colours, and also to their spectrum-intensities.
Closely corresponding to this gradation in stimulative energy,
is the division of colours into warm and cold hues. There is
clearly a maximum of warmth in spectrum-red and a gradual
falling-off through orange and yellow to green. But green and
blue are generally treated as pretty equal in their coldness, if
indeed green is not the colder of the two, as many artists suppose.
The shading-oil of blue into violet, again, is a clear^peturn to the
warm extremity of the scale.
Other peculiarities of the several colours may be found, some
1 1 cannot assign any reason why this subjective scale differs from
Young's objective scale by the addition of the fourth element, yellow.
Harmony of Colours. 185
of which fall, like the above, into something of a general scale,
as advancing and retiring colours, while others are confined to
single colours, as the particular attractiveness which Goethe
attributes to blue, the colour that woos us on by seeming to fly
from us. But most attempts to define exhaustively the
characteristic effects of the individual colours seem to involve
arbitrary distinctions. 1
Let us now pass to those aspects of colours which vary in the
case of a given individual tint. First of all there is the intensity
or brightness of a colour which answers to strength of sensation
and degree of stimulation. Opposed to this is darkness of hue,
which is connected with feebleness of stimulation, and which in
its lowest degrees is known as blackness. Each of these
extremes has its characteristic emotional effect, brightness of
colour being exciting and gladdening, while darkness of tint has
a certain quieting and solemnising influence. 2
Xext to the aspect of brightness or darkness of a colour comes
what is known as its degree of saturation or colour-force. It is
known that even spectrum-colours are not perfectly pure from
an admixture of white light, which tends to weaken their
colour-force. 3 In the case of coloured surfaces the admixture
of white light tends to make the colour pale. The more
saturated a colour the fuller its force as colour, the less saturated
it is the nearer does it approach in its character to white. The
two extremes of vivid colour and white are marked by a
characteristic emotional effect. Colour is more sensuous, more
voluptuous, produces a more voluminous mass of pleasurable
feeling : white is less exciting and more serene.
In the case of coloured surfaces a colour may be made less
saturated by being " broken " or mixed with neutral grey, which
answers to a feeble quantity 'of white light. In this way the
voluptuous colour-effect may be toned down. The extreme
supplied by grey is a much quieter impression than white, and
has something like a touch of sadness in it. Hence grey serves
by contrast to bring out the rich voluptuous effect of colour still
more powerfully than white, and in the case of all bright colours
emphasises their brilliance as well. Of course the shade of grey
1 See, for example, Wundt's recent attempt to define the characteristic
emotional tone of the several colours (Physiologische Psychologic, pp.
440-444).
2 A change in the degree of light-stimulus is sometimes attended with a
change in the quality of the colour. Thus red or yellow light when very
feeble gives the colour known as brown.
3 Helmholtz describes a very interesting experiment by which he was
able to obtain a colour-impression fuller or more saturated than that of the
spectrum (Physiologische Optik, p. 370).
186 Harmony of Colours.
may vary from something indistinguishable from white to
perfect black. Every colour, however pure, tends, when it
reaches a certain degree of feebleness, to pass into grey and
finally into black, as may be seen in the gradual change of
nature's tints which accompanies night-fall. Black being the
name we give to a surface which reflects the minimum degree of
light is equally opposed to white and to colour. It serves to
accentuate the brilliance or luminous quality of each.
Thus every colour presents itself as a triple series of
gradations between the extremes of (a) bright tone and dark
shade, (I) saturated colour and white, and (c) bright and
saturated colour and grey or black. It is plain that these scales
supply to any particular colour an indefinite number of distinct
aspects, which aspects moreover, being common to all colours,
afford points of affinity and contrast among different tints.
Let us now glance briefly at the way in which the
principle of contrast enters into the combinations of colour.
Contrast is the greatest degree of change or variety of impression,
which is known to be a universal condition of art. It is only
by change, by passing from one impression to another, that
vividness of effect can be maintained, and the greater the degree
of unlikeness between two impressions the more vivid the effect.
Hence strong contrast is the most potent effect in art. There
is no doubt that the aesthetic value of change and contrast rests
on simple laws of the nervous system. On the one hand, a
uniform unchanging impression tends to lose its effect through
a gradual loss of functional vigour in. the nervous elements
involved. On the other hand, transition from one impression to
another unlike this implies the excitation in the second case of
elements not engaged in the first, that is to say, of elements
with a plentiful store of vigour. Yet these considerations do
not exhaust the phenomenon. The value of contrast depends
on a consciousness of the relation between the contrasting
impressions, and so involves a retention of a fairly vivid idea of
the first impression. Thus the effect of contrast may be
realised when there is no time for the exhausting effect just
spoken of, e.g., in passing from a high to a low tone very rapidly.
In the case of colours which persist side by side, the effect of
contrast may be instantaneous.
According to the double aspect of change just spoken of as
relief after an exhausting impression, and a transition to a more
vivid impression, various colours in juxtaposition may be said
to relieve and accentuate one another. As the eye passes from
one to another and reverses this movement, each element supplies
at once a condition of repose and of new and vigorous effect.
Yet we may roughly distinguish three cases here. First of all,
Harmony of Colours. 187
the contrasting colours may be both stimulating, being approxi-
mately equal in intensity or brightness and in extent. In this
case which we may call that of equilibrium, and which is best
illustrated by a juxtaposition of complementary colours, or
colours nearly allied to these, there is the mutual effect of relief
and intensification just described. Secondly, the two colours
may be very unequal in stimulating force. If the weaker colour
occupies the larger space and provides the ground of the brighter
colour, as in arrangements of bright warm colours on grey or
dark grounds, we have the effect of accentuation. If on the
other hand the weaker colour appears as an incidental element
in a large mass of bright colour, as in the Chinese and Japanese
; rrangenients where small masses of black are scattered among
oright colours, we have rather the effect of momentary relief or
repose.
For the rest the pleasure of colour-combination increases
according to the amount of discoverable contrast in which each
term enhances the value of the other. More especially the
characteristic effects of Brightness and darkness, the essential
element in chiaroscuro, and of energetic and restful colour, which
again includes the opposition of warm and cold, enter as con-
spicuous features in the larger number of colour-schemes.
Variety and contrast are of the very soul of the colour-arts.
The eye desires change, and the characteristic excellence of any
particular colour is only seen when it is placed in surroundings
fitted to bring out its specific quality. Just as nature delights
the eye by its many variegated tints so the arts of colour seek to
gratify it by the greatest possible variety of hue.
Yet change and the unlikeness of contrasting elements are
only one desideratum in a combination of colours. There must
be unity as well as variety, similarity as well as dissimilarity,
supplying the peaceful feeling of harmony. The one principle
opposes itself to and limits the other. If there were no unity
variety would grow chaotic and confusing, while without variety
uniformity would become monotonous. The degree of variety,
moreover, is not always the same. Sometimes, where an exhila-
rating, highly stimulating effect is desired, variety and contrast
abound, and the connecting thread of unity becomes faintly
discernible. On the other hand, where a more peaceful im-
pression is sought, variety may be reduced to a minimum. Let
us see for a moment, in the light of the practice of the best
colourists, how the principle of variety and contrast is limited
in the case of colours.
In the first place, then, the least conspicuous action of the
principle of unity in colours is seen in the preservation of a
certain due proportion among the elements. One element must
188 Harmony of Colours.
not as a rule extrude another or domineer over it so as to destroy
its force. This principle clearly embodies the idea of " perfect
retinal activity" mentioned above. It furnishes the most
abstract rule in colouring, and one which is exceedingly likely
to be over-ruled by other principles. In applying it there is
commonly a reference to the complete spectrum-scale of colour.
This serves as a standard of complete organic unity, and any given
scheme of colour is estimated with more or less distinct conscious-
ness in relation to this scale. When all parts of this scale are
clearly and adequately represented, the mind of the spectator
hag a sense of completeness, which feeling may be called an
emotion of harmony, since it depends on a perception of a corres-
pondence with a pre-existing mental standard. It is given as a
rule of decorative painting by Mr. Owen Jones, that when seen
at a certain distance the colours should seem to blend in a kind
of neutral bloom. 1 In practice it is of course sufficient that the
principal well-marked classes be represented. The favourite triads
red, yellow and blue, orange, green and violet, &c., owe a part
of their aesthetic value to this principle of organic completeness.
Similarly the value of complementary pairs, of the contrasts of
warm and cold tint, and of light and dark, rests in part on this
sense of completeness and proportion.
In the second place, colours may be united much more dis-
tinctly by help of the principle of continuity or gradation. It
has already been suggested that the charm of gradation rests in
part on the effect of blending impressions. In addition to this
a gradation of colours pleases by giving us the sense of change
in the gentlest possible form. It implies constant change
together with the closest possible amount of resemblance short
of uniformity. When colours are linked together by inter-
mediate gradations, they are seen to have an affinity, they are
recognised as links of one continuous chain. Light and dark
(chiaroscuro) supply a second mode of gradation, which may with
great advantage be combined with that of colour.
A third and yet higher mode of attaining unity among colours
is by subordination. Ample variety of tint and of emotional
tone being secured, the various details are grouped in relation
to some central dominant element, sensuous or emotional. This
principle is clearly opposed to that of completeness and propor-
tion already spoken of. There are several recognised methods
of securing the supremacy of a particular colour or quality of
colour. For instance, the ruling feature may occupy by far the
larger part of the area of the painting or design, either in a
1 Mr. Field has worked out in his " Chromatic Equivalents " the ratio
both of light-intensity and of surface requisite to this effect.
Harmony of Colours. 189
single mass or in a broken chain of smaller areas. Thus a land-
scape painter who seeks to realise a dominant key of bright
gladsome colour may, instead of dividing his picture into two
approximately equal masses of light and shade, expand and diffuse
the light spaces, keeping the dark masses in strict subordination
as an element of contrast and relief only. It may be remarked
that the breaking-up of the dominant tint or quality of colour
into several divided masses gives to the wandering eye the plea-
sure of recurrence of the Hke, a pleasure which is of the very
soul of melody. Another mode of giving this supremacy is to
assign to the dominant, element a particular position, more
especially a central one in the coloured space. By this means
it will project its image on the most sensitive part of the retina
when the eye is at rest, and also tend to arrest and hold the eye
as the point of repose after each wandering through the
peripheral parts of the surface.
The fourth and last mode of attaining chromatic unity is that
of assimilation. When the highest degree of the emotional
effect of harmony is desired, the colour-design must exhibit a
considerable amount of similarity. In some cases a single
uniform tint is esteemed agreeable, as for example, in ladies'
dress and in domestic decoration. 1 Here the element of variety
is supplied wholly by light and shade as distinguished from
colour. 2
More frequently the design is made up of a few closely related
colours with their several tones and shades, as blues and greens, reds
and browns, purple-reds and violets, &c. All such combinations of
adjacent hues, provided they do not produce the discordant effect
noticed above, supply a large amount of the feeling of harmony,
since they are related not only in chromatic quality, but in those
characters of warmth, strength, &c., or their opposites, already
spoken of. A combination of colours may be assimilated in
some cases by a process of suffusion, one colour being apparently
laid over a number of colours. The only difficulty here is that
of preserving something of the individual colours. This is only
possible when the dominant and subordinate lights result in a
certain colour that has something of the chromatic quality of
each, that is to say, when the colours are not separated by a
wider interval than that of the second degree of affinity (as red
and yellow). The effect of the medium of the air on distant
1 This fact appears to be overlooked by Mr. Grant Allen (Physiological
^Esthetics) who seeks to resolve all the disagreeableness of colour-combina-
tions into a fatiguing excitation of one class of nervous elements only.
- This is not exactly true, as change in degree of light is, as I have
observed, sometimes accompanied by change in the chromatic quality.
190 Harmony of Colours.
colours illustrates this effect of suffusion, and the same effect is
sometimes aimed at in art.
The higher degrees of similarity just spoken of are only aimed
at when the fullest effect of harmony is desired. More com-
monly the artist is content to secure a lower degree of harmony
by means of some unobtrusive emotional affinity. Thus, for
example, a refreshing and serene character belongs to the colour-
scheme of certain marine studies with morning light, in which
bright tones of green and blue together with white predominate,
while all warm and exciting tints are either excluded or reduced
to a very inconsiderable element.
There are two methods of bringing colours together by means
of some common character which appear to be so well recognised
in art as to call for special attention. The first of these is known
as breaking or lowering the tone of colours by bringing them
nearer a shade of neutral grey (or black). In this way the
individual differences of the colours are softened though not
altogether lost. Imagination here supplements sense and
restores to some extent the half- veiled hues. The most delight-
ful examples of such subdued colours in peaceful harmony may
be observed among the tints of sea and sky on a calm cloudy
day. The present taste in decorative art and in dress illustrates
the quiet harmonious effect of such subdued colours. When the
colours are reduced to a very low shade, and made to approach
black, we have a peculiar rich emotional effect which appears to
involve an energetic action of the imagination.
The second mode of approximating colours to one another is
by means of their other common pole, namely, white. To mix
white light with coloured, or to make the colours pale and faint,
is to bring them together by another link of affinity. Although
this kind of harmony is less frequently sought in art than the
other, illustrations of it are not wanting. Slight water-colour
sketches on white ground appear to owe something of their
peculiar charm to this principle, and in certain styles of colour-
ing, e.g., that of the Chinese and Japanese, there seems to be a
preference for combinations of pale tints.
Such then are, so far as I can observe, some of the chief
modes of supplying the peculiar element of unity, affinity or
harmony in combined colours by means of some colour-element.
It must not, however, be supposed that this kind of unity is
invariably aimed at. As I have already remarked, the artist
who seeks to produce a highly stimulating effect will make use
of the greatest amount of variety and contrast in colour. In
these cases he may be content with giving to his scheme simply
the unity which comes of local connexion and symmetrical form.
How much of the peculiar effect of colour-harmony will be
Harmony of Colours. 191
sought depends on the particular aim of the painter and on his
individual feeling.
In closing this slight study of the principles of chromatic com-
bination a word may be said as to the influence of experience and
association on the aesthetic effects of colours in juxtaposition.
I have refrained from enlarging on this side of the subject here,
not because I think it unimportant, but because it seems to me
better to study all the elements directly presented to us in art
before asking how much is indirectly given us by revivals of
past experience, individual or racial. In addition to this I will
confess that, with respect to the effects of colour in combination,
this line of speculation appears to me to promise but little help.
It is easy to trace some of the effects of single colours to this
source. Thus bright colour is gladsome in part, because it
is associated with all the pleasurable feelings that arise from
sunshine and bright surroundings. Again warm energetic
colours, no doubt, owe some of their peculiar force on the mind to
the fact of their comparative scarcity in the variegated mantle
of nature, as well as to association with sensations of bodily
warmth, &c. On the other hand, it is not easy to see why, if
we refer simply to the arrangements of nature and their action
on the visual organism, grass-green and blue should not be
reckoned one of the most agreeable of combinations. One or
two conjectural explanations might be derived from this source,
as, for example, that combinations of closely-related colours are
pleasing since they constantly present themselves on the sur-
faces of natural objects, or that gradation owes something of its
aesthetic value to its place in the colour-plan of nature. But
such tentative suggestions are very unsatisfactory, while on the
other hand, the laws of colour-harmony, so far as any such laws
can be said to exist, seem to be pretty fully accounted for by
data immediately given us, that is to say, the structural pecu-
liarities of the visual organ and the general laws of nervous stimu-
lation, together with well-known principles of mental action.
JAMES SULLY.
III. THE STANHOPE DEMONSTEATOE, 1
AN INSTRUMENT FOR PERFORMING LOGICAL OPERATIONS.
CHARLES third Earl Stanhope 2 is known to science by his
mechanical inventions. The works to which he owes his
celebrity are chiefly the following : A printing press and a
microscopic lens, both of which bear his name, a method of
securing buildings from fire, an arithmetical machine, a mono-
chord for tuning musical instruments, certain improvements
in the process of stereotype printing and in the construction of
locks for canals, and a steamboat or, as it was described by its
inventor, a vessel to sail " without the aid of either wind or tide
or oars ". But it does not seem to be generally known that the
Earl devoted a large portion of his life to the study of Logic,
and that he invented an instrument for the mechanical
performance of logical operations. In none of the accounts
which have appeared of his scientific labours can we find any
allusion to his researches on this subject or to the curious
contrivance which he called the " Demonstrator ". His logical
speculations, which employed his thoughts more or less during a
period of thirty years, have remained absolutely unpublished
and unnoticed down to the present time. This is partly to be
accounted for by the fact that the two friends to whom alone he
communicated his views were not at liberty to make them known
to others. In a letter to the Eev. John North of Ashdon, near
Saffron Walden, Essex, written the year before he died, 3 he gives
some account of his logical method, and asks him to show the
same to " Dr. G-.," meaning no doubt Dr. Edmund Goodwyn, 4 but
1 The substance of the following article was communicated by the author
to Section A of the British Association at the meeting in Dublin, 1878.
2 Born 3rd August, 1753 ; died loth December, 1816.
3 The letter bears date 15th November, 1815.
4 Goodwyn, a doctor of medicine at Ashdon, and North were two of
Stanhope's executors. There were eight others, viz., Lord Holland ; Lord
Grantley ; Mr. George Dyer, B.A., of 6 Clifford's Inn ; Eev. Christopher
Wyvill of Burton Hall, near Bedal, Yorkshire ; Rev. John Robinson of
Halstead, Kent ; Joseph Jekyll, Esq., M.P., of New Street, Spring Gardens ;
Rev. George Gregory, of 10 Chapel Street, Bedford Row ; and Mr. David
Stone, surgeon, of Brasted, Kent. To his executors he left nearly all his
disposable property. Among some of their descendants may perhaps be
found letters or manuscripts relating to the subject of this article. The
reason why he left nothing to his family, except one thousand pounds to
his mother, is thus explained in an obituary notice which appeared in the
Gentleman's Magazine for 1816, Vol. 86, part 2 : " On his separation from
Mr. Pitt his family preferred the patronage of the minister to the paternal
The Stanhope Demonstrator. 193
to no one else lest " some bastard imitation " should precede his
intended publication on the subject. A work entitled " The
Science of Eeasoning clearly explained upon new principles,"
which he left unfinished, bears on its title-page the date 1800.
A few of the earlier chapters were printed by the Earl at his own
press at Chevening, but the work for the most part is in
manuscript, and some portions of it have been written and
revised several times. 1 It is occupied chiefly with questions of
logical definition and examples of a method of reducing all
propositions to one form. The chapters on the ratiocinative
part of logic, or that which relates to reasoning, had not been
written, and we have to collect the author's views on this branch
of the subject from some isolated examples and a few incidental
hints.
Prof. Jevons, in a paper 2 describing his own logical machine,
remarks : " It is rarely indeed that any invention is made
without some anticipation being sooner or later discovered, but
up to the present time I am totally unaware of even a single
previous attempt to devise or construct a machine which should
perform the operations of logical inference ; and it is only, I
believe, in the satirical writings of Swift that an allusion to an
actual reasoning machine is to be found." Xow it must be
confessed that Earl Stanhope's Demonstrator is much less
powerful as a logical instrument than Prof. Jevons's machine,
but the former is undoubtedly a distinct " anticipation " of the
latter. It is probably the first attempt ever made to solve
logical problems by mechanical methods. That it is inferior in
range |nd power to the more recent invention can hardly be
matter of surprise. Logical science has made considerable
progress since the commencement of the present century. The
Aristotelic system has been widened in various directions, and
the remarkable analysis of Boole 3 has served to exhibit the laws
of thought in logic in a form as rigorous and exact as that of
roof, and he has frequently been heard to say that as they had chosen to be
ddled on the public purse, they must take the consequences. He wished
them all to devote themselves as he had himself done to some useful
calling, by which, when the fatal day of public calamity, which he imagined
he foresaw, came, they might secure independence by their own personal
ingenuity and labour. They are therefore not mentioned in the will, but
they are all entitled to certain sums by the marriage settlement.''
1 These remains with all letters preserved relating to Logic have been
placed in the writer's hands by the present Earl with a view to the publi-
cation of this account.
2 " On the Mechanical Pefonnance of Logical Inference." Philosophical
Transactions, 1870, pp. 497-518.
3 An Investigation of the Laics of Thought, London, 1854.
194 The Stanhope Demonstrator.
any department of pure mathematics. Prof. Jevons lias attacked
the problem of a mechanical logic with all the advantages of
these discoveries, and the result is an instrument as incomparably
superior to the one I am about to describe as the method of
Boole is to the old scholastic system.
It is interesting, however, to observe that in seeking to
construct a mechanical method in logic Earl Stanhope was led
to anticipate some of the views of modern logicians. Both in
his quantification of the predicate and in his solution of problems
involving numerically definite propositions, we see the Earl
struggling, not unsuccessfully, to escape into some less confined
system of logic than that of Aristotle. Indeed it would seem
that without some advance on the Aristotelic doctrine a
mechanical logic would be impossible.
Earl Stanhope showed little respect for the authority of the
ancient logicians. The same reforming zeal which he is well-
known to have displayed in politics 1 he exhibited also in his
treatment of logic. He brought to the study of the subject a
certain independence and originality of thought which led him
to examine the foundations of the science for himself. " Log-
icians in general," he says, " consider propositions as being of
four kinds, and they distinguish them by four letters as
follows :
1. Universal affirmative, \ The letters ( A
2. Universal negative, ( by which } E
3. Particular affirmative, ( they denote y I
4. Particular negative, } them are ' 0.
" And they represent syllogisms by means of certain barbarous
words (such as Barbara, Cesare, Darapti, &c.), which words
contain combinations of some of those four letters. I shall reject
the whole of this." So elsewhere he says : " I intend to exclude
entirely that long catalogue of pedantic words which are now used
in that complex system for the purpose of drawing consequences,
and which render it, generally speaking, both unintelligible to
youth and unfit for men of any age, so far at least as relates to
convenient and habitual use. My system of logic will, on the
contrary, be found to have the striking advantage of uniting
simplicity, perspicuity, utility, and perfect correctness." Again :
1 At an early period of the French Revolution he openly avowed his
sympathy with republican sentiments, and he is even said to have gone so
far as to lay aside the external ornaments of the peerage. His advanced
views were developed in his " Speeches and Protests before the Electors of
Westminster" in 1784, and in his " Reply to Burke on the French Revolu-
tion ". A curious pamphlet, entitled " Stanhope's Political Opinions," by S.
Fletcher, was published shortly after the Earl's decease. Copies of these
works are in the British Museum (8132d, ~ 9 58, 813occ).
The Stanhope Demonstrator. 195
" The famous Locke, in his Essay concerning the Human
Understanding (Volume the Second, Chapter the Seventeenth
and Section the Eighth), says, ' It is fit to take notice of one
manifest mistake in the Mules of Syllogism, viz.. that no
Syllogistic Reasoning can be right and conclusive but what has
at least one general Proposition '. The natural acuteness of that
great man made him perceive the existence of what he terms a
' manifest mistake '. But not seeing exactly in what consisted
that method by means of wliich that error was to be universally
corrected, he leaves the subject without attempting to lay down
correct Rules of Syllogism. I shall make it my business to
supply that defect. Aid I shall produce such examples, relative
to my new system of Logic, as will clearly justify the sagacious
Locke, in the observation which I have quoted respecting the
' manifest mistake,' as he sarcastically calls it, of the logicians.
There are various other mistakes which they have made which I
must rectify. But I shall not stop to correct any of these in
detail For the Science requires to be totally reformed"
The materials in our possession do not enable us to give a
complete or systematic account of Stanhope's views on logic, nor
is that the object of the present paper. What we propose to do
is to bring out, so far as we have been able to collect them, those
points in his system which may serve to illustrate and explain
the working of his Demonstrator. On this subject we find in the
Earl's logical remains no full or formal statement, but only
scattered and fragmentary hints, and a few very simple examples.
It is possible therefore that in the hands of its noble inventor
the instrument possessed a range and power somewhat greater
than is apparent to us. He attached to it a practical importance ;
for us it possesses little more than a theoretic or an historic
interest. After an allusion to his arithmetical machine, 1 con-
structed in 1777, the Earl says : " Another instrument which I
have invented, and which is extremely simple in its construction,
is contrived in such a manner as to be useful in discovering Conse-
: qences in Logic. It exhibits the consequences symbolically, and
renders them evident to the mind. By the aid of this instrument
the accuracy or inaccuracy of a conclusion is always shown, and
the reason why such consequence must of necessity exist is
: rendered apparent. As this instrument is so constructed as to
assist us in making demonstrations, I have termed it the
DEMONSTRATOR. This same instrument is so peculiarly contrived
as likewise to exhibit symbolically those proportions or degrees of
1 Four of these machines are in existence ; one is in the hands of the
present Earl, two others, of like construction, have coine into the po-
of General Babbage, and the fourth, a much smaller and less effective instru-
ment, is at present in the custody of the writer.
196 The Stanhope Demonstrator.
probability which it is the object of the LOGIC OF PROBABILITY
to discover." Speaking elsewhere of his one universal rule of
mediate inference, he exclaims : " Behold, then, the luminous
perspicuity and most beautiful simplicity of this new system of
logic ! "
It will be convenient to cite here Stanhope's definitions of the
following terms, viz., class, opposite class, oi'iginal opposite class,
and subordinate opposite class.
Class. " An individual thing which alone possesses, or the
total number of things each of which possesses, either any given
quality or an assemblage of given qualities, is that which I call
a class."
Opposite class. " When any number of things is, by means of
any definition, divided into any two classes only, which are
perfectly distinct from each other ; then each such class, when
considered in relation to the other class, is that which I call the
opposite class."
Original opposite class. " Any opposite classes into which the
total number of all things is divided are those which I call
original opposite classes"
Subordinate opposite, class. " Any opposite classes into which
any class is divided are those which I call subordinate opposite
classes."
All propositions are reduced by Stanhope to one form, namely,
the expression of the identity of two or more things, or classes
of things. In a letter to North bearing date 8th November,
1811, he says : " I take any two of my opposite classes, which
I will call A and B, B meaning whatever is not A. When I
predicate with respect to A and B, that is, when I form any
proposition, true or false, or positiye or negative, upon the sub-
ject in question, I either aver the thing which I will call C to
be in the class A, which denies it to be in B, or I aver it to be
in B, which averment denies it to be in A. If I deny, I do the
same tiling in another form of words. Now it is evident that
when I aver that C is in or of the class A, I only aver it to be
identic with something in or of that class, and that I do and can
do nothing else." In the same letter he replies to an objection
which North had raised to his definition of a proposition as " an
averment of identity ". North had written, 4th Nov. 1811 :
" I am the less inclined to admit it .[namely, the principle of
identity], unless I had seen the induction by which it has
been formed, because I have read what Condillac had said of the
principle itself, and because I could not see that he advanced in ,
any degree the science to which he attempted to apply it, even |
though Geometry might seem the most promising of any other
of the sciences. For my own part I confess that his denionstra-
The Stanhope Demonstrator. 197
tion fatigued and puzzled me beyond my powers of describing.
L'dme est un etre pensant is a proposition which may be of use
in argumentation, but its equivalent (according to Condillac and
your Lordship) L'dme est Fame conveys no idea ; consequently if
such an identic proposition were inserted in any argumentation,
it would be so far from forming a step to facilitate our progress
that it would present a most insurmountable barrier to our
passage : such identities would inevitably bar up even* avenue
to knowledge." The answer given by Stanhope to this objection
throws much light on his general views of the proposition.
" When I talk of identity," he says, " I do not say, as you make
me say, que ' L'ame est I'd me' car cela ne dit rien, but I say
thus : Example. Suppose I had heard that there was such a
thing as a comet. I now perceive in the heavens at night a star
with a luminous tail ; that is all I know, and it is by means of
that mental description that I distinguish that star from all
other stars. I afterwards find my star, so distinguished, des-
cribed and defined, amongst the stars of some new constellation,
and I predicate that that star has moved fast, which is a quality
of my comet, but which quality of my comet was before to me
unknown ; that is to say, I aver that ' the star with a luminous
tail ' and a star which ' moves fast,' that is, which belongs to the
class of stars that move fast, are IDENTIC. Have I not ma*de an
advance in knowledge by my having so perceived, though in
point of fact, it is the same comet, the identical comet, originally
described by me incompletely, before I perceived, or could pre-
dicate, such identity ? Voila tout. Would it not sound to your
ears very droll if a person were to say that that star moving fast
means that it is identic with some star which does not move fast ?
Now if that would be evidently wrong, and if I have by my
method only tiro opposite classes, viz., stare mocinrj fast and stars
not moving fast, if the proposition in question does not mean
that the given star is identic with a star in the second class, it
must mean that it is identic with a star in the first class ; for
there are two classes only. This is my induction in other words."
The " method of identification," as the author calls it, is illus-
trated in " The Science of Reasoning " by numerous examples,
from which the following are selected:
" All triangles are trilaterals " means (" there being no differ-
ence between triangles "and trilaterals, except as to the form of
their respective definitions,") that " the class of all triangles and
: the class of all trilaterals are identic. " Pure silver is fusible "
means that " All pure silver and some of those tilings which are
fusible are identic ". " Hardness belongs to diamonds," means
that " So/iic of those things which possess the quality of hard-
ness and all diamonds are identic ". " Some printing presses
14
198 The Stanhope Demonstrator.
cannot be worked without great labour," means that " Some
printing presses are identic with some of those instruments which
cannot be worked without great labour ".
Headers of MIND will readily recognise in these examples an
anticipation of Mr. George Bentham's four forms of affirmative
propositions, forms which were afterwards adopted by Sir
William Hamilton. 1 But Bentham, Hamilton, and others who
start from the same principle could have known nothing of
Stanhope's system.
This " method of identification " is applied to negative propo-
sitions which are "translated," that is, changed in form to
affirmative ones. Any two mutually exclusive classes, called
by Stanhope " opposite classes," A and not- A, divide the uni-
verse between them ; and to deny that a thing belongs to one
class is, in effect, to affirm that it belongs to the " opposite class".
" When a man denies that a given thing is probable, he, in effect,
avers that such given thing and one of those things which be-
long to the opposite class of probable [sic] things are identic."
" No diamond is either ductile or magnetic," means that " Each
diamond and something which is neither ductile nor magnetic
are identic ". " A flint is not ductile, means that All flints and
some things which are not ductile are identic. Or, in other
words, that All flints and some of those things which are in the
opposite class of ductile things are identic." " No man is per-
fect, means that All men are imperfect." Generally, " No A is
M " is equivalent to " All A is identic with something that is
not M " ; and in like manner, " Some A is not M " is equivalent
to " Some A is identic with something which is not M ". " This
may also," says Stanhope, " be expressed positively. For if
whatever be not M be called N, then the aforesaid negative pro-
position, Some A is not M, would also mean substantially that
Some A is identic with some N. Or, in other words, that Some
A is N." So, in a letter to North dated 27th Oct. 1811, he
says : " A negative and a positive proposition, on my plan, are
always one and the same. For to affirm a given thing to be of
any 1st class or 2nd class is at the same time and of necessity,
to deny it to be of the class opposite. And to deny a given thing
to be of the 1st class or 2nd class is of necessity to affirm it to
be of the class opposite. And vice versa. So that, when we
either affirm or deny, we must do both, sans le vouloir."
Two other examples of affirmative propositions may be here
cited. " This man exists," is equivalent to " One man and one
1 Bentham, Outline of a New System of Logic, London, 1827.
Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy, London, 1852. Art. IV. "Logic,"
first published in April, 1833.
The, Stanhope Demonstrator. 199
individual who exists are identic ". " A flint is on that table,"
means that " One flint and one thing which is on that table are
identic ".
It will be seen from the foregoing illustrations that Stanhope
based his system on what De Morgan calls the arithmetical view
of the proposition. He looked rather to the extension of terms
than to their other capacity of intension. He regarded the sign
of quantification affecting any term as indicating, definitely or
indefinitely, how many objects were included in the " totality "
described by that quantified term. By the method of identifi-
cation every proposition, whether affirmative or negative, uni-
versal or particular, numerically definite or otherwise, is
reducible to the form a A's are identic with p* B's, where a and
/8, the signs of quantity, may be all, some (not all or possibly
all), most (more than half), fewest (less than half), a number (an
integer), or a definite ratio of part to whole (a fraction), but not
none. According to Stanhope, a A and /3 B are to be regarded
as " the same totality differently described ". He distinguished
between an averment of identity qid ne dit rien, such as Snow is
snow, and an averment of identity qui dit quelque chose, such as
Snow is white. He discarded the former as not available for
logical purposes, and admitted only the latter into his system.
Whatever the signs of quantity, the total number of objects
included in one " totality " a A is equal to the total number of
objects included in the other /3 B, and therefore when a and /3
are both numbers, they are equal. But when a and /3 are both
ratios, they are to one another inversely as the total number of
A's to the total number of B's. This is easily shown. For let
6>! be the whole number of A's, and to* the whole number of B's ;
then (a 6>j) A's are identic with (/3 &>.>) B's, where (a Wj) denotes
the product of a into aji and (/3 o> 2 ) the product of Q into &> z .
Hence a <u 1 =/3 &> 2 , or = . "When a is a ratio and /3 is a
P i
number, = _ ; and when a is a number and 8 is a ratio,
P i
This view of the proposition determines the form of Stan-
hope's method of mediate inference and leads to an extension of
the common doctrine. He proposes a rule " for discovering con-
sequences in logic " which is a remarkable anticipation of that
given by De Morgan for the numerically definite syllogism. It
is a noteworthy fact that Stanhope does not limit the rule to a
special form, but puts it forth as embodying the fundamental
principle of all syllogistic ratiocination. We know not how he
200 The Stanhope Demonstrator.
was led to frame it, whether by the study of the numerical
syllogism, or by some more general considerations. We suspect
the former. But certain it is that he announces it -as a rule
capable of universal application. Two forms of it are given, one
symbolical, the other mechanical. To enable the reader to un-
derstand the former, it will be necessary to give the author's
definitions of ho, los and Jiolos ; and to enable him to understand
the latter, it will be necessary to describe the construction of
the Demonstrator.
DEFINITIONS. " Whenever in the first 1 premise any totality, or
any part thereof, and any given thing or things are stated to be
identic, and whenever in the second premise (such second pre-
mise not being incompatible with the first) that same totality, or
any part thereof, and any other given thing or things are stated
to be identic ; then such totality itself is that which I call holos.
I have chosen the word holos because that word (0X0?) in the
Greek means whole. Such Iwlos or such part of holos as is
mentioned in the first premise as being identic with any given
thing or things, is that which I call ho. Such holos, or such
part of holos as is mentioned in the second premise as being
identic with any given thing or things, is that which I call los.
The reader will observe that ho as well as los may be identic
with holos, but that neither ho nor los can ever exceed holos."
EULE. " Add ho to los and subtract holos. Then the remainder
(if any) is the extent of the consequence. But if there be no
remainder, or if there be no holos, then there can be no uncon-
ditional consequence."
In fact holos is the " middle term " of ordinary logic quanti-
fied universally, and ho and los are the extreme terms with their
proper signs affixed, " distributed " or " undistributed " as the
case may be. But Stanhope avoids the language of ordinary
logic. In place of " the middle term " he speaks of a totality,
by which however he means the middle term quantified to the
extent of the universe of thought. In place of " distributed "
and " undistributed," he speaks of " whole " or " total " and
" part " ; and in place of " quantity " he speaks of " extent ".
He might have retained the language, enlarging the definitions,
of ordinary logic, but he preferred to employ a new nomencla-
ture.
By " the extent of the consequence " Stanhope means the
extent as measured by holos or the middle term distributed.
Thus if a M's are A's and /3 M's are B's, and ^ M denote the
total number 2 of M's about which we are reasoning, then Stan-
1 The order of the premises is, in Stanhope's system, immaterial ; which-
ever premise happens to be presented first is that which he calls the first.
2 When a and /3 are ratios of part to whole, or fractions, p. is unity.
The Stanhope Demonstrator. 201
hope's rule gives (a -f /8 /t) M's are both A's and B's, that is
to say, a + /3 /u, measures the extent of the consequence as
between A and B. In other words, As many A's are B's as the
sum of a and /? exceeds /*. The method shows at once when
such a conclusion as Some A's are B's, or Some B's are A's,
is valid, and when it is not, and it also defines the extent of the
" some " with reference to p M or holos. At all events it gives
what has been called the " minor limit ". Further, it enables us
to draw a conclusion in some cases where the common logic
would be powerless. Stanhope gives an example which is evi-
dently intended to illustrate his remarks, which we have already
quoted, on Locke's objection to the commonly received doctrine
" that no Syllogistic Reasoning can be right and conclusive but
what has at least one general Proposition ".
" Suppose I were to say, some of the five pictures in that room
hang on the north side. And some of those five pictures are
portraits. No conclusion can hi this case be deduced ; and the
reason is, because from the two undeterminate words, some and
some, which are respectively contained in the two premises, it
does not appear how many of those five pictures hang on the
north side of the room, nor hotv many of those five pictures are
portraits. But without introducing any general proposition, I
can word those two premises (which are both of them assertions
respecting particulars alone) so as to render a conclusion
absolutely necessary. I shall do it by introducing precision into
each premise ; as, for example, suppose I were to say three-fifths
(which is most certainly not all but only some) of the five pictures
hang on the north side of the room. And f&ur-fiftJis (which is
also most indisputably not all but only some) of the five pictures
are portraits. Therefore at least tiro-fifths of the pictures (that
is to say, at least two of the five) must at the same tune be por-
traits and hang on the north side of the room."
This conclusion is given by the rule thus, ho + los holos
(3 4 \
+ -? 1 I pietnres=two-fifths of the pictures, or (3 + 4 5)
o o /
pictures =t wo of the pictures. That is to say, at least two-fifths
of the pictures, or what is the same thing, two of them, are por-
traits hanging on the north side of the room.
A good example is given by De Morgan. Most men in a
certain company have coats. Most men in the same company
have waistcoats. Therefore some in the company have both
coats and waistcoats.
Here by Stanhope's rule
ho + los holos=(most + most all) men
=some men.
That is, Some men in the company have both coats and waistcoats.
202 The Stanhope Demonstrator.
As another illustration, let the premises be
No boaster deserves respect.
Some heroes are boasters.
According to Stanhope, the first proposition is equivalent to
All boasters and some persons who do not deserve
respect are identic.
And the second to
Some heroes and some boasters are identic.
Hence, by the first proposition, ho=holos, and the conclusion
in this case is
ho + los holos=los=some boasters.
That is, Some heroes (to the extent of Some boasters) are
persons who do not deserve respect.
It appears therefore that the rule applies with equal effect
whether the signs of quantity in the given premises be numeri-
cally definite, semi-definite or wholly indefinite. The arithmeti-
cal view of the proposition and syllogism is carried out to the
fullest possible extent. 5y " all," used as a sign of quantity, is
understood every one, or the total number, and by " some " is
understood an indefinite number which may or may not equal
the total number, but cannot mean the absence of number.
The Demonstrator is a simple contrivance for the mechanical
working of this rule. It consists x of a brass plate four and a
half inches long and four inches wide, affixed to a block of ma-
hogany three quarters of an inch thick. In the centre there is
a " square opening " or depression, about an inch and a half in
area, and half an inch deep : this is called by Stanhope the
holon. Across the holon two slides can be pushed ; one, which
is set in a slender mahogany frame, is of red transparent glass,
and cannot be wholly withdrawn from the instrument ; it works
through an aperture on the right. The other is of wood, and
seems to have been originally coloured gray, but to have become
in the course of time bleached ; this is spoken of by Stanhope
as " the gray slider". In working the " Eule for the Logic of
Certainty " this slide is passed through an aperture to the left ;
but in working another rule given by Stanhope, the " Eule for
the Logic of Probability," it is drawn out and inserted in an
aperture at the top, when of course it works at right angles to
the red slide. In each case, when the slides are pushed in, the
1 Earl Stanhope devised and caused to be executed several instruments
of various sizes and constructions for the same purpose. The most con-
venient is the one described in the text, of which there are duplicates. One
of these has been presented to the writer by the present Earl ; the other is
retained in the family. It is probable that this was the last form of the
instrument which Stanhope devised. The others are less simple in con-
struction and less effective in operation.
The Stanhope Demonstrator.
203
red covers the gray (or white). On the lower edge of the red
slide, and on the upper edge of the square opening, the numerals
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
are printed, with a white dot on a black ground opposite to
each numeral. The same scale, running from top to bottom,
is printed on the left side of the square opening. These scales
serve to indicate the extent to which the slides are pushed in.
On the face of the Demonstrator various rules and explana-
tions are given, as in the accompanying diagram which repre-
sents the appearance of the instrument when both slides are
pushed fully in.
DEMONSTRATOR,
INVENTED n-y
CHARLES EARL STANHOPE.
The right-hand edge of the gray points out, on this npper scale,
th$ extent of the gray, in the logic of certainly.
The lower edge of
the gray points out,
on this side scale, the
extent of the gray,
in the loaic of "
probability.
The area of
the square opening,
ivithin the wack
frame, represents
the holon, iu
all cases.
The right-hand side of (ha square opening points out, on fcia
lower scale, the extent of the red, in. aU cases,
The right-hand edge of the gray points cut, on the Game
lower scale, the extent of tne consequence,
(or dark red,) if any, m the
logic of certainty. j
~ ~'-
Itrte for the Logic of Certainty.
To the gray, add the red, and deduct the holon: the remainder", (at dark red,)
if any, will be the extent of the consequence.
Hide for the Logic of Probability.
The proportion, between the area of the dark, red and the area of the holon,
is the probability which results from the gray and the red.
PRINTED BY E.ARI* STANHOPE, CHEVENISC, SSJSTT.
204 The Stanhope Demonstrator.
FIG. I. FIG. II. FIG. III.
0123456 789 10
;5E
By means of two plain cards and a sheet of paper any one can
construct a Demonstrator for himself. For, on the sheet let a
square be described, and let it be divided into one hundred
equal squares ; also let the numerals to 10 be written on the
upper and left side as in Fig. II. This may be called the
holon. Next, let the cards be cut each of exactly the same
size as the holon, and let them be similarly divided into
squares. One of these, Fig. I, may be used instead of the
gray slide, and the other, Fig. III., bearing on its lower
edge the scale to 10, instead of the red. It will be found
convenient to snip the lower edge of the red card as in
the last figure, so that when the gray is placed upon the
holon (being brought on from the left for the logic of
certainty, and from the top for the logic of probability) to the
extent required by the first premise, and the red (being brought
on from the right) to the extent required by the second premise,
the extent to which the red overlaps the gray (which is the
extent of the " dark red " in the instrument) may be at once
apparent. Any problem which can be solved by means of
Stanhope's Demonstrator can be solved equally well by means
of these squares.
The following examples will sufficiently illustrate the working
of the instrument.
1. All M is A.
All M is B.
Let the holon represent " All M". Place the gray slide to the
extent of the holon to represent " Some A," and the red slide
also to the extent of the holon to represent " Some B". Then the
extent of the " dark red," that is, of the " union of the gray and
the red," which in this case is the extent of the holon, is the
extent of the consequence, and the instrument shows that
Some A is B, or Some B is A.
This is the conclusion of the common logic ; but the conclusion
The Stanhope Demonstrator. 205
given by the Demonstrator is somewhat more full and definite,
nc.
As many A's are B's, or as many B's are A's, as there are M's
in all.
2. All jewels are valuable.
All diamonds are jewels.
Let the holon represent " All jewels," and place the gray slide
to the extent of the holon to represent " Some valuable things";
and the red slide to any extent to represent " All diamonds ".
The dark red is the extent of the consequence. Here the extent
of the dark red is the extent of the red, and the instrument
shows that
All diamonds are valuable ; or some valuable things are all
diamonds.
3. No M is A.
All M is B.
These premises are equivalent to
All M is some not-A.
All M is some B.
Let the holon represent "All M"; and place the gray slide to
the extent of the holon to represent " Some not-A," and the red
slide to the extent of the holon to represent " Some B". The
dark red which shows the extent of the consequence has in this
case the same extent as the holon : the red is entirely gray, and
the conclusion is
Some B is not-A,
or more definitely,
As many B's are not A's as there are M's in all.
4. Xo M is A.
AUBisM.
These premises are equivalent to
All M is some not-A.
All B is some M.
The holon representing " All M," place the gray slide to the
extent of the holon to represent " Some not-A," and the red
slide to any extent to represent " All B". The dark red, showing
the extent of the consequence, has in this case the same extent
as the red : the red is entirely gray, and the conclusion is
All B is some not-A,
or, as expressed in the usual form, Xo B is A.
206 The Stanhope Demonstrator.
5. No M is A.
No M is B.
These premises may be written
All M is not- A.
AU M is not-B.
Let the holon represent " All M," the gray, pushed in to the
extent of the holon, " Some not- A," and the red, pushed in to
the same extent, " Some not-B". The instrument shows that
Some not-A is not-B, or Some not-B is not- A,
or, more definitely,
As many not-A's are not-B's as there are M's in all.
This conclusion would not be accepted as valid in the scho-
lastic system of logic, which virtually requires that the subject
of a proposition should be affirmative. It is, however, perfectly
legitimate in itself, though, as Stanhope says, " there is no con-
clusion as between A and B".
6. Some M is A.
Some M is B.
The holon representing " All M," place the gray slide to any
extent to represent " Some A," and the red slide to any extent
to represent " Some B". Here it is doubtful if the red will
overlap the gray so as to give dark red, and therefore no certain
conclusion can be drawn. When the number of objects denoted
by the term " Some M " in the first premise added to the
number denoted by the term " Some M " in the second, exceeds
the total number of M's, the red will overlap the gray, that is to
say, there will be some dark red, and in that case we can con-
clude that
Some A is B, or Some B is A.
7. Of ten trees seven are above 90 feet high.
Of the same ten trees six belong to Mr. North.
Let the holon represent the ten trees. Place the gray slide to
the extent of 7 to represent the trees above 90 feet high ; and
place the red slide to the extent of 6 to represent the trees
belonging to Mr. North. Then the instrument shows 3 as the
extent of the dark red, so that the conclusion is that
There are three trees above 90 feet high belonging to Mr.
North.
There may be more than three, but the instrument gives the
" minor limit," the number at least which belong to Mr. North.
If the red slide, with its scale reversed, were pushed in through
The Stanhope Demonstrator. 207
the same aperture as the gray to the proper extent, the dark
red, or the union of the red and the gray, would indicate the
" major limit," the greatest number that can belong to Mr.
North, viz., 6.
8. Of ten pictures eight are portraits.
Of the same ten pictures four are by Rubens.
The holon representing all the pictures, place the gray slide to 8
to represent the portraits, and the red to 4 to represent the
pictures by Rubens. Then the dark red shows the number of
portraits by Eubens, viz., 2. This is the " minor limit"; the
" major " is shown by the red, viz., 4. 1
9. Mr. Venn's Problem. 2 " The members of a board were
each of them either bondholders or shareholders, but not both,
and the bondholders, as it happened, were all on the board.
What conclusion can be drawn?"
Let the holon represent the whole body of bondholders and
shareholders. Place the gray slide to any extent to represent
" All bondholders," or, what is here the same thing, " All
directors who are bondholders " ; and place the red slide to
represent " All shareholders ". There must be no dark red, that
is, the red must not overlap the gray, because no director is both
a bondholder and a shareholder, but the red and the gray must
together cover the holon. Then the instrument shows that
No shareholder is a bondholder,
the conclusion required.
The mechanical process does not seem to differ essentially
from Mr. Venn's argument, than which, as he says, nothing can
look simpler ichen stated : " There can be no bondholders who
are shareholders, for, if there were, they must be either on the
board or off it. But they are not on it, by the first of the given
statements ; nor off it, by the second."
Stanhope's letters and papers contain no examples in illustra-
tion of his " Rule for the Logic of Probability," nor do we find in
them any remarks on the general subject. But the rule solves
effectually either of the following problems, viz.,
(a) Given the probabilities of two independent events, to find
the probability of their concurrence ; or
(&) Given the probability of one event, and the probability
1 To the riddle, " Two ducks before a duck, two ducks behind a duck,
and one duck in the middle. How many ducks were there ? " The answer
often given is 5 ; but the answer required is 3 the least number or
" minor limit ".
2 See article by Mr. Venn on " Boole's Logical System," in MISD IV., p,
487.
208 The Starifwpe Demonstrator.
that if that event occur, another dependent on it will happen
also, to find the probability of their concurrence.
For, in either case, if p and q be the given probabilities, the
required probability will be p q, as has long been known. And
the instrument, when the gray slide is pushed through the upper
aperture to the extent of p of the holon, and the red is pushed
in to the extent of q of the holon, simply indicates the product
of the two ratios p and q, each less than unity ; for the extent
of the dark red is evidently p q of the holon.
10. A coin is tossed up twice ; find the chance that it will
fall head uppermost both times.
The chance of head in a single throw is . Let the holon
represent certainty. Place the gray slide, now inserted through
the upper aperture, to the extent of 5, one-half of the holon,
to represent the chance of head ; and place the red slide to the
same extent to represent the same chance ; then the dark red is
obviously one-fourth of the holon, and is, by the rule, the
chance that the coin will fall head uppermost twice. We
should have precisely the same process and result if the ques-
tion were to find the chance of the coin falling head first and
tail second ; or to find the chance of tail first and head second ;
or to find the chance of tail twice.
The foregoing examples are all extremely simple, and indeed
it does not seem possible by means of the Demonstrator in its
present form to solve very difficult or complicated questions.
It is constructed for problems involving only three logical
terms ; but additional slides would give the means of repre-
senting more terms and would thereby increase the range and
power of the instrument. To Stanhope belongs the honour, and
it is a very high honour, of being the first (probably) to attempt
the solution of logical problems by a mechanical method. There
may be some difference of opinion as to how far he succeeded,
but there can be none as to the ingenuity of the attempt. The
contrivances of earlier logicians, more especially the circles of
Euler, probably prepared the way ; but Stanhope did un-
doubtedly take a very important step in advance when he con-
ceived and constructed his Demonstrator. His conversion of all
propositions into the form of identities, by means of the quantifica-
tion of the predicate, and the principle of his mechanical method,
viz., that the process of mind involved in the ordinary syllogism
and that involved in the numerically definite syllogism are
essentially one and the same, must be regarded as distinct con-
tributions to logical science, and as remarkable anticipations of
recent discoveries.
ROBERT HA.RLEY.
The Stanhope Demonstrator.
209
I append to this paper Stanhope's Table of Syllogisms, with his own
observations and some others that may serve to explain it :
STANHOPE TABLE OF SYLLOGISMS,
CONSISTING OF THIRTY-SIX FORMS.
OBSERVATTOS. The
word INCONCLUSIVE,
as referring to this Table,
means IN-CONCLUSIVE AS
BETWEEN A A>T> B.
rf
All M is A ......
S M
1 A
??
Q M
o B
10?
90?
21
H
E
B
H
All AisM
4?
\
6
22?
23
24?
G
\
Q
B
Some M is A ; or, )
Some A is M . . j~
- M
i A
O
8
9
\
25 5
G
26
27
Xo M is A ; or, \
No A is M . . j ' ' '
10 B
H
111
B
125
B
28
\
29
30
Some M is not A ....
T* M
iS B
G
14
15
31
\
32
\
33
Some A is not M . .
16
w]
18
34
35
3 S
s
1
=
.3
PP
I
02
The ?arp Figures shew the CONCLUSIVE FORMS of Syllogisms.
The small Figure* shew the INCONCLUSIVE FORMS of Syllogisms.
In the firtt large
square,
In the trtond large
square,
And also, in the
third large square,
the corresponding
FORM No. 1, by itself ; likewise \
Xos. 4, and 7, and the corresponding >
Nos. 2, and 3, j
10, 11, 12, 13, and 17,{
JNos. 19, 22, 25, 20, and 24, j
JNos.
conclude
POSITIVELY.
conclude
NEGATIVELY.
conclude
NEGATIVELY.
But, in the fourth large square, all the FORMS are INCONCLUSIVE.
Logicians, since the time of Aristotle, have set down the number of
- moods or syllogisms at sixty-four. They have taken the eight
propositions relating to M and A, given in the Table, and have rung the
changes on these with each one of the eight relating to M and B, also given
in the Table, thus making eight times eight. Or, observing that three of
the four forms A, E, I, O, are necessary to constitute a syllogism, they
have determined the possible moods by finding all the arrangements of the
four letters taken three at a time. The number of moods thus formed is
eixty-four ; but most of these are found to be invalid as contradicting one
or more of the general canons of mediate inference. Stanhope, by treating
as equivalent such propositions as No A is M and Xo M is A, and such
210 The Stanhope Demonstrator.
propositions as Some A is M and Some M is A, reduces the number of pos-
sible forms to thirty-six. Of these, six stand alone, being unaltered by the
interchange of A and B ; but of the remaining thirty, one-half may be
derived from the other half by this simple interchange. Two syllogisms
which may be converted, the one into the other, by interchanging A and
B, are called by Stanhope " twins ".
The Table is made after the pattern of the common multiplication table,
in which the products are found at the junction of the vertical and horizon-
tal columns. Thus in the Logical Table, the vertical column, All B is M
meets the horizontal column, All M is A in the second small square, and
M
the syllogism of which these are the premises, is indicated by 2B. In like
B
manner the Syllogism whose premises are Some A is not M and All B ia M,
N
is indicated by 17A. The three small capitals next to the large figures are
G
not explained by Stanhope, who merely remarks, in a letter to Mr. North,
that they " are added for the use of beginners to save them trouble ". The
first letter M or N (N being written no doubt for shortness in place of not-
M), probably indicates what the holon represents, viz. : All M or All not-
M, as the case may be. The second letter, A or B, indicates the subject of
the conclusion, when the conclusion is expressed in the ordinary form.
Lastly, the third letter, G for gray, R for red,or H for holon, indicates " the
extent of the consequence ". It will further elucidate this notation if we
write down all the conclusions given by the Demonstrator for the several
conclusive forms, " twins " being placed side by side.
M
1 A . Some A is B, to the extent of the holon.
H
2** All Bis A, 4 J All A is B,
B' to the extent of the red. G' to the extent of the gray.
3 g Some B is A, ^ Some A is B,
B' to the extent of the red. G' to the extent of the gray.
, Q^ 1 Some B is not A, j 9A f Some A is not B,
H' to the extent of the holon. H' to the extent of the holon.
j,M No Bis A, 22A No A is B,
B' to the extent of the red. G' to the extent of the gray.
j2^ Some B is not A, 05^ Some A is not B,
B' to the extent of the red. G' to the extent of the gray.
1 SB* Some B is not A, nol* Some A is not B,
G' to the extent of the gray. B' to the extent of the red.
]* A Some A is not B, o^if Some B is not A,
G' to the extent of the gray. E' to the extent of the red.
Among valid syllogisms Stanhope also places 28, viz. :
No M is A, or No A is M.
No M is B, or No B is M.
Therefore,
Some not-A is not-B, to the extent of the holon.
But here, as already pointed out (See Example 5), there is no conclusion as
between A and B, which is really all that is meant by the rule of common
logic that " from two negative premises no conclusion can be drawn ".
All the other forms tabulated by Stanhope are inconclusive whether as
between A and B, or not-A and B, or A and not-B, or not-A and not-B,
save under special conditions. R. H.
IV. JOHN STUAET MILL (I.).
I PROPOSE to review the life and character of John Stuart Mill.
In addition to what all the world may know, I am aided by
personal recollections extending over the second half of his life,
and by documents in the possession of his family for some of the
earlier portions.
My plan requires me to recall the account given in the
Autobiography of the successive stages of his early education.
There is a sort of pause or break at his eighth year, when he
began Latin. His years from three to eight are occupied with
Greek, English and Arithmetic ; the Greek, strange to say, taking
precedence. His earliest recollection of all, we are led to
suppose, although not explicitly affirmed, is his committing to
memory Lists of Greek words written by his father on cards.
He had been told that he was then three years old. Of course
reading English, both printed and written, was supposed ; and
we have to infer that he had no recollection of that first start
of all, which must have been taken before he completed his
third year. Judging from the work gone through by his eighth
year, he cannot be far wrong in putting down the date of the
Greek commencement.
A letter from his father to Bentham, dated 25th July, 1809,
affords us a momentary glimpse of him at the age of three years
and two months. It was the occasion of the first visit to
Bentham at Barrow Green. The letter is an apology for not
being able to come on the day previously arranged, and is full of
rather heavy joking about the domestic obstructions. The
passage to our present purpose is this : " When I received your
letter on Monday, John, who is so desirous to be your inmate,
was in the room, and observed me smiling [at Beutham's fun] as
I read it. This excited his curiosity to know what it was about.
I said it was Mr. Bentham asking us to go to Barrow Green.
He desired to read that. I gave it to him to see what he would
say, when he began, as if reading-=Why have you not come to
Barrow Green, and brought John with you ? " The letter closes
" John asks if Monday (the day fixed) is not to-morrow ". Xot
much is to be made of this, except that the child's precocious
intellect is equal to a bil of waggery. The remark may seem
natural, that if he were then learning his Greek cards, he might
actually have read the letter ; but no one that ever saw
Bentham's hand-writing would make that remark. As I take it,
the interest of the scene lies in disclosing a sunny moment in the
habitually stern relationship of the father and son.
212 John Stuart Mill.
As an introduction to the next contemporary landmark of his
progress, I need to quote from himself the account of his earliest
reading. He says nothing of English books till he has first
given a long string of Greek authors ^Esop's Fables, the
Anabasis, Cyropsedia and Memorabilia of Xenophon, Herodotus,
some of Diogenes Laertius, part of Lucian, two speeches of
Isocrates ; all these seem to have been gone through before his
eighth year. His English reading he does not connect with his
Greek, but brings up at another stage of his narrative. From
1810 to 1813 (age, four to seven) the family had their residence
at Newington Green, and his father took him out in morning
walks in the lanes towards Hornsey, and in those walks he gave
his father an account of his reading ; the books cited being now
histories in English Eobertson, Hume, Gibbon, Watson's Philip
the Second and Third (his greatest favourite), Hooke's History
of Rome (his favourite after Watson), Rollin in English,
Langhorne's Plutarch, Burnett's Own Time, the history in the
Annual Eegister ; he goes on, after a remark or two, to add
Millar on the English Government, Mosheim, M'Crie's Knox, a
quantity of Voyages and Travels Anson, Cook, &c. ; Robinson
Crusoe, Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Miss Edgeworth's Tales,
and Brooke's Fool of Quality. I repeat that all this was within
the same four years as the Greek list above enumerated. At a
later stage, he speaks of his fondness for writing histories ; he
successively composed a Roman History from Hooke, an abridg-
ment of the Universal History, a History of Holland, and (in his
eleventh and twelfth years) a History of the Roman Government.
All these, he says, he destroyed. It happens, however, that a
lady friend of the family copied and preserved the first of these
essays, the Roman History ; upon the copy is marked his age,
six and a half years, which would be near the termination of the
two formidable courses of reading now summarised. The sketch
is very short, equal to between two and three of the present
printed pages, and gives but a few scraps of the earlier
traditions. If it is wonderful for the writer's age, it also shows
that his enormous reading had as yet done little for him. He
can make short sentences neatly enough ; he gives the heads of
the history, in the shape of the succession of kings and consuls
and, in imitation of his author, he supplies erudite and critica
notes. 1
1 The beginning runs thus : (heading ' First Alban Government :
Roman Conquest in Italy') "We know not any part, says Dionysius' of
Halicarnassus, of the History of Rome till the Sicilian invasions. Before
that time, the country had not been entered by any foreign invader. After
the expulsion of Sicilians, Iberian (?) kings reigned for several years ; but
in the time of Latinus, ^Eneas, son of Venus and Anchises, came to Italy,
John Stuart Mill. 213
My next document is a letter, in his own hand, dated
Sept. 13, 1814. He was now eight years and four months. He
was in the second stage of his studies, when he had begun Latin,
and had extended his reading in Greek to the poets, commencing
with the Iliad. He was also teaching his sister, two years
younger than himself. The event that gave rise to the letter was
the migration of the whole family to Bentham's newly acquired
residence, Ford Abbey, in Somersetshire. I will give a part and
abridge the rest. His correspondent was some intimate friend of
the family unknown.
" I have arrived at Ford Abbey without any accident, and am now safely
settled there. We are all in good health, except that I have been ill of
slight fever for several days, but am now perfectly recovered.
" It is time to give you a description of the Abbey. There is a little
hall and a long cloister, which are reckoned very fine architecture, from the
door, and likewise two beautiful rooms, a dining-parlour and a breakfast-
parlour adorned with fine drawings within one door ; on another side Is a
large hall, adorned with a gilt ceiling ; and beyond it two other rooms, a
dining and drawing room, of which the former contains various kinds of
musical instruments, and the other is hung with beautiful tapestry.
" To this house there are many staircases. The first of them has b'ttle
remarkable up it, but that three rooms are hung with tapt-stry, of which
one contains a velvet bed, and is therefore called the velvet room. The
looking-glass belonging to this room is decorated with nun's lace.
" Up another staircase is a large saloon, hung with admirable tapestry,
as also a small library. From this saloon issues a long range of rooms, of
which one is fitted up in the Chinese style, and another is hung with silk.
There is a little further on a room, which, it is said, was once a nursery ;
though the old farmer Glyde, who lives hard by, called out his sons to hear
the novelty of a child crying in the Abbey ! which had not happened for
the whole time he had lived here, being near thirty years. Down a
staircase from here is a long range of bedrooms, generally called the
Monks' Walk. From it is a staircase leading into the cloisters. The rest
of the house is not worth mentioning. If I was to mention the whole it-
would tire you exceedingly, as this house is in reality so large that the
eight rooms on one floor of the wing which we inhabit, which make not
one-quarter of even that floor of the whole house, are as many as all the
rooms in your house, and considerably larger.
" I have been to the parish church which is at Thornecomb. Mr. Hume
has been here a great while. Mr. Koe came the other day, and Admiral
and established a kingdom there called Albania. He then succeeded
Latinus in the government, and engaged in the wars of Italy. The Eutuli,
a people living near the sea, and extending along the Xumicius up to
Lavinium, opposed him. However, Turnus their king was defeated and
killed by ^-Eneas. ^-Eneas was killed soon after this. The war continued
to be carried on chiefly against the Rutuli, to the time of Romulus, the first
king of Rome. By him it was that Rome was built."
It was about the age when he wrote this history, that he was invited
to an interview with Lady Spencer (wife of Lord Spencer, then at the head
of the Admiralty) ; her curiosity being roused by the accounts of him.
His conversation on the occasion turned chiefly on the personages of Roman
history, whose characters he fluently hit off.
'
214 John Stuart Mill.
Chietekoff is expected. Willie and I have had rides in Mr. Hume's
curricle."
He goes on to say "What lias been omitted here will be
found in a journal which I am writing of this and last year's
journeys ". He then incontinently plunges again into descriptive
particulars about the fish-ponds, the river Axe, the deer-parks,
the walks, and Bentham's improvements. The performance is
not a favourable specimen of his composition ; the hand-writing
is very scratchy, and barely shows what it became a few years
later. The reference to Joseph Hume's visit has to be connected
with the passage at arms between the elder Mill and Bentham,
which I had formerly occasion to notice (MiND VIII., p. 525, 526).
By far the most important record of Mill's early years is his
diary during part of his visit to France, in his fifteenth year ;
and from this I hope to illustrate with some precision the real
character of his acquisitions and his intellectual power at that
age. A very valuable introduction to this diary was lately
brought to light by Mr. Eoebuck, who had fortunately preserved
a letter of Mill's that he had received from Jeremy Bentham's
amanuensis in 1827. It was addressed to Bentham's brother,
Sir Samuel Bentham, and it is dated July 30, 1819, his age being
thirteen years and two months. The letter begins thus :
" My Dear Sir, It is so long since I had the pleasure of seeing
you that I have almost forgotten when it was, but I believe it
was in the year 1814, the*first year we were at Ford Abbey. I
am very much obliged to you for your enquiries with respect to
my progress in my studies ; and as nearly as I can remember, I
will endeavour to give an account of them from that year."
He then goes on to detail his reading for the successive years
from 1814. I do not print the details, but will compare them
with the Autobiography, and indicate agreements and differences.
In the year 1814 (by the letter), he read, in Greek, Thucydides
and Anacreon (an odd coupling), and, he believed, the Electra of
of Sophocles, the Phoenissse of Euripides, the Plutus and the
Clouds of Aristophanes, and the Philippics of Demosthenes ; in
Latin, only the Oration of Cicero for Archias, and part of the
pleading against Verres. In Mathematics, he was reading Euclid ;
he began Euler's Algebra, and worked at Bonnycastle ; also some
of West's Geometry. In 1815, his reading was Homer's Odyssey,
Theocritus, some of Pindar, the Orations of ^schines and
Demosthenes, on the Crown. In Latin : first six books of Ovid's
Metamorphoses, first five books of Livy, the Buccolics and the first
six books of the ^Eneid of Virgil, and part of Cicero de Oratione.
In Mathematics : finished the six books of Euclid together with
the Eleventh and Twelfth, and the Geometry of West ; studied
John Stuart Mill. 215
Simpson's Conic Sections, and West's Conic Sections, Numera-
tion and Spherics ; and, in Algebra, Hessy's Algebra and
Newton's Universal Arithmetic, in which last he performed all
the problems without the book, and most of them without any
help from the book.
1816. Greek: part of Polybius, Xenophon's Hellenics, the
Ajax and Philoctetes of Sophocles, the Medea of Euripides, the
Frogs of Aristophanes, and great part of the Anthologia Graeca.
Latin : all Horace, except the Epodes. Mathematics : Stewart's
Propositions Geometricae, Playfair's Trigonometry at the end of
his Euclid, " Geometry" in the Ed in. Encyclopaedia, and Simpson's
Algebra.
1817. Greek : Thucydides (the second time), many Orations
of Demosthenes, all Aristotle's Rhetoric, of which he made a
synoptical table. Latin: Lucretius, all but the last book,
Cicero, Ad Atticum, Topica, and De Partitione Oratoria. Mathe-
matics: "Conic Sections" in Encyc. Brit.; Simpson's Fluxions,
Keill's Astronomy, and Eobison's Mechanical Philosophy.
1818. Greek : more of Demosthenes ; four first books of
Aristotle's Organon, tabulated in the manner of the Rhetoric.
Latin : all Tacitus (except the Dialogue on Oratory), great part of
Juvenal, beginning of Quintilian. Mathematics : Emerson's
Optics, Trigonometry by Prof. Wallace, solution of problems,
beginning of article on Fluxions in the Edin. Encyc. Began to
learn Logic, read several Latin treatises Smith, Brerewood, Du
Trieu, part of Burgersdicius, Hobbes.
1819 (the year when the letter was written). Greek : Plato's
Gorgias, Protagoras, and Eepublic. Latin : Quintilian, in course
of reading. Mathematics : Fluxions, problems in Simpson's
Select Exercises. Also, he is now learning Political Economy.
Wliile this enumeration is much fuller than that in the
Autobiography, it omits mention of several works there given :
as Sallust, Terence, Dionysius, and Polybius. The private
English reading is in both : chiefly Mitford's Greece, Hooke and
Ferguson's Rome and the Ancient Universal History. His
composing Roman History, as well as Poetry and a Tragedy, is
given in both. The Higher Mathematics of this period is* but
slightly given in the Autobiography.
This letter was doubtless intended not merely to satisfy Sir
Samuel's curiosity as to his precocity of acquirement, but also to
pave the way for the in \itation to accompany him to France the
following year (1820).
A carefully written diary, extending over the first five months
of his stay in France, is by far the most satisfactory record that
is now to be had of his youthful studies. 1
1 Sir Samuel Bentham, the brother of Jeremy Bentham, was himself a
216 John Stuart Mill
We have his reading and all his other occupations recorded
day by day, together with occasional reflections and discussions
that attest his thinking power at that age. The diary was regu-
larly transmitted to his father. At first he writes in English ;
but as one of the purposes of his visiting France was to learn
the language, he soon changes to French. Printed in full it
would be nearly as long as this article, I shall endeavour to
select some of the more illustrative details,
He left London on the 15th May, 1820, five days before com-
pleting his fourteenth year. He travelled in company with Mr.
Ensor, an Irish gentleman, a friend of his father's. The diary
recounts all the incidents of the journey the coach to Dover,
the passage across, the thirty-three hours in the diligence to
Paris. He goes first to a hotel, but on presenting an introduc-
tion by his father to M. Say, he is invited to the house of that
distinguished political economist. The family of the Says an
eldest son, Horace Say, a daughter at home, the youngest son,
Alfred, at school en pension, but corning home on Saturday
and Sunday, and their mother devote themselves to taking him
about Paris. He gives his father an account of all the sights,
but without much criticism. His moral indignation bursts forth
in his account of the Palais Eoyal, an " immense building be-
longing to the profligate Due d'Orleans, who having ruined
himself with debauchery, resolved to let the arcades of his palace
to various tradesmen". The Sunday after his arrival (May 21)
is so hot that he did not go out, but played at battledore and
shuttlecock with Alfred Say. He delivers various messages
from his father and Bentham, and contracts new acquaintances,
from whom he receives farther attentions. The most notable
was the Count Berthollet, to whom he took a paper from Ben-
tham. Madame Berthollet showed him her very beautiful
remarkable man. His first service was in the Russian army, where his
soldiering was intermingled witli suggestions for improvements of all sorts,
and especially mechanical inventions, for which he had a pronounced
genius. One of his proposals to the Russian government was the Panopti-
con prison, of which he was the originator. He came over to England in
1795, and received from our Government the appointment of Superin-
tendent of the Dockyard at Portsmouth, where his talent for invention had
scope in the improvement of the navy. He married the daughter of an
eirly friend of his brother's, Dr. John Fordyce, a physician in London, called
by Bentham, "one of the coldest of the cold Scotch" ; this lady had the
domestic supervision of Mill for more than a year. On retiring from the
Dockyard, Sir Samuel bought an estate in the South of France for the sake
of a residence there ; and this led to his inviting Mill to reside with him,
first at Toulouse, and afterwards at Montpellier. The family consisted of
one son, Mr. George Bentham, the well-known botanist, and three daugh-
ters, all older than Mill.
John Stuart Mill 217
garden, and desired him to call on his return ; he learnt after-
wards that he was to meet Laplace. On the 27th, after nine
days' stay in Paris, he bids goodbye to Mr. Ensor and the Says,
and proceeds on his war to join the Bentham family, then at a
chateau, belonging to the Marquis de Pompignan, a few "miles
from Toulouse. The journey occupies four days, and is not
without incidents. He makes a blunder in choosing the cabriolet
of the diligence, and finds himself in low company. At Orleans,
a butcher, with the largest belly he had ever seen, came in and
kept incessantly smoking. On the third day he is at Limoges,
and breakfasts in company with a good-natured gentleman from
the interior; but his own company does not much improve ; the
butcher leaves, but a very dirty fille, with an eruption in her
face, keeps up his annoyance. The following day, a vacancy
occurs in the interior, and he claims it as the passenger of
longest standing ; a lady contests it with him, and it has to be
referred to the ma ire ; the retiring passenger, a young avocaf,
pleading his case. He is now in good company, and his account
of the successive localities is minute and cheerful.
He arrives at his destination at two, A.M., the 2nd of June, is
received by Mr. George Bentham,and meets the family at breakfast.
They take him out a walk, and he does no work that day, but
begins a letter to his father. Xext day he makes an excursion
to Toulouse, spends the night there, and gives up a second day
to sight-seeing ; there was a great religious procession that day.
He makes the acquaintance of a Dr, Eussell, resident at Tou-
louse, with whose family he afterwards associates. The following
day, the 5th, he sees the Marquis and Madame de Pompignan,
the proprietors of the Chateau. On the 6th, he commences
work ; and now begins our information as to his mode of allocat-
ing his time to study. The entry for this day merely sets forth
that he got up early ; went into the Library ; read some of
Lucian (who is his chief Greek reading for the weeks to follow) ;
also some of Millot, by Mr. George's advice ; " learnt a French
fable by rote " the beginning of his practice in French. 7th.
" Learnt a very long fable ; wrote over again, with many im-
provements, my Dialogue, part I." This Dialogue frequently
comes up, but without farther explanation. We must take it as
one of his exercises in original composition, perhaps in imitation
of the Platonic Dialogues. 8th. Engaged with Mr. G. in arrang-
ing the books of the Library, which seems to have been set as a
task to the boys. " Wrote some of Dialogue ; learnt a very long
fable by heart ; resolved some problems of West (Algebra) ; did
French exercises (translating and so forth)." 9th. " Breakfasted
early and went with Sir S. and Lady Bentham in the carriage
to Montauban ; took a volume of Kacine in my pocket, and
218 John Stuart Mill.
read two plays ; " remark his reading pace. On returning home
he reads a comedy of Voltaire. 10th. " Before breakfast, learnt
another fable, and read some of Virgil. After breakfast, wrote
some of my Dialogue, and some French exercises. "Wrought
some of the Differential Calculus. Eead a tragedy of Corneille."
llth. "Learnt another fable; finished my Dialogue. If good
for nothing beside, it is good as an exercise to my reasoning
powers, as well as to my invention, both which it has tried
extremely." We may be sure that it aimed at something very
high. " Wrote some French exercises ; began to learn an ex-
tremely long fable. Eead a comedy of Moliere, and after dinner
a tragedy of Voltaire. Took a short walk by myself out of the
pleasure grounds." 12th. " Rose very early. Sir S. B. and Mr.
G. went in the carriage to Toulouse. Before breakfast, I wrote
some French exercises, read some of Lucian's Hermotimus.
He vised part of my Dialogue. After breakfast went with the
domestique Piertot to see his Metairie and his little piece of
land and help him to gather cherries. After returning I finished
the long fable." Then follows an apology for not working at
his Mathematics ; Sir Samuel's books are not unpacked, and in
the Library of the house he finds chiefly French literature, and
hence his readings in Eacine, &c. Another tragedy read to-day.
13th. Before breakfast assists Mr. G. in packing. Wrote
French exercises, read Voltaire and Moliere. It is by the advice
of the family that he reads plays, for the sake of dialogue.
After dinner, he takes a long walk on the hills behind Pom-
pignan ; in his return falls in with the garde champetre, who
communicates all about himself and his district. Weather now
hot. 14th. Could not get into the Library. Walked about the
grounds with Mr. G. and one of his sisters ; came in and wrote
French exercises. Begins a new study, to master the Depart-
ments of France. Eeads Lucian. 15th. Got up early; began
his Livre Statistique of the Departments chief towns, rivers,
population, &c. Learns by heart the names of the Departments
and their capital towns. Acting on a suggestion of Lady B., he
reads and takes notes of some parts of the Code Napoleon.
Meets the Eussell family at dinner, and walks with them. 16th.
Up early, walked out, reads a tragedy of Voltaire. A mad dog
has bitten several persons. More of Code Napoleon ; Virgil ;
French exercises. Here he concludes what is to make his first
letter to his father, and appends to the diary a dissertation on
the state of French Politics ; the then exciting topic being the
Law of Elections. We are surprised at the quantity of informa-
tion he has already got together, partly we may suppose from
conversations, and partly from newspapers ; but he never once
mentions reading a newspaper ; and his opportunities of conver-
John Stuart Mill. 219
sation are very much restricted by incessant studies. Besides
passing politics, illustrated by anecdotes, he has inquired into
education, the statistics of population, and the details of the
provincial government
I continue the extracts from the Diary. June 17th. Late in
bed, not knowing the time. One of Sir Samuel's daughters lias
given him Legendre's Geometry, to which he applies himself, at
first, for the sake of French Mathematical terms. Performs an
investigation in the Differential Calculus. A short walk. After
dinner, a tragedy of Corneille. 18th. Eose early. Wrote
French exercises, and read Voltaire. It is a fete clay (Sunday),
and the peasants danced in the pleasure grounds before the
house. After breakfast, finished exercises, then walked with
the family in the grounds. Eeceived from Mr. G. a lecture on
Botany (probably the beginning of what became his favourite
recreation). Wrote out the account of his expenditure since
leaving Paris, gives the items, amounting to 148 francs. De-
scribes the peasants' dance. 19th. Eose early. Finished the
Hermotinius of Lucian, and yesterday's tragedy ; wrote French
exercises. After breakfast, assisted in packing up, as the family
are leaving the chateau for a residence in Toulouse. Finds time
before dinner for another tragedy of Voltaire. In the evening,
took to an article in the Annales de Chimie (his interest in
Chemistry being now of four years' standing). 20th. Occupied
principally with preparations for leaving. 21st. The house in
confusion. Still he does a good stroke of French reading. 22nd.
In bed till after nine ; could not account for it. The confusion
is worse confounded ; doesn't know what to do about his books ;
is now debarred from the library. Has taken out his exercise-
book from his trunk, and written a considerable portion of
exercises. Has added to his Livre Statistique ; the Departments
are now fully in his head : next topic the course of the Eivers
an occupation when he has nothing else to do. 23rd. Eose at
3 o'clock, to finish packing for departure. As there could be no
reading, at 5 he takes a long country walk to Fronton ; gives
two pages of the diary to a description of the country, and the
agriculture. Books being all locked up, he expects to feel ennui
for a little time. Writes some of his Livre, converses with two
intelligent workmen, gives particulars. After dinner, walks to
the village of on the Garonne, describes the river itself
in the neighbourhood. In the evening, being the " Veille de St.
Jean," saw the fires lighted up in the district. 24th. Lay in bed
purposely late, having nothing to do. M. Le Comte (son of the
proprietor) comes in, and politely offers bim the key of the
library, shows him a book of prints; he also scores a tragedy of
Voltaire. As this is the last day before moving to Toulouse, he
220 John Stuart Mill
makes a pause, and despatches his seven days' diary to his
father, accompanied with a short letter in French to E. Doane,
Bentham's amanuensis, chiefly personal and gossipy ; none of
his letters to Mr. Doane take up matters of thought. 25th.
Eose at half-past two for the journey. He walks out on foot, to
be overtaken by a char-a-banc, with part of the family. One of
the girls drove part of the way, and gave him the reins for the
remainder, as a lesson in driving. They take up their quarters
in one of the streets, where they have a very good ' Apartment '
(I suppose a flat) ; still after the chateau, they feel considerably
cramped ; his room a little hole, which he proceeds at once to
arrange, haviAg got shelves for his books. Same night, finishes
Lucian's Birov Tlpaa^, and reads some of Thomson's Chemistry,
which is part of his own library.
The family remains in Toulouse for some time. We have his
diary for nearly six weeks. It is the intention of the Benthams
to find him, not merely a French master, but instruction in
various accomplishments music, dancing, fencing, horseman-
ship. It is some time before the arrangements are made, so
tli at his first days are purely devoted to book-studies ; and the
diary is an exact record of the nature, amount, and duration of
his reading, very nearly as at home. It also gives occasional
glimpses of his thinking power at the age he has now reached.
It is farther interesting as exhibiting his tone towards his father.
1 will merely quote enough to complete the illustration of these
various particulars.
26th. Besides a mass of French reading, reports two eclogues
of Virgil and the Alectryon of Lucian. Eemarks that having
so much French to do, he cannot read Latin and Greek and
study Mathematics every day, and means to 'give one day to
Mathematics and one to Latin and Greek. 27th. Eose early.
Begins the practice of going every rrffrrning to bathe in the
Garonne, a little above the town : he is accompanied regularly
by Mr. George, and on this occasion by Dr. Eussell's boys.
To-day reads Legendre's Geometry. Gives a subtle criticism of
the author's method, which he thinks excellent ; praises the
derivation of the Axioms from the Definitions, as conforming to
Hobbes's doctrine that the science is founded on Definitions.
Approves also of the way the more elementary theorems are
deduced. Learnt a very long French fable. Solved a problem in
West's Algebra that had baffled him for several years. Mr. George
has already engaged for him the best dancing-master in the
place. 28th. (Classical day.) Bathing as usual. Two eclogues
of Virgil, and a French grammatical treatise on Pronouns. Eead
some more of Legendre (resolution broken through already) :
thinks his line of deduction better than Euclid, or even than
John Stuart Mill. 221
We>t. Studies Bentham's Clirestomathic Tables (a vast and
minute scheme of the divisions of knowledge). Began the
Vocalium Judicium of Lucian. Goes for a second dancing-
lesson. 29th. Bather late in returning from the river. An
eclogue of Virgil ; finishes the Yocalium Judicium ; wrote
French exercises, read some of Boileau's little pieces ; is to have
Voltaire's works soon ; asks Mr. George about a Praxis in the
higher Mathematics, having performed over and over again all
the problems in Lacroix's Differential Calculus. Resolves more
problems of West, including the second of two that had long
puzzled hyn. After dinner began Lucian's Cataplus. 30th.
Two eclogues of Virgil ; finished Cataplus ; more of Legendre,
discovered a flaw in one of his demonstrations ; wrote French
exercises ; read some of Sanderson's Logic ; also some of
Thomson's Chemistry. July 1st. Treatise on Pronouns finished ;
Sanderson ; began Lucian's Necyomantia ; French exercises ;
finished first book of Legendre ; Thomson's Chemistry. Dancing-
lesson. A singing-master engaged. 2nd. Georgics of Virgil, 99
lines ; more of the Xecvomantia before breakfast. After break-
fast, Thomson's Chemistry. Wrote Livre Geographique. In
the evening the whole family go to Franconi's Circus ; describes
the exploits. Has to be measured for a new suit, French
fashion : his Engb'sh suit being inadmissible, trousers too short,
waistcoat too long. The Russells call in the evening, and there
is an earnest talk on politics, English and French, which he
details. 3rd. A breakdown in the char-a-banc that takes them to
the river. Has now got a singing-master, and takes first lesson
in Solfeyes ct Principcs dc Jfv.sique. Again at Franconi's, and full
of the performance ; for a wonder, no studies recorded. 4th.
Rose at 5 ; home from bathing, &c., at 7A. Has obtained
Voltaire's Essai sur les Mceurs, which he includes amongst his
stated reading : breakfast at ^ to 9 : at 9i, begins Voltaire
where he left off in England, read six chapters in two hours ;
Virgil's Georgics, 47 lines ; at 12| began a treatise on French
Adverbs ; at H, began the second book of Legendre, read the
definitions and five propositions ; miscellaneous employments
till 3, then took second Music-lesson. Dined ; family again to
Franconi's, but he could not give up his dancing-lesson ; this
got, he writes French exercises and practises music, ath. Rose
at 5 ; too rainy for bathing. Five chapters of Voltaire ; from
7^ till Si, Mr. G. corrects his French exercises which had got
into arrears as regards correction; Music-master came; at 9|
began new exercises (French) ; puts his room in order ; at 11
took out Lucian and finished Xecyomantia ; five propositions
of Legendre, renewed expressions of his superiority to all other
geometers ; practised Music-lessons ; Thomson's Chemistry,
222 . John Stuart Mill.
made out various Chemical Tables, the drift not explained ; at
3 J, tried several propositions in West, and made out two that he
had formerly failed in ; began a table of 58 rivers in France, to
show what departments each passes through, and the chief
towns on their banks ; 4, dined ; finishes Chemical Table ;
dancing-lesson ; supped. Eeports that a distinguished music-
mistress is engaged at whose house he is to have instrumental
practice. 6th. Eose at 6 ; no bathing ; five chapters of Voltaire ;
a quarter of an hour to "West's Problems ; lesson in Music
(Principes) ; problems resumed ; breakfasted, and tried pro-
blem again till 10 1 ; French exercises till 11 ; began to correct
his Dialogue, formerly mentioned, till 12 ; summoned to dress
for going out to call ; has found a French master ; at 1,
returned and corrected Dialogue till 3^; Thomson till 4 (dinner),
resumed till 6 ; Mr. G. corrects his French exercises ; went out
for his French lesson, but the master did not teach on Sundays
and Thursdays ; back to Thomson till 8 ; repeated Fables to Mr.
G. ; miscellaneous affairs ; supped ; journal always written
just before going to bed. 7th. Eose 5f ; five chapters Voltaire
till 7 ; till 7, 46 lines of Virgil ; till 8, Lucian's Jupiter Con-
futatus ; goes on a family errand ; Music-lesson till 9 (Principes);
Lucian continued till 9|, and finished after breakfast at 10 ; a
call required him to dress ; read Thomson and made Tables till
12^ ; seven propositions of Legendre ; has him over the coals for
his confusion in regard to ratio " takes away a good deal of
my opinion of the merit of the work as an elementary work " :
till 1J, wrote exercises and various miscellanies ; till 2
the treatise on Adverbs ; till 3f , Thomson ; Livre Geographi-
que and miscellanies till 5 ; eats a little, dinner being un-
certain, owing to a family event ; goes for first lesson to
music-mistress, a lady reduced by the Eevolution, and living by
her musical talents ; henceforth to practise at her house daily
from 11 to 12, and take a lesson in the evening; dined on
return, then dancing-lesson. 9th. Eose at 5 ; five chapters
Voltaire ; 6|, Adverbs ; 7f , the Prometheus of Lucian ; 8^ till
9, first lesson of Solfeges together with Principes ; continued
Prometheus till breakfast ; miscellaneous occupation till the
hour of music-lesson at Mad. Boulet's ; home at 12J, ten pro-
positions of Legendre : " if anything could palliate the fault I
have noticed of introducing the ratio and the measures of angles
before the right place, it is the facility which this method gives
to the demonstration of the subsequent propositions ; this, how-
ever, cannot excuse such a palpable logical error, &c." Mr. G. is
to procure Cagnioli's Trigonometry, but a Praxis in the higher
Mathematics is not yet forthcoming. 10th. Starts at 4 with
Mr. G. arid the Eussells on a day's excursion to the forest of
John Stuart Mill 223
Bouconne, three leagues from Toulouse, the object being to collect
plants and insects. Makes his coup d'essai at catching butter-
flies, got only about ten worth keeping ; the adventures of the day
fully given, llth. Yesterday's fatigue keeps him in bed late ;
one chapter of Voltaire ; at 7|, with Mr. G., to begin with his
French master, who hears his pronounciation, and sets him
plenty of work. Taken with a party to the house of an astro-
nomer, M. Daubuisson, and shown his instruments ; then to
the house of his brother, a great mineralogist. Returns at
2 to commence the formidable course of lessons set by
the French master. Goes successively to his music-master
and music-mistress. Introduces a remark as to the great kind-
ness of the family in constantly, without ill-humour, explaining
to him the defects in his way of conducting himself in society :
" I ought to be very thankful". 12th. Hears from his father
that Lady B. has written a good account of him. Replies in
full to the matters in his father's letter ; is glad to hear of his
article on Government and promises on his return to read it
iwith great attention. Indicates that in future his French
! lessons will very much engross his time. He is to take the
| first opportunity of sending the Dialogue, on which he has taken
.great pains both with expression and with reasoning. Apolo-
gises for giving more time to Mathematics than to Latin and
Greek.
A fencing-master is now provided for him, and in two days
imore a riding-master, so that we have seen him at his best as
Regards book-studies. He keeps these up a few hours every
day, but the largest part of the day is taken up with his other
exercises. The only thing deserving mention now is the
occasional notice of new subjects. Thus, he begins a treatise on
Value, and Sir S. B. is to get Say's book for him. His French
! master seems to prescribe, among other things, translating from
Latin into French, and he takes up the speech of Catiline in
.Sallust, and afterwards some Odes of Horace. There is another
'.-xeursion to the forest of Ramelle, with many incidents.
He soon reports having read the last of Lucian, and gives a
! short review of him, accompanied with high admiration; Her-
imotimus he considers a masterpiece of ingenious reasoning. In
a letter to his mother he adverts to his progress in music and
dancing; he advises his two elder sisters to remit their music
U he returns, as he discovers now that they were on a wrong
plan. Writes a letter in Latin to those two sisters, correct
enough but not very high composition. Begins a Dialogue at
the suggestion of Lady B., on the question whether" great
lauded estates and great establishments in commerce or manu-
facturer's, or small ones, are most conducive to the general
224 John Stuart Mill,
happiness ; in the circumstances, rather venturesome. The
following day began, also by Lady B's. advice, to write oft the
Definition of Political Economy. Very much elated by " excel-
lent news of the revolution in Italy". Attends three Lec-
tures on Modern Greek, and gives his father an account of the
departures from the Ancient Greek. In the beginning of
August the lessons are at an end ; the family going for a tour
in the Pyrenees. What remains of the diary is occupied
with this tour, its incidents and descriptions, and is written in
French.
I must, however, advert to an interesting letter from Lady
Bentham to his father, dated 14th Sept. It refers to a previous
letter of hers giving particulars of John's progress in French and
other branches of acquirement. The family is to reside
in Montpellier, and the purpose of the present letter is to recom-
mend to his father to allow him to spend the winter there, and
to attend the public lectures of the college. Mr. Bernard, a dis-
tinguished chemist, who had visited the Benthams at Toulouse,
had taken an interest in him, and sounded his depths and
deficiencies, and gives the same opinion. As the party has now
been boxed up together for some weeks, his habits and peculi-
arities had been more closely attended to than ever, and (I quote
the words) " we have been considerably successful in getting the
better of his inactivity of mind and body when left to himself".
This probably refers to his ennui when deprived of books ; it
being apparent that great as was his interest in scenery, he
could not as yet subsist upon that alone. The letter goes on
"Upon all occasions his gentleness under reproof and thankfulness
for correction are remarkable ; and as it is by reason supported
by examples we point out to him that we endeavour to convince
him not by command that we induce him to do so and so, we
trust that you will have satisfaction from that part of his educa-
tion we are giving him to fit him for commerce with the world
at large". Lady Bentham does not omit to add that he must also
dress well.
The remainder of the diary serves mainly to show his growing
taste for scenery and his powers of description. He depicts
climate, productions, villages, the habits of the people, as well
as the views that were encountered. The party make the
ascent of Le Pic du Midi de Bigorre, and he is in raptures with
the prospect. "Mais jamais je n' oublierai la vue du cote meridi-
onale". In short, to describe its magnificence would need
volume !
We may now conceive with some degree of precision the intel-
lectual calibre of this marvellous boy. In the first place we
learn the number of hours that he could devote to study each
John Stuart Mill. 225
day. From two to three hours before breakfast, about five hours
)etween breakfast aiid dinner, and two or three in the evening,
make up a working day of nine hours clear. And while at
Coulouse, scarcely any portion of his reading could be called
recreative. His lightest literature was in French, and was
intended as practice in the language. Probably at home his
reading-day may have often been longer ; it would scarcely ever
be shorter. For a scholar, in mature years, eight or nine hours'
reading would not be extraordinary ; but then there is no longer
the same tasking of the memory. Mill's power of application
all through his early years was without doubt amazing ; and
although he suffered from it in premature ill-health, it was a
foretaste of what he could do throughout his whole life. It
attested a combination of cerebral activity and constitutional
vigour that is as rare as genius ; his younger brothers succumbed
under a far less severe discipline.
That the application was excessive, I for one would affirm
without any hesitation. That his health suffered, we have ample
evidence, which I shall afterwards produce. That his mental
progress might have been as great with a smaller strain on his
powers, I am strongly inclined to believe, although the proof is
not so easy. "We must look a little closer at the facts.
I cannot help thinking that the rapid and unbroken transi-
tions from one study to another must have been unfavourable to
a due impression on the memory. He lost not a moment in
passing from subject to subject in his reading : he hurried
home from his music-lesson, or fencing-lesson, to his books.
(Now we know well enough that the nervous currents when
strongly aroused in any direction tend to persist for some time :
(in the case of learning any thing, this persistence will count in
stamping the impression ; and part of the effect of a lesson must
>e lost in hurrying without a moment's break to something new,
jeveu although the change of subject is of the nature of relief.
By his own account, his lessons at Toulouse, with the exception
pf French and music, took no effect upon him. Nor is this the
worst feature of Mill's programme. According to our present
botions of physical and mental training, he ought to have had a
decided 'break in the afternoon. Considering that he was at work
from about six in the morning, with only half -au-hour for breakfast,
he should clearly have had a cessation of several hours, extend-
ing over dinner between one and two ; especially as he gave up
the evening to his hardest subjects. Of course this interval
should have been devoted to out-of-doors recreation. It is quite
rue that both father and son were alive to the necessity of
walking, and practised it even to excess ; in fact, counted too
much upon it as a means of renewing the forces of the brain :
226 John Stuart Mill
their walks were merely a part of their working-day a hearing
and giving of lessons.
What with his own recital in the Autobiography, and the
minuter details in the letter to Sir S. Bentham, and the diary,
we have a complete account of his reading and study in every
form. The amount is, of course, stupendous for a child. The
choice and the sequence of books and subjects suggest various
reflections. His beginning Greek at so early an age was no
doubt due to his father's strong predilection for the language.
What we wonder at most is the order of his reading. Before ids
eighth year, he had read not merely the easier writers, but six
dialogues of Plato (the Thesetetus he admits he did not under-
stand). He was only eight when he first read Thucydides, as well
as a number of plays ; at nine, he read parts of Demosthenes ; at
eleven, he read Thucydides the second time. What his reading of
Thucydides could be at eight, we may dimly imagine : it could be
nothing but an exercise in the Greek language ; and the same
remark must be applicable to the great mass of his early reading
both in Greek and in Latin. At Toulouse we find him still reading
Virgil, although five years before he had read the Buccolics and six
books of the .ZEneid. Moreover, at Toulouse, his Greek reading
was Lucian, a very easy writer whom he had begun before he
was eight ; the noticeable fact being that he is now taking
an interest in the writer's thoughts and able to criticise him.
It is apparent enough that his vast early reading was too
rapid, and as a consequence superficial. It is noticeable how
rare is his avowal of interest in the subjects of the classical
books ; Lucian is an exception ; Quintilian is another. He was
set by his father to make an analysis of Aristotle's Rhetoric
and Organon, and doubtless his mind was cast for Logic from
the first. His inaptitude for the matter of the Greek and Latin
poets is unambiguously shown ; he read Homer in Greek, but
his interest was awakened only by Pope's translation. His read-
ings in the English poets for the most part made no impression
upon him whatever. He had a boyish delight in action, battles,
heroism and energy ; and seeing that whatever he felt, he felt-
intensely, his devotion to that kind of literature was very
ardent. But whether from early habits, or from native peculi-
arity, he had all his life an extraordinary power of rg-reading
books. His first reading merely skimmed the subject ; if a book
pleased him, and he wished to study it, he read it two or three
times, not after an interval, but immediately. I cannot but
think that in this practice there is a waste of power.
It was impossible for his father to test the adequacy of li
study of Greek and Latin works, except in select cases ; and
hence it must have been very slovenly. In Mathematics, he
John Stuart Mill. 227
hid little or no assistance, but in it there are self-acting tests.
His readings in Physical Science were also untutored : unless at
Montpellier, he never had any masters, and his knowledge never
came to maturity.
If I were to compare him in his fifteenth year with the most
intellectual youth that I have ever known, or heard or read
about, I should say that his attainments on the whole are not
unparalleled, although, I admit, very rare. His classical know-
ledge, such as it was, could easily be forced upon a clever youth
at that age. The Mathematics could not be so easily com-
manded. The best mathematicians have seldom been capable
of beginning Euclid at eight or nine, 1 and even granting that in
this, as in other subjects, he made small way at first, yet the
Toulouse diary shows us what he could do at fourteen ; and I
should be curious to know whether Herschel, De Morgan, or
Airy could have done as much. I have little doubt that, with
forcing, these men would all have equalled him in his Classics
and Mathematics combined. The one thing, in my judgment,
where Mill was most markedly in advance of his years,
was Logic. It was not merely that he had read treatises on the
Formal Logic, as well as Hobbes's Computatio sire Loyica, but
that he was able to chop Logic with his father in regard to the
foundations and demonstrations of Geometry. I have never
known a similar case of precocity. We must remember, how-
ever, that while his father pretended to teach him everything,
yet, in point of fact, there were a few things that he could and
did teach effectually : one of these was Logic ; the others were
Political Economy, Historical Philosophy and Politics, all which
were eminently his own subjects. On these John was a truly
precocious youth ; his innate aptitudes, which must have been
great, received the utmost stimulation that it was possible to
apply. His father put enormous stress upon Logic, even in the
scholastic garb ; but he was himself far more of a logician than
the writers of any of the manuals. In that war against vague,
ambiguous, flimsy, unanalysed words and phrases, carried on
alike by Bentham and by himself, in the wide domains of Politics
and Ethics, he put forth a faculty not imparted by the scholastic
I Logic ; and in this higher training the son was early and per-
isistently indoctrinated. To this was added other parts of
(logical discipline that may also be called unwritten : as, for
i example, the weighing and balancing of arguments pro and con
! in every question ; the lookiug out for snares and fallacies of a
much wider compass than those set down in the common
1 Locke knew a young gentleman who could demonstrate several proposi-
tions in Euclid before he was thirteen.
228 John Stuart Mill
manuals. (See the beginning of the 'Bentham' article for Mill's
delineation of Bentham's Logic.)
He returned to England in July, 1821, after a stay of four-
teen months. He sufficiently describes the fruits of his stay in
France, which included a familiar knowledge of the French
language, and acquaintance with ordinary French literature.
If we may judge from what he says afterwards, his acquaintance
with the literature Was strictly ordinary ; he knew nothing of
the French Eevolution, and it was at a much later period that
he studied French authors for the improvement of his style.
He had still nearly two years before entering on official life :
and he tells us how these were occupied. His father had
become acquainted with John Austin, who assisted him in
Eoman Law, his destination being the bar. He also got deep
into Bentham for the first time, and began Psychology. He
now read the history of the French Eevolution. An undated
letter to his father probably belongs to this period. He was on
a visit to Mr. and Mrs Austin at Norwich. The letter begins
with a short account of his studies. He read Blackstone (with
Mr. Austin) three or four hours daily, and a portion of Bentham's
" Introduction" (I suppose the Morals and Legislation) in the
evening. Among other things, " I have found time to write the
defence of Pericles in answer to the accusation which you have
with you. I have also found some time to practise the delivery
of the accusation, according to your directions." Then follows
an account of a visit of ten days with the Austins to the town
of Yarmouth, with a description of the place itself. The larger
part of the letter is on the polflics of Norwich, where " the
Cause" (Liberal) prospers ill, being still worse at Yarmouth.
He has seen of Eadicals many ; of clear-headed men not one.
The best is Sir Thomas Beever, whom he wishes to be induced
to come to London and see his father and Mr. Grote. At Yar-
mouth he has dined with Eadical Palmer, who had opened the
borough to the Whigs ; not much better than a mere radical.
" I have been much entertained by a sermon of Mr. Madge,
admirable as against Calvinists and Catholics, but the weakness
of which as against anybody else, 1 think he himself must have
felt." The concluding paragraph of the letter should have been
a postscript
" I wish I had nothing else to tell you, but I must inform you that I
have lost my watch. It was lost while I was out of doors, but it is impos-
sible that it should have been stolen from my pocket. It must therefore
be my own fault. The loss itself (though I am conscious that I must remain
without a*watch till I can buy one for myself) is to me not great much
less so than my carelessness deserves. It must however vex you and
deservedly, from the bad sign which it affords of me."
John Stuart Mill. 229
On liis return from France, he resumed energetically the task
of home-teaching, making a great improvement in the lot of
his pupils, who were exclusively under their father's care in the
interval ; for while he scolded them freely for their stupidity
and backwardness, he took pains to explain their lessons which
their father never did. He was kept at this work ever after. I
remember on one occasion hearing from Mrs. Grote that she had
turned up an old letter from James Mill, in answer to an invi-
tation to John to accompany Mr. Grote and her on a vacation-
tour ; the reply was that he could not be spared from the work
of teaching the younger children.
The Autobiography gives a full account of his acquaintances
among the young men resident at Cambridge, who afterwards
came to London, including, besides Charles Austin, who was the
means of introducing him, Macaulay, Hyde and Charles Yilliers,
Strutt (Lord Belper), Eomilly, &c. There is no mention of his
having gone to Cambridge in 1822, on a visit to Charles Austin.
The contrast of his boyish figure and thin voice with his immense
conversational power left a deep impression on the under-
graduates of the time ; notwithstanding their being familiar with
Macaulay and Austin.
I alluded, in my last article on James Mill, to the persistent
attempts of Professor Townshend of Cambridge to get John
entered there. Here are two sentences from a letter dated
March 29, 1823, two months before he entered the India
House. " I again entreat you to permit me to write to the tutor
at Trinity to enter your son's name at that noble college.
Whatever you may wish his eventual destiny to be, his pros-
perity in life cannot be retarded, but must on the contrary be
increased by making an acquaintance at an English L^niversity
with his Patrician contemporaries." Whether it would have
been possible to induce his father to send him to Cambridge, I
very much doubt. I suspect that, of the two, the son would
have been the more intractable on the matter of subscription to
the Articles. Ten years later, it was an open question in the
house whether his brother Henry should be sent to Cambridge.
A. BAIX.
(To be continued.)
16
V. DEFINITION DE JUEE AND DE FACTO.
THE extent to which the custom prevails of using simple,
wide, unqualified names for classes which are less simple and
narrower, is one of those facts which are granted so easily in
theory that in practice they are often forgotten. It is of course
closely bound up with our habit of using incomplete, in place of
complete, definition : it proceeds from the same causes and is
apt to lead to much the same results. Sometimes through
ignorance that narrower classes exist, sometimes through care-
lessness, sometimes through a real need for saving time, givers
and users of names are commonly content if the names are
sufficient to connote only a part generally the most superficial
and striking part of the group of attributes actually beloging,
or afterwards supposed to belong, to the class named.
But whatever may be urged in favour of the custom on the
ground of economy of time and trouble, the risk encountered
the price paid for convenience is worth considering. The
risk is a double one : first, ambiguity may arise, and secondly
the remedy applied may be almost worse than the evil. When
a class to which a name is already appropriated is discovered (or
remembered) to possess more numerous attributes than are
strictly implied in the name no less than when its real attri-
butes are found to be incompatible with its nominal ones a
troublesome contradiction results : the class that strictly corres-
ponds to the name is seen to include members which in popular
usage are (sometimes expressly) excluded. Things which are
clearly not-A are seen to be as clearly A.
Familiarity with the danger seems to have bred contempt for
it. Some writers, no doubt, outwardly deplore the fact, but they
do not seem impelled to find a remedy. Some of the less
scientific are content to throw the blame on Logic and to leave
it there : others (e.g., Sir "Wm. Hamilton) whose profession
prevents this escape, at least in its outspoken form, satisfy
themselves by simply calling the contradiction hopeless : but
very many take one side or the other in controversies where it
occurs, with as much serious conviction as if the terms employed
were not at all ambiguous.
We are seldom distinctly put on our guard against it.
Even Whately, who has neglected the subject of Fallacies less
than most writers, is content to dispose of this kind of ambiguity
in one short paragraph. Instances of ambiguity, to be noticed
and remembered as such, must be obvious and striking, and
although the transparency of double meanings has undergone
much increase since Aristotle's time, many that were thought by
Definition, ' De Jure ' and ' De Fado '. 231
him worth mentioning being now incapable of seriously puzzling
a child, yet this particular class of them has hardly yet emerged
sufficiently into recognition to have received the express notice
it deserves. In its finer shades it is too subtle to have attracted
much attention from those whose interest, or the interest of
whose audience, in the subject, is of the usual half-playful
kind.
Just in proportion to its subtlety is, of course, its harmful
influence on thought. I think it could be shown that many of
the intricate questions which are still often called ' open,' really
owe their vitality to its presence : but, however this may be, the
fact that the ambiguity can possibly exist at all is sufficient
justification for a survey of the means by which, in these cases,
definiteness may be attained.
The term, then, having two meanings, one of them must be
given up. To achieve definition, it is necessary to choose
between two courses : we may either (1) sacrifice the strict con-
notation-meaning to that prescript! vely acquired through the
denotation, and keep the name in question for the objects which
it has been used to denote, refusing it (at least in its unqualified
shape) to the wider class ; or (2) we may sacrifice denotation to
connotation, and qualify the name in its application to the
narrower class. The only third alternative is to invent a new
set of names, but this may in most cases be disregarded, owing
to the practical difficulty of introducing so complete a change. 1
The practical difficulty applies, though in a less degree, to the
two courses first mentioned, and the large amount of this kind
, of ambiguity that does exist in language perhaps shows that the
world on the whole prefers the less immediately troublesome
plan of letting the wheat and tares grow together, and fight the
battle out between themselves. Yet numerous examples can be
found of attempts to employ each of the two methods : we shall
see that, where they have been rivals, sometimes one sometimes
the other has triumphed in the sense, that is, of winning fairly
wide acceptance ; and that, as to their success in removing
ambiguity, the second though complete is to some extent im-
practicable, while the first is never more than a temporary
1 The artificial system of naming in Botany (e.g.), which has been grow-
ing in strength and completeness ever since the time of Linnseus, may
appear, although aimed at prevention rather than cure of ambiguity, to
point to a possibility of even complete regeneration. But it is very doubt-
iul whether this method could ever meet with acceptance in any depart-
ment of knowledge which is not given over to specialists. It has been tried
on the wide scale many times in the past, and has always died a natural
death. Witness the labour thrown away on the ingenious system of
Bishop Wilkins, or on those of some of the numerous inventors mentioned
in De Morgan's Budget of Paradoxes.
232 Definition ' De Jure ' and ' De Facto '.
relief, often no real relief at all, and always liable to establish
an evil that may be regarded as worse than ambiguity itself.
The field of Ethics probably supplies the most frequent
instances of distinct and firm refusal to employ a term which
has been used for one class, in joining to that class another
formerly excluded. And one obvious reason for this is no doubt
the fear, which everyone must have sometimes felt, that the
classing together, even for any purpose, two kinds of acts one of
which is ' right ' and the other ' wrong,' may have a tendency to
obscure the distinction between right and wrong themselves.
Even J. S. Mill, for example, who cannot on the whole be
accused of a sentimental shrinking from truth on account of its
possible immoral consequences, distinctly refuses, as many
people before and since have done, to class together all volun-
tary acts under the name of ' interested ' : but since voluntari-
ness implies choice, and choice implies belief (conscious or
unconscious, mistaken or not) of total preferability for the
chooser, there can be no doubt that in every voluntary act the
agent follows (in many cases, however, unconsciously) his own
apparent interest. If anyone demur to this, it can only be to
the use of the expression ' apparent interest ' for unconscious
self-seeking, and just here lies the root of the matter : judg-
ing by connotation ' apparent interest ' is simply that course
which appears preferable to the chooser (including both the
cases where he is, and where he is not, conscious of the prefer-
ability) ; but since it is only lately that attention has been much
directed to the instinctive and unconscious side of our nature,
the possibility of acts ' appearing preferable ' to anyone without
his being distinctly aware of the fact and reflecting on it, has
not obtained recognition in our language : we have improvi-
dently applied the name which by its connotation should
belong to the larger class (the conscious and unconscious belief
together), to that smaller portion with which we were first
acquainted, and now the term has won a prescriptive right to
denote that portion only. Hence, many careful writers will not
allow us to name the larger class at all : in spite of all modern
theories as to the connexion between instinct and reason, a hard
and fast line is to be drawn at deliberate recognition, and
nothing ' appears ' to anyone except what he reflectively knows
to appear.
Here may be seen a case where the two rival methods for
avoiding ambiguity have each found their adherents, producing
the two hostile camps in a well-known controversy, and where
the result of employing the first method consistently would be
as it must always be to close the path against new discoveries.
It may be noticed that here, as in all those sciences in which
Definition ' De Jure ' and ' De Facto '. 233
(probably owing to their complication and uncertainty) ' com-
mon-sense ' is popularly preferred as a practical guide, the
attempts to employ the second method have for the most part
met with slight success, and the new nomenclature has been the
property of a clique rather than universally accepted. The im-
mense difficulty of changing purposely the denotation of any term
in popular use without plainly and popularly showing some
practical object to be gained (other than the mere improvement
of language), is a perpetual hindrance to its application.
Another hindrance is the absence of any widespread recognition
of the world's continual mistakes in classification and naming.
Accordingly, for examples of the successful employment of
this method, we must look, not to Ethics, but to those sciences
which have fairly succeeded in establishing their popular reputa-
tion for practical value, and in which also there is less possi-
bility of a too flattering opinion of our own attainments ; for
where we distinctly feel our ignorance of facts, we are more
content to leave classification and naming in the hands of those
who have made the facts their study. When such names as
' planet/ or ' salt,' or ' acid ' (to use stock examples), come before
us, there is a tendency to rely, for their strict interpretation, on
the definitions agreed upon by men of science.
The history of the term ' planet ' will to some extent serve as
an example of the application of the second method. Before the
time of Copernicus the earth was of course excluded from the
class of ' planets ' : whatever may have been the complete list of
the properties actually supposed to belong in common to the
members of the ancient class, the name (as usual) gave very
little information about them, the property of ' wandering ' being
the only one expressly connoted. 1 When, therefore, owing to
the new explanation of the facts observed, the value of the old
classification was overthrown, and it was thought that a more
useful distinction would be that between fixed stars and moving
ones, the denotation-meaning of ' planet,' which excluded the
earth, was forced to give way to the connotation-meaning (or
rather to the only surviving shadow of it), and the new class
was called by the name which the old class had formerly
possessed.
The terms ' salt,' oil,' ' acid/ and ' alkali/ often quoted as
instances of change of meaning, may be viewed rather as cases
1 It is probable that those who gave the name intended something more
than merely change of place ; the apparent irregularity of the movement
was, no doubt, the striking circumstance, and the intended distinction that
between such bodies as moved erratically and such as did not. This fine
shade of difference, however, between ' wandering ' and ' travelling,' appears
to have been lost si^ht of in later times.
234 Definition ' De Jure ' and ' De Facto '.
where, although there has been some change, the original
meaning has been more closely adhered to than has the actual
class of things meant. For in all these cases the denotation-
meaning has had to give way, and the class to take in new mem-
bers formerly excluded, on the discovery of the possession by other
substances of qualities closely resembling those originally connoted.
Here, however, there has been no lasting controversy : the facts
are comparatively simple and were well understood, and here,
consequently, the names have had to adapt themselves to the
facts, instead of standing in their way and making the facts still
more obscure. As before remarked, it is in the more compli-
cated and difficult sciences of Conduct, Life, Mind, &c., that we
shall find the best instances for our purpose.
Take the Free- Will Controversy. How is it that in many
quarters there is so strong a disinclination to class voluntary
with involuntary action, under the name of ' determined ' ?
Clearly because that term, (and still more completely, ' neces-
sary ') and its contradictory ' free,' have gathered round them a
narrower meaning, through their denotation, than their simple
connotation would suggest. Since voluntary actions are obvi-
ously free from the only form of compulsion that Law and
Morality are concerned, for purposes of punishment or exhorta-
tion, to recognise, these comparatively superficial needs were
satisfied by the employment of the terms in the more restricted
sense : and now that it is guessed that voluntary and involun-
tary acts may properly be classed together as opposed to ' free '
in a wider sense, we are left with no word (or the doubtful
possibility of introducing an entirely new one) to mark un-
ambiguously their point of resemblance. If the first method
be employed consistently, we must continue to shut our eyes
to the now very probable fact that voluntary and involuntary
acts are alike in being due to ' natural causes ' and therefore
increasingly predictable.
Again, as already indicated, the dissolution of old rough-and-
ready barriers which must follow in the train of the Evolution
Theory, is continually producing the same difficulty. If, for
instance, we want a name to express the result of all that an
individual has passed through, from the time when he existed
only in the person of his remotest ancestor, there is in strictness
(i.e., by its connotation simply) no name so fit as ' experience '.
We need not, indeed, suppose that Hume and his contempor-
aries, or even J. S. Mill, saw clearly their need of extending the
name ' experience ' beyond its denotation-meaning. But it can
hardly be doubted that they felt the need of a wider name, and
felt that there was no other name so suitable.
Numbers of words, too, such as 'belief,' 'memory,' 'knowledge,'
Definition ' De Jure ' and ' DC Facto '. 235
'perception,' 'feeling,' 'motive,' 'deliberation,' 'resolution,' 'voli-
tion,' 'intention,' 'desire,' &c., have been by custom applied to the
conscious end of the scale only, and now \ve are practically com-
pelled either to employ each of these words both in the wider
and the narrower meaning, or refuse to group together acts and
states which are alike in every point except the degree of con-
sciousness of the agent 1
Again, the whole question of Causation is full of these am-
biguities. ' Invariable antecedent ' strictly includes, but by
custom excludes, the notion of unconditionalness : ' cause '
strictly includes the notion of efficiency, but by definition, to
suit the denotation, excludes it : if ' energy ' had been defined
only by assembling the particulars, and if we had refused to
bind it together with its apparent contradictory, the Law of
Conservation could never have been stated, ' Chance,' too, is
excluded by the Law of Causation, and yet every time that a
coin is tossed up, it is a ' chance ' in the narrower meaning
wliich side will come uppermost. ' Miracles/ in the widest
sense, are excluded by it, and yet everything which contradicts
the laws of nature as known to the human ignorance of any
period, is in the narrower sense a miracle. The best induc-
tions are ' certain,' in the sense which corresponds to the
actual denotation of that term, and yet in its strictest connota-
tion-meaning they are uncertain : they are more than 'probable 7
in one sense, and only probable in another. ' Impossible,' ' in-
conceivable,' even ' infinite,' have their wider and narrower
meaning, and all these have accordingly become centres of much
controversy and bewilderment that might otherwise have been
avoided. Headers will remember the long list of contradictions,
turning chiefly on the word ' infinite,' drawn up by Sir William
Hamilton.
In every department we find the same. ' Law,' ' right,'
' obligation,' &c., have each their double meaning ; and here may
be seen a case where (since Austin's time at least) the denota-
tion-meaning has on the whole won a firm footing, and yet has
not succeeded in driving the connotation-meaning entirely out of
the field
Again ' subjective,' in Metaphysics, sometimes includes, some-
1 For a modern instance of some clever and amusing acrobatic feats with
these ambiguities, performed however on the whole in the service of truth,
the reader may be referred to Mr. S. Butler's Life and Habit ; and although
it is not everyone who possesses sufficiently the painter's disdain for
accuracy of detail, to rest satisfied, as Mr. Butler is, with the somewhat
cheap remark that " Nature loves a contradiction in terms," or that, if we
try to be consistent, we "may be good logicians, but we are poor reasoners,"
yet all must agree that he lias stated some of the difficulties, and implied
many others, in a very forcible manner.
236 Definition ' De Jure ' and ' De Facto '.
times excludes, ' objective ' ; ' matter ' is sometimes the supposed
substratum, sometimes the well-known phenomenon : and until
they are appropriated firmly and consistently to one meaning
only, there is clearly no hope of an end to the disputes which
cluster round them.
Before discussing the intentional re-arrangement of names, by
the light of the most accepted rules of definition, it may be
useful to glance at the changes in meaning, the narrowings and
widenings, which are constantly taking place without any such
definite intention. Some authorities, indeed, would tell us that
this latter is the only manner in which alteration can occur.
Prof. Max Mliller has said : l " Although there is a continuous
change in language, it is not in the power of man either to
produce or to prevent it. We might think as well of changing
the laws which control the circulation of our blood, or of adding
an inch to our height, as of altering the laws of speech, or
inventing new words according to our own pleasure. As man
is the lord of nature only if he knows her laws and submits to
them, the poet and the philosopher become lords of language
only if they know its laws and obey them." And though this
is certainly an overstatement a too literal acceptance of the
epigram that language ' is not made but grows ' (as may be seen
from the fact that new words and modes of expression have
been from time to time deliberately coined and gratefully
accepted by the public) yet there is sufficient truth in it to
justify us in holding at least that the majority of changes are
unintentional, that most changes in meaning (as in sound and
spelling) take root and spread, steadily and silently, no one
exactly knows how, and the fact only conies to light afterwards,
through etymology and history.
Still, two main tendencies have been observed, to one or other
or to both of which every individual change may be referred.
The list of attributes originally connoted by a term may be
either increased or diminished, or after proceeding for a time
towards one of these results it may begin to move in the opposite
direction. The meaning may become more special or more
general, or first one and then the other.
It is not difficult to see, in the unintentional change to a
more special meaning, or rather in the silent completion and
establishment of that change, a striking likeness to the opera-
tion of the first of our two alternative methods. When, for
instance, the meaning of ' resentment ' was beginning to be nar-
rowed down into connexion with injuries only, but while it was
still possible to speak (as Barrow did) of the good man as a
1 Lectures on the Science of Language (1862), p. 37.
Definition ' De Jure ' and ' De Facto '. 237
faithful ' resenter ' of benefits, and of the duty of ' testifying an
affectionate resentment of our obligations/ there was some
danger of ambiguity. In order to avoid this, one meaning had
to be given up, and the world has tacitly chosen to hold to the
class most frequently in fact denoted and to despise the less
distinctly-coloured wider attribute which the term in strict right
connotes. And so with numbers of other words : the plain old
meaning of ' good,' and still more of ' simple,' and of ' worthy '
(as applied to persons), is fast giving way to a more complicated
meaning, derived from a contemplation of the actual members
of the class commonly denoted. The two latter words have for
some time been, and the former soon will be, terms of polite
contempt ; and it is not impossible that in process of time all
three may become simply terms of unqualified abuse. The
history of ' silly ' derived from selig and of the modern
German schlecht which a few centuries ago meant good l will
show what extreme changes in the meaning may be brought
about by seeking for it chiefly in the members of the actual
class from time to time believed to correspond with the inten-
tion of the name.
Equally noticeable, though not so complete, is the likeness
between the second alternative plan for avoiding ambiguity, and
the silent unnoticed change towards a more general meaning.
The likeness is not so complete because here the connotation
becomes actually smaller than it was originally, and the moving
cause is rather the desire to name, and classify conveniently,
existing notions, than to select and fix notions for existing but
ambiguous names. But they are alike in one important point
the prominence which they give to connotation. Many cases of
this change are, no doubt, directly the result of metaphor or
poetry, as, for instance, in the words ' derivation,' ' to govern,'
' to equip,' or ' sphere ' ; but the use of metaphor itself springs
from nothing else than a vision often dim, or fanciful, or even
false of the hidden attributes which seem to underlie the more
ordinary meaning and bind together classes commonly supposed
to be in serious fact exclusive. It is because attention is paid
to the attributes intended, rather than to the actual objects at
any time believed to possess them, that new objects can be re-
ceived into a class ; it is when we think of the attributes rather
than of the actual members, that the difficulty of drawing hard
and fast lines begins. Man and beast and vegetable seemed
much more clearly separated when people were content to
' know them by sight,' and before we had begun to puzzle over
their exact points of difference and similarity.
1 Mentioned by Professor Max Miiller : Lects. on Science of Lang. 2nd
Series, p. 248.
238 Definition ' DC Jure ' and ' De Facto '.
It appears, then, to be almost a matter of chance, that is to say,
of complicated and untraceable causes, whether in remodelling
any old classification, the public will be most inclined to pre-
serve the denotation or the connotation of existing names. The
most we can say is that specialisation appears to have hap-
pened wherever the denotation has been prominent, where the
class of things is (superficially) easy to distinguish, and therefore
distinctly conceived in extension, and not liable to be disturbed
by the applications of doubtful claimants for inclusion where-
ever, that is, there were other marks more convenient than the
connotation, by which to recognise the members of the class :
and generalisation to have happened where the reverse has been
the case. But which of the two results is either preferable, or
on the whole actually preferred, is at first rather difficult to see.
Nor do we get much help towards finding out definitely which
course we ought to take, from those who have written upon the
subject. Mill's chapters, in the Logic, upon Definition and the
Requisites of Language, useful and interesting as they must be
admitted to be, are to some extent spoilt by the inconsistency
with which, after having all through his earlier portion insisted
on the all-importance of Connotation, and refused to allow to
Denotation any part in ' meaning,' he finally decides that in
many cases we cannot stand out against the denotation-meaning,
but must accept it, and enforce it, whenever we think the change
is already " irrevocably effected ". It is disturbing also, to those
who would be glad to know the purely logical bearings of the
question, to find themselves warned away from "the shallow
conceptions and incautious proceedings of mere logicians," and to
see held up to gentle scorn " persons . . . whose leading and
favourite idea is the importance of clear conceptions and precise
thought ". The sum of his advice apparently is, 1 that we should
define, if possible, so as to prevent " the changes which usage is
continually making in the signification of terms," and where tins
should seem no longer possible (towards deciding which question
no advice is given), there we should submit " with a good grace,"
and, if a definition is necessary, define the word according to its
new meaning. Try, that is, to avoid, in these cases, defining at
all ; but where definition should be forced on us, define to please
the newspapers, and pretend to be pleased ourselves.
Now, passing over the difficulty, and in its finer shades, the
impossibility, of knowing when a change ^irrevocably effected, is
it not probable that, in many cases at least of the firm establish-
ment of a more special meaning, the old general meaning can
never be really lost that if we recognise the pretender, we shall
i Bk. IV., end of Chap. v.
Definition ' DC Jure ' and ' DC Facto '. 239
only produce the confusion of a perpetual civil war ? Try to
apply the rule to actual cases of narrowed meaning, and we shall
often find ourselves left with no name except the same one for
the wider class. Try it with the term ' expedient,' or ' useful,'
or ' necessity,' or ' certainty,' or ' pleasure ' : the attempt has in
fact been made, over and over again, and some of the most
undying controversies in the world bear witness to its failure.
Or, to take an instance of specialised meaning mentioned in
another place by Mill 1 himself : " Every word which was origin-
ally intended to connote mere existence, seems after a time to
enlarge its connotation to separate existence, or existence freed
from the condition of belonging to a substance," and if we
should authoritatively define ' to exist ' or ' entity ' in this nar-
rower meaning, is it not clear that when next we might have
occasion to speak of the wider class we should find ourselves
compelled to use the same word for it, and involved in endless
ambiguity ? It is true that by coining new terms as ' entity '
was itself invented when 'being' in the wider sense was dis-
carded we may stave off the difficulty for a time ; but it should
not be forgotten that, however fertile our invention may be in
creating new names, our power of intentionally bringing them
into circulation is limited. And besides, granting even un-
limited power of doing so, we should only be throwing our
babies out to the wolves ; the ambiguities would overtake us
again before long, and the three stages of danger, sacrifice, and
temporary safety, would have to be repeated for ever, loading
the language with ever fresh supplies of synonymous, and there-
fore confusing, names.
Professor Bain's suggestions 2 give even greater weight to the
Denotation. We must " assemble for comparison the particulars
coming under the notion to be defined," with the aid of those
coming under the opposed or contrasting notion. " By the
particulars are meant, not every individual instance, but repre-
sentative instances sufficient to embrace the extreme varieties."
We are then to cut off corners from the irregular mass, and to
fill up its gaps, only if need be departing from the accepted
denotation, " leaving out some instances and taking in others,
until we form a class really possessing important class-attri-
butes".
It will be seen that this method amounts on the one hand to
an earlier yielding to accomplished facts, and on the other hand
to a greater interference with them afterwards, than Mill would
consider necessary and advisable. Mill recommends us to hold
out against merely prescriptive right until our chance of success-
1 Logic, Book I., Chap. iii. - Logic, Bk. IV., Chap. i.
240 Definition ' De Jure ' and ' De Facto '.
fully doing so is gone, and then to yield with a good grace, but
Professor Bain would have us go more than half way to meet
the usurper, and then try to buy him off with a compromise.
Accordingly his plan is open to all the same objections as Mill's
with the exception of the difficulty of deciding when we are
beaten, and with the additional objection that, whenever we
might arrive by means of it at a definition differing from Mill's,
such difference would consist in its being less in conformity
with actual usage, and therefore more difficult to introduce.
Both plans are alike in being makeshifts, and hardly more than
this seems to be claimed for them by their advocates. And in
both there almost appears to be a tendency to confuse might
with right.
Of the numerous cases in which the narrow boundary
between ' is ' and ' ought to be ' needs careful watching, the
fixing of a definition is one of the most ensnaring. For one
reason, the identity of the language in which it is usual to frame
both questions, helps to keep confusion alive. ' What is the
definition of this ? ' or, still more, ' How would you define that ? '
may mean either ' What is the connotation given (dimly) to the
name by a certain (vaguely limited) set of people ? ' or ' What
ought to be the connotation given (less dimly) to it, by all who
intend to make the best use of language ? '
But even supposing this preliminary danger avoided, and the
question clearly stated as an attempt to find what ought to be,
the same confusion will probably arise again in deciding upon
the answer. And there is some excuse for it : the originators of
words, as we have already noticed, have often been unable or
too careless to foresee all the complicated purposes which their
gift would be required to serve in later days : they needed
merely a means of making themselves understood at the time,
and were content if the names which they gave were vaguely
descriptive without being definitive. For, the purposes of classi-
fication and naming being ever less complicated the further
back we look, the classes which satisfy one generation are not
only less intricate and inter-dependent, but more roughly con-
ceived and readily accepted than those which are needed to
satisfy the next : the difficulty of identification does not appear
to have sat so heavily on our ancestors as on us. Hence, we
are saddled with words which ought to mean (and to some extent
do mean) one thing, and which do mean (and perhaps therefore
ought to mean) another ; and we have to determine which of
the two meanings de jure or de facto ' ought to be' allowed to
remain; to decide how far the founders' intention is really
binding on us now.
In this perplexity, it may be of importance to bear always in
Definition ' De Jure ' and ' De Facto '. 241
mind the main fact which the above illustrations show that,
whether through carelessness, ignorance, or economy, most
general names have been incorrectly applied to the things which
they are actually used to denote : that though they are always
given for a purpose, this purpose is seldom completely, sometimes
not at all, fulfilled. The classes of things denoted by a name in
successive periods of time may almost always be regarded as a
series of more and more nearly, but never quite, successful
attempts to find things really corresponding to the notion :
' pleasure,' ' happiness/ ' good,' ' useful,' ' expedient,' may be
mentioned as instances. If attempts be too strong a word to use
for the numerous cases where failure has been due to careless-
ness rather than to ignorance where we kneu: that the class
was narrower than the name, but sacrificed correctness to
convenience we may at least look on the successive lists of
things denoted as records of the lessening distance from
correctness that our growing appreciation of what constitutes
the truest convenience has allowed.
The fact that general notions are abstracted from perceptions
of concrete things, may appear to contradict this view, as it
undoubtedly contradicts the ancient error of Eealism. It has
been often said, and oftener implied, that notions are limited by
things and can never rise beyond them ; that there is always, as
Whewell puts it, " a tacit assumption of some proposition
which is to be expressed by means of the definition, and which
gives it its importance" that the notion 'life,' for instance,
must include waste and repair of tissue, or growth, or decay, or
death, or some one at least of the well-known facts which are
found to accompany every form of actual life that we have
examined. But would it not be more nearly true to say that
in no single case is the notion actually limited by the things
from which as a historical fact it was drawn ; that it is always
slightly in advance of them, more ideal, slightly an exaggeration,
that is, of the attribute which they actually possess in common ?
The familiar instance of the notions in Geometry will be
sufficient to prove that we can and, in some cases, do habitually
raise an ideal beyond the parent facts : if we were to ' assemble
for comparison ' all the lines and points and circles in the actual
world, however many excrescences we might afterwards pare
away, our definitions would still have to mark some breadth,
some parts and magnitude, &c. The tendency to generalise
beyond our warrant is (for good or evil) as human in the forma-
tion of conceptions as in discovering the laws of nature.
But whether or no every general notion is ideal (in which
case we may perhaps cease to deride Bacon for his speculations
on the nature of heat), it is enough for our purpose here if any
242 Definition ( De Jure ' and ' De Facto '.
are. For in those cases we must set up the ideal connotation,
not that corresponding to the actual things originally denoted,
as the object of our search, if we wish to find the meaning of the
name the purpose for which it has been always (more or less
loosely) given : and when found, even if only by approximation,
we must employ this ideal as the test by which to try the
strictest right of any class of actual things to enjoy the name in
its unqualified shape. We do this when we say that it is only
' practically ' certain that the sun will rise to-morrow, or when
the minimum visible is admitted to be only an approximation to
a ' point '. Can we not also do it in the other cases ?
To take again some of the instances mentioned above : the
distinction between ' interested ' and ' disinterested ' was evi-
dently made to mark the presence or absence of conscious
intention to follow one's own interest, since at that time the
possibility of the existence of a state of mind resembling ' inten-
tion ' (denotation-meaning) in everything except the degree in
which the intender recognises it, was hardly seen : the same
distinction would now be as clearly marked as in the present
state of knowledge it can be, by the terms ' consciously ' and
'unconsciously' interested. The distinction between 'experience'
and its contradictory was evidently meant to mark off from the
universe the events that any individual had passed through
after birth (or possibly after conception), since the continuity of
the individual with his ancestors was at least not considered to
be sober fact : the same distinction would now be achieved by
'pre-natal' and 'post-natal' experience. The distinction between
' free-will ' and its opposite was meant to mark off such acts
as might be prevented by the fear of punishment from such as
could not : the same distinction would now be accomplished by
substituting for ' free ' as an explanation of ' voluntary ' the
narrower term ' practically free '.
Seen in this aspect the search for the strictest meaning
acquires a clearer character, and the assembling of particulars
loses its exaggerated importance. It is important, certainly,
and can by no means be dispensed with : but it is now seen to
be only the first step, not the chief part of the process. The
really important thing is seen to be not the list of things that
have somehow won the name, but the reason which (whether
through mistake or carelessness or not) accounts for their having
done so : and what importance the former has, is seen to depend
on its being a guide to the latter. We cannot consistently set
up as the chief and ultimate aim of our search both the list of
things that have won the name and also of those that ought to
have won it. Compromise, as usually understood, means nothing
more than uncertainty and irregularity of plan. If we admit the
Defimtivn ' De Jure ' and ' De Facto '. 243
necessity of compromise (except in a sense to be presently sug-
gested) we leave just the very question undecided upon which
the whole search turns. "We leave it doubtful, before trying to
reach them, whether the grapes are sour or sweet.
It would no doubt be inconvenient to use the longer expres-
sions always : the simple, unqualified ones would be generally
sufficient. Perfectly precise language must always be more
lengthy than epigram, and it is probable that, however much
mechanical or other improvement may in the course of ages be
made in facility and quickness of writing, and even of reading
and speaking, there will still be a quicker method beyond
namely to drop so much of the precision as may be found on
the whole superfluous. And hence a habit is formed of using
the more rough and ready language, the convenient substitute
for precision, until at last the substitute usurps full powers,
gains a prescriptive right to rule our thoughts, and any attempt
to restore precision and to point out to convenience its proper
place, will be called pedantic or unpractical.
In fact, the need for avoiding pedantry and saving time would
be an insuperable bar to a habit of duly qualifying all our
general names. But it need be no bar to a habit of remember-
ing that in strictness they ought to be so qualified. There is a
tendency to think that because "what is present everywhere,
once recognised, may be everywhere suppressed," therefore what
is once recognised as present everywhere may be ever afterwards
considered everywhere absent ; and all that is necessary to
correct this tendency, is to translate the second ' everywhere '
into ' for many practical purposes/ and then to make clear what
those purposes really are.
The necessity of compromise, for certain purposes, must be
admitted ; but it may be worth while to consider what those
purposes are, and whether no alternative plan of meeting them
can be devised. Is there perhaps, in these cases, a modus rivendi
to be found, for both convenience and precision; a means of pre-
serving both without their clashing, and of limiting each to its
proper use ?
Perhaps, instead of basing the entire process on compromise,
instead of depressing our whole search for the best possible
definition by the fear that, even if really found, we should not
be able to bring it into daily use thus searching for the best
that will probably be allowed, while pretending to search for
the best of all it might be more consistent to institute two
separate searches ; first, for the really best definition, and, when
that is discovered, then secondly to find how much accuracy
must be surrendered, and on ichat occasions, in order to meet
the business-requirements of the world. The ease with which
244 TJie Personal Aspect of Responsibility.
we do this in Political Economy, where such terms as ' wealth,'
' capital,' ' value,' &c., have a wider meaning than that in common
use, seems to afford a precedent pointing to success. We should
thus have two different phraseologies, one for the rough purposes
of daily life, and the other for serious discussion and hard
reasoning, the former inaccurate but convenient, the latter
inconvenient but as strictly correct as possible.
If for instance we were to use, for ordinary purposes, the
terms ' voluntary,' ' experience,' ' disinterested,' &c., in the
ordinary acceptation, but at the same time form a habit of
remembering that in strictness ' disinterested ' acts are ' uncon-
sciously interested,' that the events which happen to an indi-
vidual after birth constitute only his ' later experience,' that
' voluntary ' acts are only ' practically free ' ; on the one hand,
believers in determination of the will, necessary egoism, or
the explanation of all knowledge by experience, would be them-
selves guarded from the errors which ill-considered opposition
often helps to drive them into of fatalism, belief in universal
conscious selfishness, or disbelief in a priori knowledge ; and on
the other hand their opponents would see, more clearly than at
present, that these three latter theories are all that anyone is
really concerned to deny.
ALFRED SIDGWICK.
VI. THE PERSONAL ASPECT OF RESPONSIBILITY.
FEW things are more universally taken for granted than the
high moral value of a belief in personal responsibility, and any
one venturing to call in question not merely the scientific
validity but the ethical excellence of any of the several as-
sumptions grouped in such a belief, is likely to be vituperated
without a hearing. Nor without reason ; for when the moral
title of a principle hitherto deemed fundamental is sud-
denly questioned, men's consciences experience a painful and
possibly an injurious shock ; and the indignation with which
such questioning is. met, or the reluctance with which it is
tolerated, is due to a useful and perfectly justifiable instinct of
moral self-preservation. People are wholesomely afraid of the
consequences of being forced into impromptu defence of prin-
ciples long regarded as so vital or so self-evident as to be
independent of logical support ; and nothing is more reprehen-
sible than a wanton spirit of criticism which chooses to air its
plausibility in the depreciation of beliefs closely concerning the j
higher emotions of those who hold them. The reformation of
The Personal Aspect of ^Responsibility. 245
moral principle is not effected suddenly or by force of
argument, but is brought about slowly and silently, as it is
needed, by the gradual working out of that social development
which it appears to be its function to subserve. Any, therefore,
holding an opinion distinctly opposed to a belief that passes
muster with the public as necessary to the maintenance of
practical rectitude, may well refrain from its premature expres-
sion as needlessly heretical : likely, in fact, to prove prejudicial
to the popular acceptance of some greater truth on the admis-
sion of which it logically follows.
Nevertheless, occasions sometimes arise when the explicit
repudiation, not of principles, but of current shibboleths which
are 'mistaken for them, is clearly needed, in order to vindicate
from inconsistency, or to rescue from misuse, some such greater
truth which is already before the public, and which, when so
vindicated, may itself operate powerfully as a reforming
influence on a community recognising its bearings.
That such an occasion exists at present is indicated by the
somewhat querulous discussions with which the air is rife,
touching " mechanical " morality, and that discouragment of
individual virtue which is supposed to follow on a belief in the
modern theory of the natural evolution of society. It is certain
that if ever the evolutionist's creed is to precipitate its principles
in the practical form of a code, it can only be after a fair facing
and resolution of the grave ethical difficulty which stands at its
very threshold.
This is, of course, nothing less than the old difficulty about
free-will and responsibility. To believe in a perfectly regular,
not-to-be-suspended and not-to-be-hastened order in the
phenomena of human development is to believe in the " neces-
snry" character of every one of those benevolent impulses
and beneficent actions which arise in the process of that deve-
lopment, and to which men have been accustomed to attach
something of value over and above their mere social utility.
When to the theory of social evolution we add the modern
scientific views respecting the physical relations of consciousness,
the logical resources of the belief in responsibility are further
weakened, since such views undoubtedly tend to sweep aside as
chimerical all ethical standards based on freedom of the will,
reducing the loftiest and most far-reaching moral efforts to the
irresistible reaction of a complex automatism or stimulus of
which it had no share in the institution. In the temporary
oscillation of the moral compass which ensues on the full
perception of this aspect of scientific conclusions, it requires the
strongest philosophic faith in the utility of truth to remain sure
that whichever way the battle goes with reference to the
17
246 The Personal A sped of Responsibility.
precious doctrine, the popular conscience will emerge from the
conflict unscathed. Science must develop, and society must
develop ; and, at first sight, it appears that the only road along
which they may peaceably progress together lies directly
through the scientific justification of a belief in personal respon-
sibility. Science, however, having already virtually discredited
such a belief in her deliverances touching the genesis of morals,
we find .even philosophers, here and there, standing somewhat
aghast in the presence of the considerations they have brought
to light.
Does the .salvation of conscience, then, depend at all on the
precarious possibility of unravelling this gordian knot ? Must
an argument which should make short work of it by cutting it
cut humanity at the same time adrift from its social and moral
moorings, and expose it to wreck and ruin ? I believe not.
Nay, if truth demand the cutting of it, I am sure not ; for truth
ever remains the ultimate level upon which conscience and intelli-
gence meet, and on reaching which each recognises in the other
an invaluable ally. If the discovery of truth be intellectually
excellent, none the less are iis recognition and application
morally so. Moreover, the welfare of society depends on no
shifting sands of theory, but has its unseen anchorage in the
profound depths of that irresistible impulse common to all organ-
ised existence, society included, to make for its own maintenance
and further development. If the functional basis of morals be
the perpetuation of this development through the development
of social tendencies and sympathies in individuals, the security
of morality may be at once inferred, even in the event of our
having to give up the precious belief in our own personal
deservings.
For such and little else is the belief in responsibility, if we
strip it of all implications other than those which are threatened
by science. Science has no word to say against the practical
part of the doctrine. It is pure nonsense to assert that a man
can only justly approve or disapprove his own or his neigh-
bour's conduct, or must only allow such approval or disapproval
to influence his further dealings, so long as he believes his own
and his neighbour's conduct to be supported, each on a lever
without a fulcrum on a self-originating volition which might
as well have been one thing as another. What possible con-
nexion is there between the two propositions ? Why should the
appropriateness of moral approval, or of the practical linking of
this approval with retributive dealing, be represented as de-
pendent on whether or no the antecedent conditions of conduct
had a beginning in consciousness ? It is to me surprising that
out of a doctrine which makes a point of extending the sure
The Personal Aspect of Responsibility. 247
foot-way of continuous causation into the field of mental
phenomena, and which throws some explanatory light on tbe
meaning of virtue and the conditions of progress, men should
have extorted the strange corollaries that it is useless to try and
be good, and unreasonable to dislike or resist what is bad. Is a
watch that won't go the less a bad watch because it neither made
itself nor wound itself up ; or because its bad going is the mere
result of bad spring and wheels ? Shall we, on this account,
disapprove it the less as a bad goer, and hesitate to take it to a
watchmaker, to be put right if possible, and to be dishonoured
and discarded as rubbish if incorrigible ? Is a bad man the less
a bad man the less an unfit social influence because he only
follows his bad will, and did not originate it ? Are we for such
theoretical reasons passively to endure the results of his ill
conduct, or to deem ourselves unjust for reprobating it and
dealing with him in any way we believe fittest for reforming his
will, or at least rendering it socially inoperative ? Happily for
society, men's morality does not depend on their lucidity of
intelligence, and the occult process of reasoning which issues in.
such inconsequent conclusions, even if it could be demonstrated,
could never be acted on.
The real moral lessons conveyed by a belief in determinism
in the connexion of every volition with certain antecedents
uncontrolled by any previous volition of the agent, appear to be
mainly these: (1) In awarding our moral approval or disap-
proval we ought never to consider any one " by name," so to
speak ; but in every case our judgment (of ourselves as of
others, of others as of ourselves) should be strictly proportioned
to the social value of the principle evidenced in conduct, no
admixture whatever of any personal favour or dislike being
allowed to emphasise either our judgment or its expression.
(2) Our rewards for virtue must be real encouragements, and
our punishments of vice real deterrents, following the laws (so
far as we know them) of volitional conditions, and not merely
arbitrary symbols of our approval or disapproval, however just
these latter may be. We are not to hate the man whose
dominating tendency induced him to J " fix his attention " (i.e.
to will) wrongly, but we may disapprove him, inasmuch as we
are a part of the society he hurts. Further, seeing that certain
conditions, hitherto absent, may induce a future beneficial modi-
fication of his will, we may, so far as we disbelieve in the power
of that will to resist such conditions when really presented,
rationally set about instituting them, in the shape of new fears,
Vide a published lecture entitled " Is Man an Automaton," by Dr.
"VV. B. Carpenter.
248 The Personal Aspect of Responsibility .
new deprivations, or new hopes and inducements. The morality
and philosophy of the matter fit like hand and glove.
Nevertheless it is commonly assumed that the mere recog-
nition that we are virtuous of necessity, when we are virtuous
at all, is sufficient to remove that necessity and to render us
vicious. It is only when we discover that the surplus value
which rectitude is held to possess (beyond its social fitness) is the
value it possesses for its follower as differenced from the com-
munity to which he and his conduct belong, that the reason of
this apprehension dawns upon us. Nine times out of ten when
a man speaks with unction of his responsibility, he is influenced,
consciously or not, by a consideration less of his conduct than of
his credit : less of the actual human worth of the deed or of the
existing need for its performance than of its adventitious reflec-
tion on the baptismal name of the doer. This is no sneer. I
think the phraseology of the subject bears me out. We hear of
" shrinking from responsibility " " disclaiming responsibility,"
and so forth, but not from great helpers, great saviours, or great
reformers of their generation. These fix their gaze intently on
the unrecognised truth which needs a preacher, no matter whom,
or the stern duty which needs a performer, no matter whom,
and fling themselves into the saying or doing of it with no
thought of their personal responsibility.
It is scarcely sufficiently recognised in ethical discussion that
the moral abstraction hidden away in the term Responsibility is
in reality a compound of truth and fiction, and that (owing
possibly to the long connexion of morals with theological beliefs)
the fictitious element alone has been taken into account in the
naming. Discriminating between the several and widely dis-
similar ideas commonly present when personal responsibility is
predicated of conduct, we find that the valuable element receives
at the hands of the evolutionist not merely corroboration, but
lucid interpretation. This valuable element is the recognition
of the vast and permanent importance of all acts and forbearances :
the dependence of weighty social consequences on the force and
direction of human effort, and the appropriateness of a moral
valuation of each man by himself, as by his fellows, strictly
following the social quality of his deeds and tendencies. On
the other hand, the distinctive part of the doctrine all, that is,
that distinguishes it from he moral lessons deducible from the
doctrine of invariable physical causation takes note only of the
individual aspects of conduct; and so, is not, strictly speaking,
morel at all. The tendency of the current commonplaces about
personal responsibility is to insist, less on the virtue and health-
fulness of truth, self-restraint, benevolence or industry, than on
the merit of the person exhibiting such virtues : less on the
The Personal Aspect of Responsibility. 249
evil to society of dishonesty, cruelty, sensuality or idleness, than
on the " auswerableness " (whatever that may mean) of the
sinner. The point about which so much metaphysical dust has
been raised proves in the last resort to be one of those purely
personal considerations of which moral advance consists in the
gradual supersedure. Analysis discloses the heart of the dis-
pute (concerning free-will, and the rest) to be less a question of
morals than of merit.
It is at this point that we come in sight of what seems to me
the moral insufficiency of the only part of the popular belief
threatened by modern science.
A few brief remarks on the general character and meaning of
moral progress may fitly preface what is to be said on this point;
that so, having inferred the chief desideratum in any theory or
principle claiming to exercise moral influence over its followers,
we may observe how far the belief in question tallies with the
required standard.
Broadly stated, the functional basis of morals appears to be
the perpetuation of human development. This development
presents itself under two aspects : (1) The evolution of society
as a whole; (2) The evolution of the social or super-personal
impulses, emotions, and tendencies in individuals. Virtue,
functionally considered, amounts to the maintenance of
humanity's fitness for survival so far as this maintenance
may be secured by the civilisation of individuals through the
medium of their own actions. That character is moral which
(whatever the formulated principle recognised by its owner)
issues in conduct conducive to the well-being, not necessarily of
the personal agent, but of his kind : which keeps man at the head
of things, and elevates his headship. That motive is moral
which implies a desire to exhibit such conduct so far as the
agent knows how. Just in proportion as the desires and pur-
poses of the individual lead him to conform to social require-
ments, and to merge self, the person, in self, the social unit, can he
obtain a virtual mastery over his conditions. Happiness consists
in such mastery ; rectitude, in the conformity which leads to it
The rectitude and the happiness, however, do not necessarily
meet in the same personality ; and in the artificial correction
of this special instance of a naturally incomplete adaptation of
our circumstances to our requirements lies the essence of all
good and wise law-making, as also of the purification of public
opinion, that most powerful of all social engines.
If the function of morals be to subserve the interests of the
community, those motives and principles must be most moral
which concern themselves most closely with the welfare of the
community, and which have least regard to considerations
250 Tlie Personal Aspect of Responsibility.
indifferent to that welfare. The most moral belief, again, must
be that which tends to the institution of such social motives
and principles ; and which, in its indirect effect on the emotions
of its follower, brings his will increasingly under their power.
Quite in harmony with this conclusion is the fact that the central
principles of that large body of rules and regulations for indi-
vidual consciences which the felt consequences of conduct have
caused to be empirically established as right which have been
permanent and which come into increasing prominence and play
wherever a community advances in coherence and organisation
have always taken form as in some sort a merging of person-
ality. A high degree of enlightenment and prosperity, or swift
progress towards it, commonly accompanies the high estimation
of such principles as self-government, sympathy, and equity.
The latter especially is the crowning virtue of civilisation. From
first to last moral advance appears to have consisted under
varying disguises in the slow surmounting, not of individual
distinctions, but of personal considerations : in the gradual
lessening of the weight of special interests, whether egoistic
or altruistic, in the balance of morally permitted motives,
and in increasing the preponderance of what are virtually
race-instincts as a compelling agency in the conscious lives
of individuals. In states pre-eminently civilised we find
teachers, governments and even public opinion busy, more or
less consciously and more or less successfully, with the inculca-
tion of ends, and the institution of restrictions bearing directly
on the products of individual character and conduct, as affecting
the vital resources, not of the agent per se, but of the community;
the interests of the agent being included only in proportion to
his capability of development in social conditions. Society is no
impersonal structure; neither as regards the requirements of its de-
velopment is it a merely magnified person; but it is a great super-
personal organism into which the self -hood of every one of its units
enters not merely as a modifying influence or a supplementary
end, but as an essential ingredient. The requirements of society
include, while transcending, the requirements of the individual ;
and, when supplied, yield what is felt as an improved quality of
happiness (though seldom as an increased quantity) to each
individual who lives in practical recognition of his share in a
larger life than his own. The most virtuous man is he who is
able habitually to regard, and to deal with himself, his friend,
his enemy, and a stranger from the same standpoint; that is,
from a point where these distinctions of self, friend, enemy, and
stranger disappear, along with the special emotions belonging to
them, in the distinction each assumes as a better or worse social
member to be judged and treated by a human test alone, as if
The Personal Aspect of Responsibility. 251
nothing more circumscribed than the whole future of the whole
race were concerned in the matter. The most moral valuation
of personal morality must be that which regards conduct ex-
clusively in its super-personal or social aspect, and which dis-
regards its emanation from or reaction upon a given agent
otherwise than as he too is a part of that whole his conduct
must affect.
Provided with this test, if we return to the belief in personal
responsibility, we find that, so far as it means a belief in the
proper merits or the proper rights of persons, it falls morally
short For instead of placing the impulse to self-service or to
self-sacrifice, as such, under orders to the dictates of the impulses
conducive to race-preservation, it tends directly to reverse the
process ; and so far as it confines attention to the real or sup-
posed reaction of conduct on the personality, as distinguished
from the humanity of the agent, it does so at the expense of that
purely social valuation of individual conduct, on the unbiassed
integrity of which a true morality ever insists. Humanity
suffers or may suffer in the person of self if the interests of less
fit social members be taken into consideration merely because
they are not self ; and conversely, humanity may suffer in the
person of others or of an other if conduct be modified by a
consideration of one's merely personal relationship towards that
other. The insistence on personal responsibility frequently
means nothing more than an insistence on this personal relation-
ship as giving a special moral colouring to conduct. I, at least,
run more risk of self-deception as to what is my duty towards
my neighbour in a particular conjunction of events if, instead of
looking the position simply in the face with a single eye to doing
the fittest thing, so far as I know it, I mentally attitudinise
before my own relationship to my own conduct, reflecting on
my own responsibility as if the eventual deed either gained or
lost in intrinsic importance from the circumstance of my hap-
pening to be the doer. True virtue requires that we regard
neither first nor second persons when a question of duty arises.
Our moral judgment of third persons is more likely to be reliable
and equitable, and the moral man must endeavour to appear as
a third person in his own eyes.
In order to strain the principle advocated to its furthest
capability, and to give dissentient readers the utmost room for
correcting it, I take an instance in which, if ever, personal
considerations may be held to intensify moral obligation. A
father is said to be specially responsible for the moral training
of his child, by which it is meant that he is liable to be specially
disgraced in the eyes of others if he neglect such training. It
is implied in this that the man is to the same extent
252 Tlie Personal Aspect of Responsibility.
irresponsible for the moral influence he exerts over other
people's children : that the personal relationship or its absence
is alone sufficient to modify moral obligation; that, other
things equal, his child's training ought to be a matter of
greater concern to him than that of other children. Other
things are not generally equal, or the moral fallacy involved
would at once disclose itself. For the doctrine implies that the
father deserves to be more disgraced for failing in what is a
matter of general social duty towards one human being than
towards another, the distinction all the while being one that
concerns no one except himself. So far as the judgment con-
cerning parental responsibility hints at the importance of senior
guidance for the young, it is moral and true : so far as it specifies
one child as of more importance than another coming under
similar influence, and colours duty with a personal consideration
of no value to the community, it is at least non-social, and,
through its tendency to withhold a parent's attention from the
human (which he may of course regard as the religious, or other-
wise transcendental) meaning of his conduct, may become
eminently immoral. Just so far as the father is practically
influenced in his dealings with his child by a consideration of
his own personal relationship, and the extra importance that
relationship may give to his conduct in the estimation of those
he knows, just so far is the good of the child subordinated
in his rnkid to his own credit, and the tendency must be to
lessen such considerations as, while concerning the child's
good, are yet in no way related to that credit. Just in pro-
portion to the access of value an action receives from the
personal aspect of responsibility will be the loss of regard in
which a precisely similar case is held when such responsibility
is supposed or known to be absent. The question is to me
unavoidable Would not this loss operate harmfully on any one
coming under the influence of the conduct based upon it ?
Of course no question is here raised as to the appropriateness
of the parent's greater love for his own child. Domestic welfare
lies so firmly and deeply at the roots of social welfare that any prin-
ciple threatening the former might well be mistrusted as unlikely
to prove a true friend to the latter. "What is here maintained is
not that a father should not feel a stronger affection for his own
child than for another, but that, when both are equally under his
influence and control, his sense of " responsibility " concerning
each child respectively should be precisely equal. He ought to
treat both children with equal moral solicitude, and from the
same motive. I profess to derive this " ought " from the highest
sanctions of civilised morality. I submit that in recognising (as
all must) the rectitude of such equitable dealing and equitable
Tlie Personal Aspect of JResponsibilify. 253
feeling on the part of the supposed parent, the title of super-
personal conduct to our moral approval is granted ; and that, by
implication, the special responsibility of the parent that is, his
title to special reprehension in the case of his neglecting his own.
child rather than the other, or the other rather than his own is
disproved. If this be true, a doctrine presenting the reverse
principle of an insistence on personal distinctions, whatever else
it may have to recommend it, cannot be moral.
A formidable objection is often made to a doctrine which,
while upholding the ancient principle of the excellence of virtue,
yet denies the free-will and consequently the personal merit of
the virtuous agent. It is said that such teaching, to be logical,
must make no account of conscience or of conscientious motive as
such, since either is liable to be misguided. I, however, entirely
disclaim any imputation of undervaluing the great utility of
conscientiousness as such. There may be no merit in being con-
scientious, but, according to the social standard of excellence,
there is great good in it. A person's susceptibility of feelings of
pleasure or pain in proportion to the conformity or non-confor-
mity of his own conduct with any standard having a basis wider
than his own interests is what, I suppose, we mean by his " con-
science". It may not inaptly be compared with a social nerve
which, in measure of its development and activity, gives its pos-
sessor a place in the sensoriuni of the community. However
misguided it may here or there be however vague or even in-
accurate in its response to the demands made upon it it is yet
the finest product of past millenniums of human socialisation. I
even incline to agree so far with the orthodox moralist as to
affirm that a rigid (that is a conscientious) motive prompting a
v:rony or erroneous act is a better thing than a useful (extrinsi-
callv-moral) action which has been prompted by a selfish motive.
Why ? Because the tenour of a life signifies more to the
community than its single acts, and the degree in which a man
habitually acts upon the suggestions of his conscience is pretty
certain to correspond with the degree in which he is amenable
to considerations wide of his own concerns, as such. In other
words, conscientiousness is potentially, even where it is not
actually, moral.
I, however, dispute the moral legitimacy of using this " social
sentience " in cool blood as a means of personal gratification : of
looking forward to its favourable verdict which, as is admitted,
is not always a faithful verdict as an end to be kept in view
when aiming at rectitude. "Whatever his " merit," a moral man
looks out from self at facts, and aims straight at their fit adaptation
to what he deems right, with no side glance at his own reflection in
to-morrow's eyes to see what figure he cuts while taking his aim.
254 The Personal Aspect of Responsibility.
Finally, it may be objected that it is both foolish and wrong
to cry down men's ready belief in their own merits, since such
a belief has constantly proved a valuable stimulus to well-doing.
Doubtless it has. But a useful stimulus is one thing : a per-
manent and necessary vital condition is another. Alcohol is
often useful to keep nagging physical power up to working-
point : taken medicinally it may even save life : but the healthier
the life the less the need of its services. Similarly, I am not
here concerned to show that the idea of personal merit has
never done good, or that where a belief in it can be honestly held
it may not in the future do good again : but I desire to show
that it is not necessary to normal moral vitality, while it has
very often done harm and indirectly produced misery by leading
men to claim personal recompense as their natural due for conduct
which in the nature of things produces only a social result : caus-
ing them to feel ill-used of gods and men when such recompense
has been withheld. Until we have learnt to rectify sub-human
nature's oversights, and to apportion our rewards on a principle
more complex than hers, such expectations are doomed to disap-
pointment ; it being about as reasonable to expect in the natural
course of things & personal reward for a social effort as to expect
a physical reward for an intellectual effort : the removal of a
disease, for example, by the solution of a mathematical prob-
lem. Since those among us who accept unreservedly the con-
clusions of modern philosophy must learn to do without any
belief in our own merits, it is just as well to recognise the con-
soling fact that men may yet care to do right after they become
convinced that they are not fine fellows for doing it, and that
the rectitude which persists in action independently of personal
bolstering is the highest and most invincible rectitude of all.
It cannot be denied that a sense of merit masquerading as
" honour " has often done good service in prompting men to
deeds or strengthening them for forbearances which they were
not sufficiently socialised to desire for their own sake. But
though in nine cases such a sense might lead a man right, in the
tenth it might lead Mm wrong, thus disclosing itself, not as an
essential principle of morality, but as the falsely-assumed rule
which is disproved by an exception.
However generally useful we may allow the sense of honour
to have been, it is none 'the less true that a wide-spread feeling
exists testifying implicitly to its moral second-rateness, and re-
cognising the love of virtue as morally superior to the love of
glory, the dread of vice to the fear of disgrace. And the exis-
tence of such a feeling, however small the operative power it as
yet possesses, indicates a dim recognition of the higher social
value of such a standard whenever it is seen in operation.
The Personal Aspect of Responsibility. 255
The desire of public approval is not necessarily identical with
the desire of public good. It is at least equally allied with the
ry desire of public notice which may be and sometimes is
clearly exhibited immorally by felons in the commission of
crime, and non-rnorally by speculative or artistic egotists in the
iuction of work differing from that of their compeers only in
the matter of eccentricity. Men are slow to learn that even
ir own glory must play second fiddle to the wants of a solidi-
fying community, although it is a happy thing for themselves
and for the community when at last they do learn it. Life is at
I once simplified and beautified, and many faults of character with
their attendant miseries vanish spontaneously when the indi-
vidual learns to content himself with what Emerson calls " his
social and delegated quality," when he sees that whatever
" respects the individual is temporary and prospective like the
[individual himself who is ascending out of his limits into a
catholic existence ".
When at last the merely rational theory we have been slow
jto learn as such flashes into light as a substantive truth which
it is beyond our power ever again to ignore in our computation
of things and their values, and when we become intimately con-
scious that our goodness is not in any sense of our own providing
when we have reached this belief as a realised practical convic-
tion, I say, we never want our personal merit back again. In reach-
ing the point where such a conviction becomes possible we have
left behind us all other points at which the belief in personal
responsibility, having been honestly tenable, has been in any
degree useful. "VVe have also unconsciously outlived that in us
which received gratification from the contemplation of merit ;
the love of goodness which needed a love of self proper to eke
out its small propelling power being transformed into a larger
! faculty which needs it not.
L. S. BEVINGTOX.
VIII. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.
MR. LEWES'S DOCTRINE OP SENSIBILITY. 1
Mr. Lewes's Physical Basis of Mind has already been subjected to
searching criticism in the pages of this journal. But we trust that the
importance of the subject may be held to justify a few farther remarks
on his view of Sensibility, Sentience, Sensation, the various aspects
of Feeling, giving as it does the key to his position in reference to
the question of the forces that determine animal action.
Shortly stated, Mr. Lewes's view seems to be the following : That
Sensibility is the property of combining and grouping stimulations ;
that it belongs specially to nerve-centres, but to these in whatever
part of the organism they are present ; that the sensory reactions,
when numerous and consentient, are attended by consciousness (the
function of the organism as a whole), but that this is no invariable
mark of sentient states ; and that sentience as such, whether conscious
or unconscious, is radically distinct from mechanical force in all its
forms.
From this statement it appears that Mr. Lewes gives to the terms
Sensibility and Consciousness a mainly physiological value. To this
in itself no objection can be made ; for, though it may be a question
whether he does not thereby add to the confusion and ambiguity oi
language which he himself deplores as a bar to the progress OJ
psychology, he is of course entitled to use terms in any sense in which
he defines them. But it is quite legitimate to remark that, on this
view, Sentience has not the character of a fact or phenomenon ; no
account can be given of its nature ; it can be described merely through
the effects which it produces and the source whence it springs. Hence,
no doubt, comes the lame and tautological character of some of Mr.
Lewes's explanations, as that " the reaction of a sensory organ-
called by the physiologist a sensation is always a sentient phenome-
non," and that " it is the physiological reaction of the living organism
which constitutes sensation " (pp. 193, 420). Farther, it is of more
importance to observe that, on this view, Sensibility is merely an en-
dowment of nerves, equally physical with any other which belongs to
them as part of the material framework of animal life. This, indeed
Mr. Lewes would be far from allowing. He dwells on the distinctions
between organisms and machines, and finds the two to be essentially
different. But the difference which he finds, he cannot, it seems to us
account for. The questions discussed in his third and fourth essays are
What is the character of reflex action 1 and May animal action in
general be regarded as the result of purely physical processes 1 These
questions he answers by pointing to Sensibility as the motive powei
peculiar to animal organisms. He says in effect : All animal actior
is reflex, but, even when unconscious, it is the result of sensibility, o'
vital force residing in the organism, it is a sentient, not a physical
1 This Note (by the daughter of the late Sir William Hamilton o
Edinburgh) was in type before the death of Mr. Lewes. D.
Notes and Discussions. 257
phenomenon. And, since even unconscious actions are due to the
operation of Feeling, much less can it be affirmed that those which
evidently spring from it are the result of merely physical processes.
But Mr. Lewes's conception of sentience as wider than and not
implying consciousness, renders ineffectual his denial of the automatic
character of animal action. For what is the essence of a mechanism 1
Is it not that the source of action is external that the sequence of
acts is determined from without ? And, as long as action is so deter-
mined, and all results are produced by external force, is it of much
moment whether the mechanism be of one kind or another, organic or
inorganic 1 A plant has life, a stone has none ; but we deny that the
one can in any real sense act more than the other. That the pro-
of animal action are to a great extent mechanical is allowed
by all But on the automatic theory they are nothing but mechani-
cal, there is no such thing as spontaneity in animal life.
Thus the very matter in question is the source of impulse ; and, if
that be traced to any material agency, it matters not that it be called
sensibility, the conception is equally a mechanical one. We fail,
therefore, to see that Mr. Lewes's theory, in replacing a mechanical by
an organic view of the production of action, or rather in setting up a
sensitive instead of a material mechanism, differs in any essential
respect from that against which he contends ; or that the word
sensitive has any particular value, when sensibility is reduced to a
purely vital property, and the springs of action are traced to the
harmonious play of parts in a complicated organism. Similarly,
on Mr. Lewes's prevailing conception, his denunciation of the
" exclusion of sensibility from the actions classed as reflex " seems
an elaborate strife about words : for what, after ail, is the difference
of any moment that separates him from his opponents 1 Both sides
have to account for the fact that, under the influence of external
stimuli, complex acts are performed by animals which have suffered
serious and extensive mutilation of the nervous system. Both hold
jthe effects observed to be the result of neural processes. Both regard
jthese processes as unconscious. Only the one calls them sentient,
the other insentient the one mechanical, the other organic. "\Vhere
else than in the names lies the difference 1 ? Mr. Lewes refers to a
jnumber of cases as evidence of sense-guidance in the absence of the
[brain. But, if sentience be merely the power of combining
Stimulations, how are the effects of sense-guidance to be discriminated ?
(That the stimulations are combined, and so as to resemble the effects of
sense-guidance, is allowed by all. The very question to be answered
is : How are they combined 1 By physical properties, or by the sense
of pleasure and pain, or by intelligence 1
But, while Mr. Lewes's view of sensibility and consciousness is
mainly physiological, it would be inaccurate and misleading to
represent him as keeping out of view the mental elements which they
undeniably possess. According to him, sensibility, though itself a
property of nerves, has in sentience a " subjective side " or " psycho-
logical equivalent," which is " the substance of all knowledge ".
258 Notes and Discussions.
Consciousness, while physiologically a function of the organism, is,
" strictly speaking, a psychological, not a physiological, term," and
designates either all psychic states or that class of such states which is
attended by a reflected feeling of attention. And, if it be objected
that such attempts to give to the same phenomenon intellectual and
physical attributes, and to place it at once in the spheres of mind and
inatter, involve a fatal contradiction, Mr. Lewes is ready to reply that
this, on the contrary, is the very foundation of his theory ; his view of
sentience being merely an application of the more comprehensive theory
of " the twofold aspect," on which he explains the connexion between
mind and matter, by supposing that, not only the neural process and
the conscious state, but soul and body, nay. all that is physical aud
all that is mental, are related to each other as respectively objective
and subjective phases of one underlying reality.
Mr. Lewes makes much use of the terms " subjective " and " objec-
tive," and claims by their aid to have solved one of the most difficult of
metaphysical problems. But they are proverbially dangerous apt to
rend any system into which they have without due care been'
introduced : and, even as philosophical terms with a definite and
recognised meaning, it appears to us that Mr. Lewes is not sufficiently
guarded and precise in his manner of using them.
When we distinguish various aspects of any reality, we imply that
we are face to face with some object, which in certain of its attributes
remains unaltered, while in others it varies according to the point from
which we regard it. The thing in its essence does not change ; our 1
relation to it is what changes. So much for aspects in general. In
regard to the particular aspects in question, the terms " subjective " and
" objective " relate to knowledge or thought, and to that alone : they
have no meaning save in reference to an act of intuition or conscious
experience, which has as its poles the two correlative elements of the
subject, or that which knows, = self, and the object, or that which is
known, = not-self. The reality implied in subjective and objective
aspects is the content of such an act of intuitive knowledge, which is
regarded subjectively as a mode of self, objectively as a quality of not-
self. But, because the reality is one, this content, whatever it be,
must remain the same under the opposite aspects which by turns it
presents; i.e., what is considered, now subjectively, now objectively,
must be the very same datum, one in time, in antecedent conditions,
in all relations save that which it is conceived to hold to the subject
and the object of the act of knowledge.
Now, all these conditions are violated in Mr. Lewes's application of
the contrast of subjective and objective aspects. When, e.g., he calls
a conscious state or a change in feeling the subjective aspect of a
neural process, he both assigns a subjective aspect to that (neural pro-i
cess) Avhich can have none, because it is not the content but the objecl
of an intuition, and designates as subjective and objective aspects o:|
the same reality the data of separate and distinct acts of knowledge;
When two things are subjective and objective phases of the same, WM
cannot have the one without the other, or do away with the one without:
and Discussions. 259
facto, doiiig away with the other. But here we can undoubtedly
e the one without the other, since the apprehension of a neural
process is no conveyance of the corresponding sensation, nor vice versa.
In fact, the two never are apprehended together ; and so far are
sensation and the nervous system, soul and body, the mental and the
material, from being indissolubly bound up iq the same act of
experience, that each is only remotely connected with the other by a
chain of reasoning. "Whereas in the case, e.g., of colour, where the
material quality and the visual sensation are unquestionably objective
and subjective phases of the same, the coloured surface and the
affection of the organ of sight are absolutely simultaneous, and
determined by identical conditions : in fact they are the very same
thing, which is only diversely thought about. Liberty and law are
simply various aspects, because your liberty is my law differently
expre-
Mr. Lewes's plea (p. 403) for the admission of Consciousness as " a
factor in the so-called conscious and voluntary actions," affords an
example of the misleading effect of making aspects, or the relations of
knowledge, convertible with the relations of existence. It is argued
that, though consciousness is a purely subjective process, yet, because
subjective and objective processes are but two faces of one reality,
feeling is justly said to determine action. But two such faces must
remain apart as eternally as parallel lines, and action, as that which is to
be expressed in terms of matter and motion, can no more be determined
by a purely subjective consciousness than can such a consciousness be
determined by the movements of matter through space. If conscious-
ness be an aspect, it cannot be a factor, any more than the convex
surface is a factor in the production of the concave ; and, if conscious-
ness in this manner accompany molecular changes, it can no more
affect the character of the series than the colour of a row of balls in
motion can tell upon the force of their mutual impact.
It appears, then, that Mr. Lewes's theory of Sensibility lies open to
grave objections. It does not satisfactorily account for the phenomena
with which it deals ; it cannot hold elements which yet it is compelled
to admit. "We thence draw an argument in favour of the purely
psychological view, according to which sensation is a form of
consciousness, and consciousness another name for immediate know-
ledge. But if consciousness be knowledge, even of the lowest and
most rudimentary kind, it cannot be a mere organic process or a
function of the organism ; it must imply a self. That is, knowledge
is not interpretable without reference to self. It is this reference that
is implied in Mr. Lewes's account of it as the function of the organism
as a icJwle. But the unity of the ground and source of consciousness
; cannot be explained as the mere harmonious action of parts. "We
: come to connect our consciousness with the organism, but what is given
in it directly is states of that which, when known, (but this it need
j not be and very generally is not), is known as self. It is quite
'certain that in no conscious state, of whatever kind, have we the
direct suggestion of a consentience of organic parts, while in
260 Notes and Dismissions.
reflectively conscious states we cannot help being aware of "I" as
thinking or feeling. Mr. Lewes says : " The organism is in its
objective aspect a physiological mechanism, in its subjective aspect a
psychological mechanism ". What is " a psychological mechanism " ?
Psychology knows nothing of mechanism. It has to do exclusively
with states of feeling, of volition, of thought. These may or may not
be produced by mechanical agency, but we must pass beyond psycho-
logy in order even to try to ascertain the fact.
The recognition of its conscious character yields a much more
intelligible account of sentience than Mr. Lewes is able to give.
Whereas he can define Feeling only through its results and its source,
states of feeling as conscious become the simplest and clearest of facts,
known with a directness and certainty beyond that of any other order
of facts. Feeling, under the two heads of sense and emotion, becomes
a general term for all conscious states in which self is preponderantly
passive and subject to impression, and in which there is the
qualitative apprehension of a state. Of course there are many stages
of consciousness, e.g., that of molluscs and that of men, and in
these Feeling appears very variously combined with other elements ;
but in itself it is throughout the same.
Mr. Lewes cannot on his view consistently explain how Feeling
determines action how what is subjective passes into the objective
sphere. From the other point of view, Feeling is a spring of action
through the excitation of desire under the sense of pleasure and pain.
Doubtless, also, it is from overlooking the reference of consciousness
to self that Mr. Lewes seems to deny any essential distinction between
voluntary and involuntary actions.
We would reiterate that only through the recognition of the self
involved in consciousness can the controversy against the doctrine of
animal automatism be carried on to clear, broad, and well-defined
issues. Self is the only really spontaneous source of activity ; nothing
else yields any valid ground of escape from the mechanical conception
of life. Mr. Lewes seeks (p. 407) to prove that " consciousness is
legitimately conceived as a factor in the so-called conscious and
voluntary actions," and that the animal organism is not to be classed
among machines, on the ground that " the collateral product of one
movement becomes a directing factor in the succeeding movement,
that being precisely what no automaton can effect, unless for
changes that are pre-arranged ". But, in the first place, it is of the
essence of a machine that the product, direct or collateral, of one
movement should by pre-arrangement give rise to the next movement,
and Mr. Lewes assumes that the particular collateral product which he
has in view does so impromptu. In the second place, that product
(sensation) does not he himself allows that it cannot itself give
rise to succeeding movements ; for the same experience which assures j
us of the sensation of heat or moisture or roughness, excited, e.g., by
the motion of the hand over a surface, assures us that the direction of
that motion is changed not by this sensation but by ourselves under
its influence.
Notes and Discussions. 261
This evidence, therefore, fails to prove the conclusion which it was
meant to establish ; but, on the other hand, it unquestionably im-
plies the element of self ignored by Mr. Lewes. Again, that element
is implicitly recognised in the appeal to consciousness which Mr.
Lewes makes as a last resort in his contention against the automatic
theory, and which, as was formerly remarked in MIXD, " is somewhat
confounding when it comes from him ". The very term " subjective,"
so constantly employed by Mr. Lewes, if meaningless apart from
knowledge, is equally meaningless unless knowledge be conceived as
a relation between self and not-self. Without allowing that there
are " the strongest reasons for concluding that every feeling, every
change in sensibility, is the subjective aspect of an objective organic
change," we note here and elsewhere the repeated application of a
word which binds Mr. Lewes to the recognition of an element not
allowed for in his theory. When Mr. Lewes tries to prove that
all actions are reflex and all sentient, by adducing evidence of sense-
guidance from the behaviour of animals which have been decapitated
or deprived of their cerebrum, he is again driven to an implicit
recognition of the mental character of sensation. For this evidence
does not prove sentience without proving a great deal more than he
allows to enter into sentience. As Mr. Lewes gives no signs by
which to discriminate sentience in itself, he can show it present
only along with volition and intelligence as well as consciousness,
and is driven to what he himself feels to be the absurdity of claiming
the power of choice for headless reptiles. His signs of sentience are
really signs of consciousness.
It appears to us that Mr. Lewes makes good his contention that
the brain is not to be looked on as exclusively the organ of sensa-
tion, that no one part of the organism is in itself the exclusive seat
of sensation. But, while his position is "not the brain but all
nerve-centres," ours would be " not the brain and not nerve-centres
at all, are primarily and exclusively the seat of sensation". If
individuality be the root and principle of sentient life, the brain
may be the organ of sensation, as (what Mr. Lewes calls it) " the
centre of centres," fitted, by its connexion with every part of the
nervous system, to be the physical counterpart and medium of the
^fi'X'j- It is because this communication of individuality must be
impaired by loss of the brain, that we are led to suppose the physical
properties of the nervous system to suffice, under stimulation, for the
production of the effects observed. Besides, the comparative unim-
portance of the brain in certain forms of animal life may chiefly,
perhaps, indicate the low type exhibited in these forms, even when
the organism is in its normal state.
Thus, while holding with Mr. Lewes that Feeling is a force, we
venture to differ from him both as to its real relations and as to the
mode of its operation, and to assert that his account of these is not
such as to remove the confessed difficulties of the subject, or to be
accepted as finally sufficient.
E. HAMILTON.
18
262 Notes and Discussions.
PROFESSOR MAXWELL ON THE RELATIVITY OF MOTION.
UNDER the title Matter and Motion, Professor Maxwell furnishes
one of the series of " Manuals of Elementary Science," published by
the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In its hundred and
twenty small pages are presented the more important conceptions
which students of physics and astronomy have arrived at as a means
of grasping the phenomena of the material universe. A prolegomena
physica of this nature is of very great utility ; but how well adapted
to the general public this attempt by Professor Maxwell is, how
digestible the large amount of nutriment in this form may be, we
shall not here surmise. We propose merely to bring forward some
considerations regarding the relativity of motion, especially in refer-
ence to rotary motion, which are contained in the book or suggested
by it.
On page 20, after speaking of the position of a point as its distances
and directions from other points, Professor Maxwell says :
"All crar knowledge, both of time and place, is essentially relative.
When a man has acquired a habit of putting words together, without
troubling himself to form the thoughts that ought to correspond to them,
it is easy for him to frame an antithesis between this relative knowledge
and a so-called absolute knowledge, and to point out our ignorance of the
absolute position of a point as an instance of the limitation of our faculties.
Anyone, however, who will try to imagine the state of a mind conscious of
knowing the absolute position of a point will ever after be content with
our relative knowledge."
Having then established the fact that our knowledge or conception
of position involves only the geometrical relations between points and
consists entirely of our knowledge or conceptions of those relations,
Professor Maxwell proceeds to consider motion and rest, and to show
the relativity of these also. Evidently since position is relative,
motion, which is the change of position, must be relative to at least
an equal degree. On p. 29 we read :
" It is true that when we say that a body is at rest we use a form of
words which appears to assert something about that body considered in
itself, and we might imagine that the velocity of another body, if reckoned
with respect to a body at rest, would be its true and only absolute velocity.
But the phrase ' at rest,' means in ordinary language ' having no velocity
with respect to that on which the body stands,' as, for instance, the surface
of the earth or the deck of a ship. It cannot be made to mean more than
this.
"It is therefore unscientific to distinguish between rest and motion, as
between two different states of a body in itself, since it is impossible to
speak of a body being at rest or in motion, except with reference expressed
or implied, to some other body."
Thus all that we can know or conceive with regard to position,
motion and rest, consists of the geometrical relations between the
points concerned and the changes of those relations, and this is indeed
all that the words position, rest and motion mean.
Let us illustrate this. We will suppose that the universe consists
JTotes and Discussions. 263
of a sphere and a ring, and that the sphere passes and repasses
through the ring. And, that this ideal universe be as simple as
possible, let all the points of the sphere move in straight lines with
regard to the ring. Thus we will suppose it to swing to and fro for
ever. "We will people these bodies. The inhabitants of the sphere
then will see the ring approaching, surrounding and passing them to
return and repass. The inhabitants of the ring will see the sphere
approach, pass through their world, and depart to return and repeat
its motion indefinitely.
Xow, it will be quite in accordance with the ordinary use of
language for the inhabitants of the ring to speak of the sphere as in
motion, and for the inhabitants of the sphere to speak of the ring as
in motion. And if they wish to represent astronomical phenomena in
their lecture-rooms, the inhabitants of the ring will make their minia-
ture model of a ring stationary in the lecture room and cause the
sphere to move to and fro through this. The converse will be the
case with the scientists on the sphere. Xay further, in conceiving the
phenomena in their own minds, those on the ring will be apt to
imagine a model constructed in one way, those on the sphere in the
other. Xow, it is evident that in both these ways of representing
the actual phenomena, whether in models or imagination, both parties
are right. In the models the sphere and the ring must have specific
relations of motion or rest to the walls of the lecture-room, just as
they must have wires to support them and machinery to keep them,
going, but the relations to the walls of the lecture-room do not repre-
sent the real astronomical facts any more than do the wires and the
clockwork. And if, when we imagine the models, we find it easier
to conceive the one thing or the other as at rest with regard to our-
selves, we must not forget that this relation is not one that reproduces
what we wish to reproduce, namely, the changes of configuration of
the system.
It is well to become perfectly clear with regard to this matter.
"We must not, for example, imagine that the two parties see different
sides of the same thing. They do in fact see the whole of it
Nor must we regard the two views as two different theories, each
with a certain number of facts in its favour. There is only one theory,
and all the facts sustain it. But there are two different ways of
representing it.
"We have spoken above of the particles of the sphere as moving in
straight lines with regard to the ring. "We have here to show that
the expression move in straight lines is meaningless without an ex-
pressed or implied reference to a body with regard to which the
motion is straight. Suppose that a pea is propelled through a straight
peashooter. If each point in the peashooter is at rest with regard
to the ring in our former example, then the inhabitants of the ring
would say that the pea moved in a straight line. But if the man
with the peashooter moved it about while the pea was going through,
they would say that it moved in a curved line. If he should move
the peashooter so as to keep it at rest in all its points with regard
264 Notes and Discussions.
to the sphere, the inhabitants of the sphere would say that the pea moved
in a straight line, and the inhabitants of the ring in a curved line.
Nor would there "be any difference between the two views, because
in the one case reference to the sphere, in the other to the ring, is
understood. It is therefore evident that, in speaking of motion, not
only the amount, but the direction of the motion and the nature of
the trajectory as being straight or curved, contains an implicit reference
to some other body.
Now, the question arises to what body is reference had in the use
of the word straight in Newton's first law of motion. The law runs :
Every body perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a
straight line except in so far as it is made to change that state by
external forces.
If we confine our attention to terrestrial phenomena, we find that
the law is in all ordinary cases sensibly true, when by straight we
understand straight with reference to the earth. But better devised
experiments and more accurate observation show that this is not
exactly true, and we are driven to the fixed stars as a basis of refer-
ence. The trajectories must be straight with regard to these. But
even with regard to these the law does not seem to be perfectly ac-
curate. Still we are not obliged to consider the law as merely
approximative ; for we can define a plane, and points in that plane, so
moving with reference to real, i.e., material, points, that the law shall
hold true to the extent of all our powers of scientific observation.
We will illustrate by supposing that the stars did not shine, and hence
were unknown to us, and that we attempted to apply Newton's law
to the motion of bodies on the earth. We should find as before that
it was not strictly accurate, with reference to the earth, and we should
not be able to refer to the stars. We might, however, come to con-
ceive of a plane passing through the poles of the earth and turning
about its axis from east to west once a day (sidereal), and then we
should find that the trajectories of the bodies would be almost exactly
straight with regard to this plane. This plane, although imaginary,
is rigorously defined with regard to real points on the earth, and other
motions used as measures of time. Moreover, the motion would be
straight with regard to all planes moved paraDel to this plane with a
uniform motion.
In this way then we may have to posit and define a plane of
reference among the " fixed " stars, a plane not fixed perhaps with
regard to any one of those stars, but whose motion is capable of
definition with reference to the stars. With regard to this we may
assume Newton's law perfectly accurate, but we must bear in mind
that, if there is one, there is an infinite number of such planes, i.e.,
all those moving uniformly parallel with that one which we happen
to select.
We now pass to what Professor Maxwell says about the motion of
the earth. On page 87 we read :
'' So far as regards the geometrical configuration of the earth and the
heavenly bodies, it is evidently all the same
Notes and Discussions. 265
' Whether the sun predominant in heaven
Rise on the earth, or earth rise on the sun,' &c., &c.
The distances between the bodies composing the universe, whether celestial
or terrestrial, and the angles between the lines joining them, are all that
can be ascertained without an appeal to dynamical principles, and these
will not be affected if any motion of rotation of the whole system, similar
to that of a rigid body about an axis, is combined with the actual motion.
So that, from a geometrical point of view, the Copemican system, according
to which the earth rotates, has no advantage, except that of simplicity, over
that in which the earth is supposed to be at rest, and the apparent motions
of the heavenly bodies to be their absolute (sic) motions."
After what has been said, and won our assent, to the effect that
motion and rest are conditions of relations between bodies and nothing
more than this, and as these relations are merely those referred to
in the passage just quoted, lines and angles, as being the same under
either hypothesis, we are unable to see any difference between the
Copemican and Ptolemaic theory as far as regards the real things
which those theories regard. But it is evident that the phenomena
might be modelled, and the models conceived in one way or the other,
and it may be readily admitted that one way of making the orreries,
or drawing the figures, or conceiving of the phenomena in miniature,
mignt be practically more convenient than the other. "When the
phenomena are thus modelled or figured in imagination the difference
between the two conceptions lies in the difference between the relations,
of rest or motion, between the images of the astronomical bodies and
the room or our own persons. But, as we have said before, these
relations do not repeat any astronomical relations. While, then, the
difference is a difference only in the scaffolding, it by no means
follows that the results of the improvement in this would be incon-
siderable as regards our real knowledge. Indeed they have been
marvellous.
The word " absolute" appears in the foregoing quotation, and the im-
plication is that in the one view the earth, in the other the stars, are
" absolutely " at rest. To decide between them an appeal is made to
dynamical laws. Inasmuch, however, as these dynamical laws are
generalisations of modes of change of configuration of material systems,
and as these changes have nothing absolute in the sense of non-
relative in them, it is evident that the dynamical laws can have no
reference to anything absolute in that sense its ordinary sense. It
remains then to discover what meaning is to be given to the word
" absolute " in order that the statement of the earth's absolute rotation
may be, we will not say true, but intelligible. Evidently from the
appeal to dynamics, this meaning must have reference to some dyna-
mical law.
"We will see what Professor Maxwell refers us to. " Newton," he
says, page 88, " was the first to point out that the absolute motion of
the earth might be demonstrated by experiments on the rotation of a
material system," and he goes on with some experiments on the
development of centrifugal force by rotation, and concludes with
Foucault's pendulum-experiment. Now the centrifugal force is a
266 Notes and Discussions.
mere case of Newton's first law, and Foucault's experiment is another,
a little more complicated. Newton's law was with regard to uniform
motion in straight lines with reference to a plane (or other body of
points) defined in such and such a way. The plane in which the pen-
dulum, situated at the poles, vibrates must be at rest with regard to this
plane of reference implied in Newton's law. The earth, rotating then
with regard to the plane of Foucault's pendulum, rotates with regard
to the plane of reference once in twenty-four hours. But the earth is
said to rotate absolutely once in twenty-four hours, and it is only
proved that it does so by showing that it rotates with regard to the
plane of reference ; therefore all that it means is that it rotates with
respect to the plane of reference. " Absolute " motion then means
mofton with regard to a plane (or other body of points) with regard
to which uninfluenced motion is in straight lines. Since, however,
uninfluenced motion is in straight lines with regard to an infinite
number of planes (or other bodies of points) moving parallel each to
itself with a uniform motion, it may seem trivial to distinguish one of
these planes from all the others, but a change of direction with regard
to any of these planes is a change of direction with regard to them all.
We may thus speak of rotation with regard to all the planes or a
change of velocity with regard to them all, while the motion itself, not
the change of motion, at any instant is something different for each
one of these planes. To this we may then refuse to assign a value,
for it might be, or rather is, every value. But the direction or change
of velocity of the motion is the same for all of these planes of refer-
ence, and to these we may give the name " absolute ". It is perhaps to
be regretted that the same word has these two different meanings, the
one non-relative, and the other the technical and peculiar meaning
which we have described. But so it is and the technical meaning
is too different from the ordinary meaning to be at all comparable
with it.
It is hardly necessary to state that the Ptolemaic did not differ
from the Copernican system by asserting that the earth was at rest
with regard to a plane with reference to which uninfluenced motion
was in straight lines. But it is easy to see how the Copernican con-
ception was much better adapted to conceiving the dynamics of
astronomy than the Ptolemaic. The models on the former system
would have made the directions which the planets tended to take
straight lines with regard to the room, and hence coincident with the
directions which the miniature spheres of the orrery would actually
take if they were free, while, on the other plan, the bodies would
have to describe complex curves in the room. This is the grand
advantage in the Copernican conception, but, we need hardly say
again, it is one of mere subjective logical convenience.
JAMES K. THACKER.
Yale College, U.S.A.
Notes and Discussions. 267
MR. G. S. HALL OX THE PERCEPTION OF COLOUR.
MR. G. STANLEY HALL has an interesting though somewhat
speculative paper on this subject in the Proceedings of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, VoL III., p. 402 (1878). Purkinje,
Helniholtz, aiid others had noted that if two parallel fibres of spider's
web be brought very close together on a white ground the inter-
mediate white line, when closely examined with one eye, presents a
beaded or zigzag outline. This phenomenon is explained by assuming
that the retinal image of such a line, falling across a row of cones
presumably arranged in alternate order (thus :::::), would
only excite activity in one cone, where it fell centrally, yet would
excite activity in halves of two adjacent cones, where it fell peripherally,
and would accordingly be cognised as twice as large in the latter case.
X"W, if it be true that the ultimate percipient elements are cones
of three varieties, corresponding to the colours red, green, and blue-
violet, it would follow that the individual cones which perceive any
one of these colours, say green, must be much more widely dispersed
over the retina, being at best only about one-third of the whole number.
Hence, with black lines on a green ground, or vice versd, the beaded
irregularity ought to be much greater than in the case of white light,
which would excite all three orders of cones.
To test this, Mr. Hall gummed ultimate fibres of silk white, red,
green, blue, and violet on a piece of black paper. It was found that
the wavy outlines were certainly not more, and apparently even less,
observable in the coloured than in the white fibres. Hence, if the
cause assigned to the beading be correct, it would seem that the
hypothesis of three orders of cones must be abandoned. Accordingly,
the author suggests that each cone may very probably be percipient of
light of all three orders, but of each in a different plane. He supposes
that minute segments or layers of the cone may vibrate sympathetically
in unison with light-undulations of a particular frequency. To test
this view, observations were made on positive after-images. Squares of
coloured paper were fastened to a strip of pasteboard, and a movable
slit allowed any colour to be seen by itself, without effects of contrast.
Positive after-images were formed, first, by rapidly opening and
shutting the eyes some eight or ten times, at the rate of once a second ;
and afterwards by illuminating the squares with the electric spark. A
solar spectrum was also similarly observed with a movable slit. "SVith
colours near the middle of the spectrum, the first phase of the after-
image is nearly or quite white. But red and violet undergo no such
paling. In the after-image of a short total spectrum, the middle still
seemed nearly or quite white. Even when thrown upon red and violet
paper, which by absorbing most of the green rays got rid of the greater
intensity of the middle, the effect was still the same.
Mr. Hall suggests the following possible explanation. Let
us assume that the cones are composed of transverse disks, each
answering, say by sympathetic vibration, to the action of light-waves
of corresponding periods. Then the perception of white light would
268 Notes and Discussions.
require the simultaneous agitation of most or all of these disks. Again,
let us assume these disks to be arranged in spectral order those
sensitive to red near the point of the cone, those answering to violet
near its base each disk being " transparent" (i.e., non-absorbent) to
all waves of greater length than its natural period. Then agitation of
a. group of medial disks might be mechanically communicated to the
groups on either side, and the wave of disturbance so aroused, passing
to both ends of the series, would set up a sensation of white ; while
the agitation of either end would not produce the same general
disturbance. Furthermore, pressure (mechanical or from congestion)
often causes pure coloured as well as white images. This effect,
unexplained on the hypothesis of three sets of cones, is explicable on
the new hypothesis, if we assume that increasing degrees of pressure
excite waves of disturbance of increasing length. The facts of red-
blindness (true Daltonism) are also explained by supposing that the
exposed ends of the cones, among the coarse pigment-cells of the choroid,
are those perceptive of red ; and it might be expected that the cone-
ends would be often injured or undeveloped, as indeed the microscopist
frequently finds them. [Actual post-mortem observations on the
retinas of known red-blind persons would here be valuable.] The
sudden decrease in saturation on mixing two tones of green, and the
comparative paucity of distinct hues of green, considering the total
length occupied by that colour upon the spectrum, are accounted for by
the instability which the green-percipient disks would possess, owing
to their central position and the ready way in which a wave of
disturbance, originated in them and passing each way, would produce
the impression of an admixture of white light. The sympathetic
function at the centre of the cones would thus be less specialised than
at either end. The paper concludes by a discussion of the bearing
which late observations on the " retinal purple " would have upon the
new theory, and by some notice of its connexion with various other
modern hypotheses. The author modestly puts forward his ingenious
suggestions in the most tentative form ; and further facts or elucida-
tions in the light of his aperqu woiild be valuable. Its relation to the
subject of so-called colour-blindness in particular would seem to merit
the attention of specialists.
GRANT ALLEN.
PROFESSOR HERZEN ON " THE PHYSICAL LAW OP CONSCIOUSNESS ".
THE following is an abstract of a memoir by Professor Herzen of
Florence, which has been read at the Accademia dei Lincei in
Rome on Jan. the 5th, and will appear in the next volume of the
Proceedings of the Lincei :
" After having pointed out the fundamental principles of modern
Monism, according to which, in the organic as in the inorganic sphere,
the words ' force ' and ' matter ' do not stand for two entities that either
work together or are in conflict with one another, but for mental abstrac-
tions answering to the two aspects, material and dynamical, of any pheno-
menon, or to diverse manifestations of an unique substance, whose absolute
Notes and Discussions. 269
nature remains unknowable for us, the author proceeds to treat of the
thorough disagreement that exists amongst the most eminent monistic
psycho-physiologists on the subject of the participation of consciousness in
central nervous activity. Whilst all admit that there is no essential differ-
ence between the activity of the encephalic and that of the spinal nervous
centres, yet some hold that consciousness is merely a phenomenon fre-
quently concomitant with, but not necessary to, the activity of all nervous
centres, which can act equally v:ell without it ; other thinkers hold, on the
contrary, that consciousness constantly accompanies the activity of every
nervous centre. G. H. Lewes and Dr. Maudsley are typical champions of
these two rival opinions in the field of modern English psychology.
" According to the author, both of these opinions are at once true and
false true, in so far as each starts from one of the two aspects of psychical
activity, false in so far as each neglects too much the aspect that forms
the point of departure of the rival theory ; so that each, in consequence of
this neglect, after having grazed the truth, fails to grasp it. He believes
that the truth is to be found in the synthesis of the two rival opinions,
which synthesis it has been his endeavour to effect ; and he proposes, under
the name of ' physical law of consciousness,' a formula that embraces every
act of any nervous centre, encephalic or spinal, from the most intensely
conscious of intellectual acts, down to the most unconsciously automatic of
reflex movements.
" Starting from the point of view of absolute Monism, he contends that a
psychical act, objectively considered, is a special molecular movement
induced in .the central nervous elements either by an impression from
without, conveyed to them by afferent nerves, or by a reflex sensation (from
within) : it does not become ' psychical ' until the molecular vibrations in
question have been communicated to some cell of the grey matter, and it
ceases to be psychical the moment the vibrations cease, or quit the cell to
pass into efferent nerve-fibres and be discharged in the shape of muscular
movement. The phenomenon taken in its totality presents the following
two phases : First, decomposition of the substance of the nervous ele-
ments, and liberation of the latent energy stored up in them, or of the work
represented by it ; secondly, reconstitution of their substance and storing up
of latent energy destined to furnish future discharges. The author cam
the first, nerro-psychical disintegration : the second, nervo-psycldcal n-
ration. Re-integration always takes place according to a mode determined
by the mode of the disintegration that preceded it ; so that after its func-
tional disintegration the nervous element, originally integrated according
to the evolutional type of the animal to which it belongs, does not return to
the state it was in before discharge, but acquires a disposition that enables
it to discharge with increased facility along the lines of precedent discharges.
This is, in fact, a necessary condition of the evolution or progressive develop-
ment of brain or mind.
" The author, having premised these considerations, which he deems
demonstrated by modern biological research, formulates as follows his
' physical law of consciousness ' :
Consciousness never accompanies either the integration or the re-inte-
gration of the nervous elements ; it only accompanies their functional
disintegration ; its intensity is directly as the intensity of the disintegration
and inversely as the readiness with which the internal energy of the nervous
element is discharged upon some other element, sensitive or motor, central
or peripheral.
"After bringing forward various objective and subjective data of obser-
vation in support of this law, in so far as it regards the activities of the
cortical centres of the cerebral hemispheres, the author proceeds to show
270 Critical Notices.
that it applies equally well to the activities of the sensori-motor centres of
the base of the brain, and, finally, to those of the spinal centres. His ex-
position leads to the result that, whilst the habit of continual and uniform
reaction against uniform impressions has ended in the reduction of the
medulla spinalis of the higher vertebrates to a condition of complete auto-
matism, as regards sensorial centres, the variety of impressions received by
them, and the resulting diversity of motor and other reactions, have pre-
vented their reduction to a like state of automatism. In the cortical
centres, the constant variety, progress, and complexity of their functions,
render impossible the reduction of their activities to the state of auto-
matism ; unless, indeed, there exist a limit beyond which psychical
development cannot pass. If such a limit exist, there must come a day,
distant though we must hope it be, in which the psychical activity of the
human brain will have exhausted all its possibilities of further evolution,
and become little by little instinctive, reflex, automatic, mechanical, such
as has already become that of animals whose poorer organisation contained
fewer possibilities of development.
" The author believes that his law is applicable to every functional act of
any nervous centre ; and it unites in a conciliatory synthesis the opposite
opinions of Lewes and of Maudsley, by showing that the former, preoccu-
pied with the phase of disintegration in nervo-psychical processes, sees
consciousness everywhere ; whilst the latter, preoccupied with the phase of
re-integration, everywhere sees unconsciousness."
VIII. CEITICAL NOTICES.
Hume. By Professor HUXLEY. (' English Men of Letters Series,'
edited by John Morley.) London: Macmillan, 1879. Pp.208.
This short account by a man of science of one who was more than a
man of letters presents some notable features. The biographical part,
consisting of forty-four pages in all, is less detailed than could be
wished or might have been expected : still the author, with charac-
teristic art, has managed to convey by a few firm strokes a very
distinct impression of the manner of man that Hume was ; and, few as
the pages are, they yet include well-selected representative extracts
not only from Hume's charming correspondence but also from the
more popular of his essays. He is thus not inadequately porfrtrayed
on most of his sides ; nor are his foibles and prejudices by any means
forgotten in the general picture that is given of placid strength of
mind and character. In particular, the reader may carry away from
the sketch the essentially true impression of Hume's philosophical
activity that here was a man fitted as few have ever been to sound all
the deepest questions of human concern, yet withal one who did not
live for that kind of work. The precocious development of Hume's
speculative ardour was -followed by its contented repression in mature
years ; while his striving after momentary effect and personal distinc-
tion is visible alike in the more than candid self-exposure of his
earlier philosophical manner and, when that failed of the mark, ill
the polished reserve and studied inuendo of his later. Prof. Huxley
Critical Notices. 271
makes no pretence that he is dealing with one of the loftier spirits of
the race. But if there is one man more than another whose thinking
has to be reckoned with in these days, it is Hume, and, such as it is. it
can have no more fitting interpreter than a man of science.
Though he shows his sense of its exceeding importance by giving to
the Philosophy more than three-fourths of the whole space at his
command, Prof. Huxley does not of course aim at producing a
balanced exposition of the whole. \Vhen he has traced Hume's
account of the origin of knowledge up to the point when the general-
ising and objectifying agency of Language comes into play in the
form of propositions, he is forced to confine himself to those philoso-
phical topics that are of more general interest to mankind, and which,
probably on that account, were those that continued to engage Hume's
own thoughts after the wider-ranging activity of his youthful intellect
was spent. Upon such subjects as Miracles in relation to the Order
of Xature, the Soul, Theism, &c., Hume's ideas get, in some eighty
pages, that sympathetic exposition, mixed with vigorous and inde-
pendent criticism, that were to be expected from his present interpreter.
In this place, however, we may rather note a few points in Prof.
Huxley's treatment of the foundations of Hume's philosophy, which he
has sought to repair and make good in the light of more advanced
knowledge.
He would amend the scheme of the sources of knowledge by adding
to Hume's enumeration of the senses " the muscular sense, which, had
not come into view in Hume's time " ; by extruding the passions or
emotions (Hume's so-called ' impressions of reflection ') as being all of
them "complex states arising from the close association of ideas of
pleasure and pain with other ideas " ; but, chiefly, by positing " as
ultimate irresolvable facts of conscious experience " three feelings or
"impressions of relation" namely, co-existence, succession, similarity
and dissimilarity. He is, of course, perplexed by Hume's unaccount-
able wavering in the matter of Relations, and sees the need of making
a clear and decisive affirmation on this all-important head ; but,
whatever may be said against Hume's uncertain enumeration of the
formal elements, it would not be easy for Prof. Huxley to prove his
own sufficient for the explanation of knowledge as exhibited by any
human mind. Xor is his statement of the material elements up to
the mark of modern psychological science when he is content, under
the head of Sensations, to add to the usual five senses " Resistance
(the muscular sense)," and makes " Pleasure and Pain " a co-ordinate
chief head. Impressions (1) of Sensation, (2) of Pleasure and Pain,
(3) of Relations (as above) are hardly an adequate scheme of the
" Contents of the Mind ".
How the impressions arise or come to pass in consciousness is the
next question dealt with, and here Prof. Huxley, while noting again a
want of decision in Hume's answers, due (as he thinks) partly to his
apparent unfamiliarity with even such knowledge of the physiological
conditions of consciousness as was then current, declares for himself
" that the materials of consciousness are products of cerebral activity,"
272 Critical Notices.
" effects or products of material phenomena," or, as he says more
explicitly in another connexion, " products of the inherent properties
of the thinking organ, in which|they lie potentially, before they are
called into existence by their appropriate causes ". In calling them,
however, effects of material phenomena, he is careful to explain that
he means nothing inconsistent with the idealistic position " that
whenever those states of consciousness which we call sensation or
emotion or thought come into existence, complete investigation will
show good reason for the belief that they are preceded by those other
phenomena of consciousness to which we give tne names of matter
and motion ". And whether these phenomena, in the last resort, are
due to the evolution of the mind as a "Leibnitzian monad or Fichtean
world generating-ego," or are symbols (not copies) of " a real some-
thing " in relation with " the part of that something which we call
the nervous system " are two suppositions which, in his view, are
equally possible in themselves and equally beyond the possibility of
being either of them exclusively established.
There is some very striking expression, on p. 81, in the short develop-
ment of this view, but the author seems open to the charge of not keeping
sufficiently apart two different kinds of consideration. There is, of
course, a good meaning in saying that sensations arise when certain
changes are effected in the nervous system, and, in this point of view,
do not arise without such antecedents or (more strictly) accompani-
ments. There is also a good meaning in saying that the physiological
accompaniments have themselves an expression in terms of conscious
experience, and, from this higher point of view, cannot be allowed to
be the absolute conditions of mind which the materialists suppose.
But what is of chief importance is that the two points of view should
be clearly severed, ana this they hardly are when it is said that the
phenomena of sensation, &c., are, in the " idealistic " point of view, to be
regarded as " preceded by those other phenomena of consciousness to
which we give the names matter and motion". From the idealistic,
which is the philosophical, point of view, there is in truth no question
of a relation of sensation or other subjective experience to anything
that is ever called matter and motion. When we speak of such
a relation, we are at the other point of view the point of view of
positive science. The question of the " origin " of states of conscious-
ness is, in fact, an ambiguous one ; and this, it may be added, makes
it especially important in describing their physical relations, which is
one question, not to speak of them as "products" or "effects" of
nervous processes, when such terms, if at all strictly interpreted, must
be held to exclude, or at all events prejudge, the other, or philo-
sophical, question. It is possible that Hume refrained from such a
statement as Professor Huxley offers less from ignorance of such
physiology as was accessible to him than because he remembered that
he was engaged upon a philosophical inquiry.
On the historic question of Innate Ideas so lightly skimmed over by
Hume, Professor Huxley takes occasion to quote some passages from
Descartes' minor writings, which should be noted by students of the
Critical Notices. 273
history of philosophy as showing how circumspect that thinker
could be, when he chose, in his statement of the relation of reason to
experience in knowledge. More particularly, they prove him to have
clearly anticipated the kind of answer which Leibnitz, in the
Noiii'tanx E.?sais, takes, and usually gets, the credit of having made
to the arguments of Locke. In comparison with Descartes, Hume is
rightly charged by his critic with an imperfect appreciation of the
import of the question and an inadequate resolution of it.
Rightly, too (as I think) to refer but to one other point of the
detailed exposition does Professor Huxley, when dealing with
Hume's account of "Abstract Ideas," in relation to language, lay
stress on the different cases of concepts, as they stand related or not
to definite percepts. "While highly abstract qualities of things or
relations amongst things may safely be pronounced unthinkable with-
out the help of definite marks and signs, it has been too readily
assumed by nominalists that the corresponding words are in like
manner indispensable to the mind's comprehension of sensible objects.
In spite of what Berkeley, once for all, so triumphantly urged against
the easy-going assumption of conceptualist thinkers that there is no
more difficulty in the definite representation of generals than of
singulars, the circumstances in which concepts are formed are in fact
so different as to preclude the possibility of making any hard and fast
statement as to the representability or non-representability of generals.
When definite percepts are experienced with well-marked common
features overpowering individual differences, it is quite intelligible,
according to psychological law, that there should arise representatively
some schema more or less definite which for purposes of (general)
thought may stand for the multitude of singulars. This seems to be
the view that Prof. Huxley seeks to express in less technical language,
and in illustration he very happily refers to Mr. Galton's production
of the typical face of a class by superposition of portraits of similar
individuals on the same photographic plate.
The earlier chapter on "The Object and Scope of Philosophy," with
which Prof. Huxley passes to the second and more serious part of his
task, deserves, in conclusion, to be still more particularly noted.
Though it may not contain anything that is unfamiliar to philosophical
students, it is really, for its length, a very good statement of the
meaning of philosophy in relation to the sciences and also, more
especially, of the relation of philosophy to psychology. Taking Kant's
famous statement of the business of Philosophy that it answers the
: three questions : " What can I know ]" " What ought I to do 1" and
! " For what may I hope ?' and bringing back the last two questions
. to the first, he proceeds to maintain that, while that question is dis-
tinct from the question of Science or the Sciences : " What do I
know 1" it can be answered, in its different bearings, only by reference
to the results of one branch of science, namely Psychology, which
investigates the actual contents of the mind. Here are some of his
sentences, bearing on the question of the scientific standing of
Psychology :
274 Critical Notices.
" Psychology is a part of the science of life or biology, which differs
from the other branches of that science merely in so far as it deals with
the psychical, instead of the physical, phenomena of life. As there is an
anatomy of the body, so there is an anatomy of the mind : the psychologist
dissects mental phenomena into elementary states of consciousness as the
anatomist resolves limbs into tissues and tissues into cells. ... As
the physiologist inquires into the way in which the so-called ' functions '
of the body are performed, so the psychologist studies the so-called
' faculties ' of the mind. . . . On whatever ground we term physiology
science, psychology is entitled to the same appellation."
Nothing, again, could be more pointed than his rejection of Comte's
plea against the possibility of mental introspection ; and when Hume
himself in the remarkable passage of the Introduction to the
Human Nature, where he argues for an extension of the area of
psychological observation to the broader field of human social activity
seems for a moment to anticipate Comte's view in a more guarded
form, Professor Huxley is immediately ready with the very pertinent
remark that "the manner in which Hume constantly refers to the
observation of the contents and ftie processes of his own mind clearly
shows that he has here inadvertently overstated the case." It is
refreshing to come across one "man of science" and him a leader
among his fellows who can enter so sympathetically and thoroughly
into the conditions of psychological inquiry ; and it may be hoped
that his words will not fall idly upon ears that are deaf to voices from
within the psychological camp itself. Professor Huxley's appreciation
of the scientific character of Psychology contrasts very favourably
with the different opinion specious but hollow to which Professor
Clerk Maxwell has lately committed himself in a bright review of a
dull book (see Nature December 19, 1878).
EDITOB.
Habit and Intelligence : A Series of Essays on the Laws of Life and
Mind. By JOSEPH JOHN MURPHY. Second edition, illustrated,
thoroughly revised and mostly re-written. London : Macmillan
& Co. 1879. Pp. xl., 583.
Mr. Murphy has republished his work on organic and mental
evolution in one volume, with so many alterations that, as he justly
claims, it may be practically regarded almost as a new book. The
Introduction to the first edition, consisting of an essay on historical
methods in science, has been suppressed : while the Preface to the
first edition does duty as Introduction to the present issue. All the
chapters dealing with physical science, all the resumes of facts bearing
on evolution, together with the chapter on the Senses, and the three
chapters on the Classification, the History and the Logic of the
Sciences, have also been omitted, " to avoid making the work too
bulky with material which is not directly relevant to its main subject ".
On the other hand, several new chapters have been inserted, which
may conveniently be summed up under two heads. First come three
Critical Notices. 275
chapters on the Facts of Variation, on the Effect of Change of Condi-
tions, and on Mimicry, Colour and Sexual Selection. These consist
mainly of short summaries, giving the gist of such among Darwin's
great works as have appeared since the publication of Mr. Murphy's
first edition, together with a few excerpts from Mr. Wallace. Professor
Mivart and the current scientific periodicals. Secondly, the purely
new constructive matter of the edition is contained in five chapters on
Classification and Parallel Variation ; Classification and the Fixation
of Characters ; Structure in Anticipation of Function ; the Origin of
Man ; and Automatism. " The chapter on Metamorphosis and Meta-
genesis is mostly new. The psychological chapters are re- written and
much improved ; and there are few chapters which are not in a con-
siderable degree re-written." In short, the alterations and additions
bring the author's original conception (with few exceptions) up to the
level of the most modern discoveries and theories.
It will be obvious from the above summary that very little of the
fresh matter comes strictly within the domain of MIND. Xevertheless
the subjects of which the new essays treat have so many close rela-
tions both to Psychology and to Philosophy, that some short account
of their contents may not be undesirable here.
The chapter on the Facts of Variation is a brief review of Mr.
Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, and
adds little or nothing to the existing stock of knowledge on the
subject. That on Classification and Parallel Variation endeavours to
show, after Professors Cope and Mivart, that " transverse affinities "
exist between the species of different genera ; that is to say, that
certain species of each genus answer to certain species of other genera
a system which may best be illustrated after Mr. Murphy's own
manner as follows, where A, B and C stand for genera and 1, 2 and
3 for species. The transverse affinities will then be seen thus :
A 1 , A 2 , A s .
B 1 , B 2 , B 3 .
C 1 , C 2 , C 3 .
These supposed facts of Parallel Variation seem to Professor Cope and
Mr. Murphy inconsistent with the belief that organic evolution is
mainly or entirely due to natural selection. But the cases alleged in
defence of the theory seem ridiculously inadequate to support so
weighty a conclusion. If we must bring in a dens ex machina to
account for such occasional parallelisms, we ought at least to be shown
a difjnus vindice nodus: whereas the system as propounded by Mr.
Murphy looks to an outside observer quite as fanciful as the quinary
classifications of earlier biologists. Where the habits of life are
similar we should expect direct and indirect adaptation to produce
great similarities of structure in very different animals or plants, as in
the humming-birds and sun-birds, the cetacea and fishes, or the
euphorbias and cacti. Indeed, Mr. Murphy himself makes so many
admissions upon this point, as well as upon the influence of correla-
tion of characters, that he practically answers his own arguments.
The chapter on Classification and Fixation of Characters endeavours
276 Critical Notices.
to prove that natural selection will not account for the relative fixity
of unimportant specific characters. But, waiving the question whether
any such relative fixity really exists (a point upon which a certain
amount of incredulity may be felt ; for any man who has specially
studied a small group of species say, for example, the British snails
must have been struck by the infinite number of varieties and
individual peculiarities), let us take the particular case which Mr.
Murphy alleges the arrangement of the parts of the flower in plants.
Now this, it might seem to many, is not an unimportant character,
from the functional point of view, but is rather a matter of prime
importance, as influencing the proper fertilisation of the pistil. And
even if it were not so, would not constant crossing (as I have endeav-
oured to show elsewhere) necessarily result in a relative uniformity
and definiteness by neutralising individual peculiarities, as, for
example, in the shape of bones inherited from remote ancestors, as
much as in mere spots or lines of colour ? And are we ever sure that
any character, however apparently useless, is really so 1 ? Do not
works like Darwin's Fertilisation of Orchids and Kerner's Flowers and
their Unbidden Guests teach us from day to day that some unseen
purpose lurks in the most insignificant detail of every plant and every
animal ] We ought at least to make perfectly sure that we know
all about a particular character before we dogmatically assert that it is
functionally useless. But even if we grant Mr. Murphy's argument
all possible licence, it would still seem that comparatively functionless
structures, handed down from an immense number of ancestors, ought
above all others to be kept constant by neutralisation of individual
variations.
The chapter on Mimicry, Colour, and Sexual Selection contains a
short summary of Darwin's and Wallace's views on these subjects.
But Mr. Murphy does not seem to be acquainted with Sir John Lub-
bock's researches upon the optical perceptions of insects, as he refers
to a much less conclusive observation on the spectrum of the firefly's
light : and if he had consulted Mr. Wallace's Tropical Nature (pp.
189 ff.) he would probably have modified his remarks with regard
to the difficulty of understanding how the first steps in mimetic
resemblance are taken, though his application of the principle of
" local resemblance " to these cases certainly deserves consideration for
its ingenuity. Mr. Murphy seems overmuch inclined, also, to use the
word " beauty " in too limited and human a sense. For example, he
observes that gasteropods " certainly have not a mental nature suffi-
ciently developed to appreciate beauty," and therefore he argues that
the colours of their shells cannot be due to sexual selection. But
surely it is going rather far to talk of " mental nature " and " apprecia-
tion of beauty " in connexion with so simple a taste as that for bright
colour. It may well be doubted whether any gasteropods (except
possibly the strombidse) have eyes sufficiently developed to distinguish
colours : but, granting this, there seems no reason why they should
not be attracted by bright hues as readily as any higher species. At
any rate, it is certain that gasteropods can perceive light, and are
Critical Notices. 277
attracted by it in the same manner as insects. If, therefore, they do
net receive pleasure from the stimulation of colour, it is probably
because they are unable to perceive it.
The most striking chapter in the whole book, however, is that which
deals with Structure in Anticipation of Function. It cannot be denied
that Mr. Murphy has here got hold of the great crux which evolu-
tionists have hitherto failed to solve. Of course the difficulty has
struck every Parwinian already : but Mr. Murphy uses it with much
force, not as a mere friendly suggestion, but as a weapon of hostile
import. Xo doubt the origin of certain structures, such as the mam-
mary glands or the wings of birds, is exceedingly difficult to under-
stand : because it is hard to see how they could be of any use to* the
animal until they had reached a considerable degree of development.
But it is too much to say dogmatically of the rudimentary notochord
in the ascidian larva (to take a concrete instance) that no t: possible
benefit to the animal itself will account for it ". From this and
similar examples the author draws the conclusion that " as there is
Foresight in organic development, there must be Intelligence". This
intelligence is seen in the evolution of the Crustacea, which cannot be
explained (it is asserted) by the action of the environment on the
organism ; in the metamorphoses of medusae ; in the transition from
fishes to air-breathers ; and in the " preparations for bird-structure "
in the dinosaurians. In all these instances it might be wiser to
acknowledge our ignorance of the real course of evolution than to call
in an unknown agent to account for half-known facts.
Finally, the chapter on the Origin of Man takes up, with like
intent, Mr. "\Vallace's view that natural selection is inadequate to
explain the evolution of the human brain, because primitive man is
supposed to have had a brain developed beyond his actual attain-
ments. If we remember, however, the important principle pointed
out by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that brain is proportionate to the com-
plexity of the muscular movements performed, as well as to their
number, it will appear that the central nervous system of primitive
man a talker, an instrument maker, an artist, a hunter, a fisherman,
and a warrior is really not more than that required by his actual
attainments, which are so infinitely ^uore varied than those of the
highest anthropoid ape. Mr. Murphy himself almost allows as
much, for he says that language alone may be sufficient to account for
the difference a very questionable statement, as it seems to me.
he then goes on to say that this only removes the difficulty one
step back, as language itself is developed among savages far beyond
I the needs of their actual life. It is curious that practical researches
into several special vocabularies have led more than one observer to
the diametrically opposite conclusion, that language is only developed
in exact proportion to the needs of its users. From these and other
alleged facts, Mr. Murphy, like Mr. Wallace, deduces the belief that
an Intelligence has presided over the development of man. But
while Mr. Wallace seems to believe that the Intelligence supervened,
iK) to speak, at a late date, and need only be invoked after the appear-
19
278 Critical Notices.
ance of the quadrumana to account for the special peculiarities of
mankind, Mr. Murphy thinks that Intelligence has guided the whole
course of organic evolution, from the root upward. Again, while the
former author regards this Intelligence apparently as external to the
organism, the latter considers it as immanent. The phrase " uncon-
scious intelligence " which he applies to its lower forms might even
remind one of Von Hartmann. On the other hand, Mr. Murphy
disclaims the imputation of pantheism, and seems to consider himself
a theist, though on this point he speaks with apparent reserve. The
new edition leaves us as much in the dark as to the nature of the
immanent Intelligence as did the former one (if not even more so) :
and it must be confessed that the reader lays down the book with no
rery clear conception of its ultimate intention.
On the whole Habit and Intelligence, now as before, represents
that class of beliefs which form convenient resting-places between two
theories, the old and the new. At bottom it is a compromise, a
reconciliation between evolution and design. Like most other recon-
ciliations, it will doubtless satisfy for a while a certain number of
timid and inquiring minds, just as Hugh Miller's reconciliation of
geology and Genesis satisfied similar spirits in a past generation. But
Mr. Murphy is too conspicuously candid, honest and manly for a good
apologist. He admits too nmch and allows the strong points of his
adversaries too easily. The new chapters state with great clearness
the principal difficulties in the way of accepting natural selection as
the sole cause of organic progress : but they also state with too great
emphasis the reasons for not regarding these difficulties as final.
GRANT ALLEN.
Phdnomenologie des sittlichen BewiLsstseins. Prolegomena zu jeder
klinftigen Ethik. Von EDUABD VON HARTMANN. Berlin :
Duncker, 1879. Pp. xxiv. 871.
It was in 1869 that Von Hartmann took the reading world of
Germany by storm by the publication of his Philosophy of the
Unconscious. Since then edition has rapidly followed edition (the
most recent being the 8th, published last year, in two volumes), and
its author has sent forth at short intervals other striking compositions
from his productive workshop. Now, to show that the creative
energy is still unspent, we have a freshly-written volume of 870
pages on a department of thought hitherto neglected by him. This
last performance will hardly have the success of the Philosophy of
the Unconscious, lacking the charm of a novel theme and that
audacity of imagination which characterised the earlier work ; but
it is marked by an originality of treatment and artistic completeness
soineAvhat unusual in a treatise on morals. Von Hartmann, as is
well knoAvn, possesses in a high degree the ability to write for the
general public without being superficial, the power of handling
the profoundest themes of thought and life without incurring the
Critical Notices. 279
reproach of learned dulness. He always refuses to look through
other people's spectacles, and accordingly makes the reader feel that
the problems he is dealing with are really personal problems, not
merely abstract questions to be debated in the schools as matter
of speculative curiosity. But again, our author is anything but a
merely " popular " thinker in the sense that he carries the discussion
just far enough to satisfy the demands of common sense. On the
contrary he has perhaps an inordinate desire to probe things always
to their very bottom, and is never satisfied unless he has carried to its
extreme consequence the principle he finds himself logically necessi-
tated to accept. Thus, in the present book, although it is called, and
is for the most part, a Phenomenology, or examination of moral
phenomena, he cannot refrain from adding a third section on the
Urgrund of morality or an account of absolute moral principles.
I mention this merely as a characteristic of the author, without pro-
nouncing on its wisdom or unwisdom. The English mind tends to
err (if error it be) too much on the other side for a reader not to feel
a shock of pleasant surprise when he takes up a book, professedly
addressed to the world at large, which considers a final metaphysic
indispensable to the regulation of the commonest life.
Before entering upon his main task, namely, an examination of the
genuine moral consciousness, Von Hartmann devotes about a hundred
pages to a consideration of Pseudo-morality, or those principles on
which the human mind first relied to guide its action, and which,
though really non-moral, were a necessary propaedeutic to the rise of
a true moral consciousness. These pseudo-moral principles are Egoism
and Heteronomy the principles of Self -Love and External Authority.
In the main these correspond with the principles of Antiquity
and the Middle Ages, at least so far as the Greek and Scholastic
philosophies are concerned. It was the well-being of the individual
which Greek (and Eoman) Ethics always assumed to be the final court
of appeal in matters of conduct, whether that well-being was positive
or negative pleasure, or the negation of pleasure in the form of apathy
or indifferentism. The natural mind has no doubt with regard to the
attainability of happiness, and the sympathies are for a long time
too weak to allow of any regard for the happiness of others, except as
an enforced limitation to the demands of self-love. But this naive
belief in the attainability of private happiness cannot last. The
hindrances to personal enjoyments are far too many for any one
living in the busy world, subjected to restraints on every hand, to
imagine that Individual Eudaemonism is terrestrially realisable.
Despairing of happiness here, the individualist throws his glance
beyond the confines of earth, and fondly imagines blessedness there.
This transcendent eudaemonism is exhibited in the ethics of the
early Chistians, but in that form is no more capable of satisfying the
requirements of the moral consciousness, than terrestrial egoism. For,
the social continuity being interrupted by death, everything that is
most precious here being unknown there, there is no support given to
just those forms of activity which are the most prominent in earthly
280 Critical Notices.
life. A transcendent egoism, moreover, which finds its moral norm in
the principle : That is right which will lead to heavenly happiness,
needs a revelation of the celestial code, thus paving the way for the
next principle of Heterononiy, or External Authority.
He who deliberately makes his own happiness his end is forced to
surrender one pleasure after another, in order to retain some chance of
happiness at all And this course continues, until it is at last found
that the positive eudaemonism, with which the individual started, has
"become negative eudaemonism. Hedonism passes into Cynicism.
First apathy, then contempt for life. The Stoic's self-renunciation, or
moral inditferentism, passes into utter disgust for every form of
earthly action. But there is one step more to take. Life being
discovered to be worthless, why consent any longer to bear its daily
burden ? The choice lies between Suicide and Asceticism. If there
be no future life, suicide would be the more rational ; if this life be
not all, asceticism might be the more prudent course, but only at the
cost of rendering continued existence utterly valueless, and thereby
rendering it utterly meaningless. Egoism has thus ended by becoming
" bankrupt ". Its last word is Self-renunciation, denial of the
principle itself. But a man who has discovered the vanity of the
search for personal pleasure, if he shrinks from the practically logical
consequence of his guiding-principle, will only be able to evade that
consequence, by surrendering his self-confidence and submitting to an
authority outside himself. The Egoist has gained something by the
practical discipline of life he has learned the necessity of self-renun-
ciation, and that is the contribution of this pseudo-moral Egoism to
the erection of the moral fabric. But there is something more
wanted before the human mind can become truly moral : there is the
need of an engrained reverence for Law. And that reverence must be
gained through obedience to rules authoritatively imposed from with-
out. Von Hartmann briefly reviews the various forms of Heterononiy,
the authority of the Family, the State, the Church, the Divine Will,
and shows the relative value of each, according to the intellectual
elevation of those submitted to the rule ; but they cease to be sufficient
as soon as the individual regains the self-trust which the failure of
his first attempt at self-guidance led him to renounce. Summoning
up courage at length to criticise the authorities which profess to offer
an infallible help, he discovers that they are only mediately authori-
ties, that they are only to be trusted so far as they repose on right
reason and pure feeling. At this stage the heteronomous education
is completed, and henceforth the rule of action can only be autono-
mous, the genuine moral consciousness being now born.
We now enter upon the main theme of the book. This second
part has three divisions the Springs of Morality, the Ends of
Morality, the Ultimate ground of Morality ; the largest space being
given to the Springs of Morality. These are the subjective principles
of Taste, Feeling, and Eeason. The question to be answered first is :
Do we instantaneously give expression to feelings and judgments on
actions, entirely without regard to their bearing on personal well-
Critical Notices. 281
being, or without reference to their conformity with any external code 1
The answer is that we do, and in a three-fold form. Goodness or
badness is implied in our aesthetic judgments, we feel drawn to or
repelled from certain modes of conduct, and we peremptorily judge
this course to be right and that to be wrong. It should be observed
that the question is not here raised as to the genesis of these mental
phenomena. The inquiry is one merely of matter of fact, not of
psychological origin. It would not be possible in the present notice
to review in detail all the forms of the subjective moral principles
here described. Under the head of Taste, the author treats of the prin-
ciples of Harmony, Perfection, and the Ethical Ideal. The justifica-
tion for taking Taste first is not that it is the more elementary
psychical form, yielding in that respect to Feeling ; but because it is
more independent of the special object-matter, and therefore seems
better adapted to lead the mind to acknowledge the reality of sub-
jective morality as a general form of consciousness.
Indispensable as Feeling is as a moral factor, it is an error to found
a system on this most subjective of all principles. Love, compas-
sion, even the feeling of duty itself, have a moral value, not in their
own right, but only so far as they unconsciously serve an end ; in
other words, they must be rationalised before they can be pronounced
ethical Feeling and Taste are particular and concrete in their appli-
cation, but the Moral Law is general and abstract ; hence Reason must
be taken into the account as the third and highest subjective principle.
Ton Hartmann treats at great length of the rational impulse. A
discussion of Moral Freedom leads him to examine fully the Free
"\Vill controversy, his conclusion being that the belief is the result of
a confusion of self-positing with immediate-positing in willing, and irre-
concilable with the fundamental conditions of moral life. The highest
form of subjective rationalism is to be found in the idea of purpose
or design. The world can only be rationally conceived as a system
of graduated ends. Refuse to admit the idea of purpose (Zweck),
and Morality becomes impossible ; for if there be no objective ends
on which the subjective principles of autonomy may repose, there is
nothing for it but to fall back upon the pseudo-morality of Egoism,
or the arbitrary commands of any power which may have strength
enough to enforce obedience.
"vTe must pass on then to the objective ends which the subjective
principles of Taste, Feeling, and Reason unconsciously imply, and
from which they receive their moral character. A man, who has come
to perceive the impossibility of setting-up his own happiness as end,
will find no difficulty in positing the happiness of others as the proper
end of action. Social Eudaemonism is an objective moral end largely
recognised, not least in England ; John Stuart Mill's essay On
'tarianism being recommended to the inquirer as furnishing the
best statement of the doctrine. The recommendation is not very
easy to understand, however, because when Hartmann comes to
examine the essay critically, he can hardly find language strong
enough to express his contempt for its superficiality and confusion of
282 Critical Notices.
thought. He holds that Mill either failed to see that Egoistic and
Universalistic Hedonism are radically opposed principles ; or in order
to bribe common sense to accept the severer doctrine, perpetrated the
pious fraud of representing the endeavour after other people's happi-
ness as the same thing as furthering one's own. The identity of
private and public interest herein implied is phenomenally impossible,
individuality necessitating antagonism to the very end of the chapter.
The stress laid by Mill on Sympathy, and his demand for a Religion
of Humanity, should be regarded as unconscious admissions that
a phenomenally objective rule cannot be independent, but on the one
hand requires the support of subjective feeling, and on the other
points to a deeper ground of Morality in the metaphysical unity of
the human race. Suppose, now, the principle of the "greatest
happiness of the greatest number " to be erected into an exclusive
objective moral end, the consequences would, in the view of our
author, be anything but desirable. A serious attempt to maximise
happiness would lead to an equality of possessions, the abolition of
motives to exertion, the reign of ignorance, and finally a reversion to the
most pernicious of all principles the diffusion of beliefs and illusions for
the sake of their agreeableness. Thus, all that the world has so pain-
fully striven for refinement of life, art, science would go down in
the flood of common-place comfort, tasteless art-products and Jesuitism.
One cannot help suspecting that Von Hartrnann, like the less-gifted of
his countrymen, has been scared by the rapid growth of late years of
the party of Social Democrats. Such plausibility as his description
of the consequences of Social Eudaemonism possesses, is only
obtained by the very tmphilosophic procedure of ignoring many of
the circumstances of the case, the result being a trivial solution of
an unreal problem. In considering what is for the happiness of
other human beings, the idea of happiness, as conceived by the
cultured few, will form a not unimportant element, so that that
universal re-animalisation, which our author announces as the social-
eudaemonistic goal, would be a simple impossibility. With regard to
the degradation of science and art, it is very doubtful whether the
best work even now is done as a result of the pressure of competi-
tion. Certainly the highest genius is not productive, either through
the stress of competition (which does not exist for it), or with an eye
to an appreciative public (which is usually at first lacking). Eut by the
time the levelling process contemplated has gone to extreme lengths,
we may suppose the love of truth and beauty will be so firmly rooted,
that bad art and pleasant fictions will be condemned even by the many.
Besides General Happiness, our author cites another objective
principle the Development of Culture. Allowing Social Eudaemonism
full right as a moral principle applicable to an existing generation, the
principle of Evolution is needed to supplement it, in view of humanity
being a continually growing organism. As the happiness of the
individual must often be sacrificed for the welfare of the community,
so the interests of an existing society must be made to bend to the
well-being of the future of the race. This is a point of view which
Critical Notices. 283
has no doubt hitherto been imperfectly adopted. Indeed, it could
hardly well be otherwise, seeing that Evolution in the elaborate form
of the doctrine as we now know it is so recent. It is, however,
probably owing to the slight regard that is paid to the needs of the
future, that our books on ethics have such an air of unreality about
them, and that so little has yet been done towards a scientific system.
Von Hartmann of course lays great stress on this aspect of morality,
as his philosophical system as a whole is in effect a Philosophy of
Progress, with Teleology as its corner-stone. The pursuit of general
happiness now -appears in its true light, as means to the awakening of
consciousness, wherein consists the raison d'etre of Humanity. The
moral world-order is the complete expression of the two one-sided
principles Social Eudaemonisin and Development of Culture. When
we severally play our parts in this world conceived as a system of ends,
freely surrendering our own welfare, or the welfare of a lower end for
the sake of a higher, we are then first truly moral. One thing is
dear by this time, that Morality cannot be divorced from theoretic
Philosophy. It may be shown most convincingly that man possesses
impulses of a social nature, that the pursuit of private pleasure is
doomed to disappointment ; still it is possible to deny the objective
validity of the so-called social principles, and in spite of the failure
of Egoistic Hedonism to assert the Absoluteness of the Ego. Yon
Hartmann rightly calls such a mental condition " the most horrible
that can be conceived " ; but he avers that to that state we must
all come at last, if our view of the world leave no room for an
objective Teleology. Phenomenal objective principles hang in the air
unless they are based on absolute moral principles which affirm the
identity of the essence of the individual with the essence of the
absolute. We are driven on to a Metaphysic of Morals, because, on
the one hand, the subjective principles can furnish no general rules,
and are dependent on the constitution of the individual ; on the
other, the objective principles, not being my principles, have no
constraining force. Xor will any mere combination of them suffice ;
they can only attain their proper influence when the aim of the
world is proved to be my aim, and my aim would have no signifi-
cance unless it were the aim of the whole. The foundation of
Morality then is supplied by four principles the monistic principle
of the essential identity of individuals, the religious principle of
essential identity with the absolute, the absolute principle of absolute
teleology as that of our own essence, the principle of redemption
(Erlusuny) or negative absolute-eudaeinonisrn.
The objective principles of right conduct (to which our subjective
consciousness pointed) were two that it was our duty to further the
general happiness, and that we were bound to sacrifice the well-being
of a lower order of existence for the sake of a higher. The endeavour
after the utmost possible happiness through a continual process of self-
renunciation such was found to be the content of right and moral
action. But man's life is a fraction of the Universal Life, his purpose
is a part of the Universal Purpose. Transfer the notion of Eudaemon-
284 Critical Notices.
ism (Happiness) to the Absolute, and regard the world-process, human
activity included, as a necessary aid to its attainment, and we have at
once Social Eudaeraonism and the self-denying principle of Evolution
made intelligible. The essence of all is One : that essence is non-
blessed. It endeavours after blessedness, an unattainable state, but
which can only be so demonstrated, when the absolute essence is
illuminated through the full development of consciousness. The
author of the Phenomenlogy of the Moral Consciousness is still eloquent
in praise of Schopenhauer, and has not receded from the stand-point
of the " Metaphysic of the Unconscious". Perfect Duty and true
Keligion are one to work to the utmost for the enlightenment of the
Absolute Will, and to do that work reverentially and lovingly, feeling
that we are labouring to abridge the pains of a God, the term of whose
suffering is at the discretion of his creatures. The difference between
this theology and that of the Christian Church, for instance, is that
we each and all are the very God who is awaiting deliverance.
Von Hartmaim considers he has now solved all the difficulties in
the way of a Theory of Moral Obligation. The challenge, as I under-
stand it, which he throws down to contemporary moralists is to
explain our moral consciousness (1) without basing morality on
ontology, and (2) without accepting the ontology which he propounds.
He is less concerned for the second point than the first. He thinks
his own Pessimism the only metaphysical creed capable of satisfying
all the requirements of the problem ; but should that opinion prove to
be ill-founded, the reasons for a metaphysical support to morality
would remain in full force.
W. C. COUPLAND.
FIEPI AIKAI02YNHS. The Fifth Book of the Nicomachean Ethics
of Aristotle. Edited for the Syndics of the University Press, by
HENRY JACKSON, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Cambridge : University Press, 1879. Pp. 125.
The correction of a few oversights in Bekker's text and critical
notes sums up the value of this edition. It is to be regretted, how-
ever, in the interest of those students who use Zell and Michelet, that
Mr. Jackson has not printed his collation of El. along with that of
Bekker's MSS. ; for Zell and Michelet derive their knowledge of El.
CN. and CCC. entirely from Wilkinson (1715), and an examination
of Book V. in CCC. has convinced me that Wilkinson's collation is
worse than useless, giving a perfectly false idea of the character of the
MS. which closely resembles K b without being a transcript of it. It
is probable that he is as misleading with regard to El.
Mr. Jackson's extensive re-arrangement of the Book is scientifically
inadmissible even as an hypothesis, because it cannot be decisively
tested. His test, lucidus ordo, is not decisive, for the author or
ancient editor may have been satisfied with much less order than Mr.
Jackson is ; and supposing " Dislocations," as he says, to have taken
Critical Notices. 285
place, we cannot deal with them after the manner of the editors of
Lucretius, by reconstructing an archetypal MS. The attempts at
least to reconstruct one have not been of a very promising nature, and
Mr. Jackson, I observe, does not notice them. Young students, how-
ever, will welcome Mr. Jackson's hicidus ordo ; and I can imagine
nothing more demoralising for them than the feeling that difficulties
be effaced in Mr. Jackson's way. Xor do I think much of Mr.
Jackson's order, even as a device in hermeneutic. E.g., his treatment
of 6 1-5 simply obliterates a valuable piece of dialectic. Surely
TO ai/T/7re7rof<?o'? in 3 is introduced to show, by reference to a prin-
ciple which neglects motives, that we must not overlook the Trpoaipeai<i
of the agent ( 1 and 2), while 4 and 5 analyse TO Tro\micov
BiKaiov and vofio* with the object of showing that we can infer an
unjust motive from the acts of the TrXeoW/rnf? at least.
Xowhere can I see in this edition any due appreciation of the
general philosophical bearings of Book V. ; and the Xotes on par-
ticular difficulties of interpretation not involving " dislocations " will
not help the student who possesses previous editions, if they do not
mislead him by their eccentricities. E.g., Mr. Jackson's eccentric
treatment of 5 9 is rendered unnecessary by the note of Michael
Ephesius ad loc. to the effect that TO -oiovv is ex vi termini the
superior producer ' The trades would perish unless, A supplying
wares of a superior bulk or quality, B were able to express this superi-
ority (eiraay^e TOVTO KOI toaoutov KOI TOIOV-QV) in terms of his own
inferior wares'. On 5 12, Mr. Jackson follows old grooves.
Although he speaks of " one pair of shoes on account," he fails to see,
from the prominence of vofnia^a in the context, that orav a\\a^wvrai
implies the exchange of A's goods for B's money, or rather credit, not
the exchange of goods by both parties. The merely puts the prin-
ciple stated in Eth. IX. i. 9 : that the receiver (TO e-epov unpov, the
inferior party) fixes the price, but before the goods are delivered. Mr.
Jackson s explanation of rj Kara &iap.npov ovgcvgi? (5 8) has been
anticipated by Mansel (Journ. of Class, and Sue. Philol i. 344, 1854).
To make TO -\(T? ti'xaiov (6 4) the genus of which TO cta-o-nKov
CIKOIOV, &c., are species, is to mistake the obvious purport of the con-
text, which states that TO e<nr. &c., do not realise the notion of
justice (TO Tr/jo? erepov) at all. ' \7r\Cct is a word with many shades of
meaning, and must always be interpreted in relation to its particular
context. Mr. Jackson's treatment of it here betrays unfamiliarity with
a very important point in Aristotelian usage. The beginner who adopts
Mr. Jackson's view here will see the whole Fifth Book in a wrong
light. I had marked other Xotes for comment, but have no further
space. I can only say that where they vary from those of previous
editors, they are meagre and eccentric. The import of the book, as an
integral part of a great philosophical system, is ignored, and every
thing is sacrificed to a hasty and unscientific attempt to mend assumed
" dislocations ".
One word in conclusion on Mr. Jackson's "translation or para-
phrase ". I do not think that he gains " precision and perspicuity "
286 New Books.
by leaving in Greek all the technical words and formulae. I should
have thought that the rendering into English of such words and
phrases, in an author like the present, was the only way to put one's
precision and perspicuity of thought to the test. Aristotelian scholar-
ship in England is happily too familiar with excellent equivalents for
the terms in question to countenance Mr. Jackson's version. Beginners
struggling with the Fifth Book may indeed he pleased to learn that
they need not find renderings for the hard words ; but even this
natural joy will be marred, I should think, by such unsatisfactory
pigeon-English as the following : " A man is &'rutos when he
ZiKuioTrpa^r) of deliberate purpose ". " Who is it whom he aSuce? 1 "
" If the 'distributor give his judgment a<yvowv he OVK aditce? Kcnu. TO
VOfllKOV SiKaiOV."
J. A. STEWABT.
IX. NEW BOOKS.
[These Notes are not meant to exclude, and sometimes are intentionally preliminary
to, Critical Notices of the more important works later on.}
Selections from Berkeley, with an Introduction and Notes, for the Use
of Students in the Universities. By A. C. ERASER, LL.D., Pro-
fessor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh,
Second Edition. ' Eevised and Enlarged. Oxford : Clarendon
Press, 1879. Pp. xlviii., 366.
The appearance of a new edition of Professor Eraser's Selections
from Berkeley is a favourable sign of the interest now taken in the
study of pure philosophy. Few writings are so well adapted as those
of Berkeley for introducing the English student to the line of modern
metaphysical thinking which finds its natural termination in Kant.
With the assistance of the notes supplied by the editor, the student of
Berkeley's writings can hardly fail to have his attention awakened to
the nature and conditions of those speculative problems only dimly
apparent in that writer. Nothing can exceed the fairness and
judicial candour with which Professor Eraser points out the inade-
quacy of what are fundamental theorems in the Berkeleyan system
e.g., the doctrine of abstraction, the theory of external reality, and the
theory of causality. The notes on these and other special subjects are
most helpful. In the present edition it is possible to trace a more
constant reference to later writers, such as Kant, than was previously
given.
The Introduction has been re-written and re-arranged. In its
new form it contains an accurate and lucid account of the develop-
ment of modern thought from Descartes to Hume, sketching the
history of the fundamental philosophic problem from its first state-
ment to the point at which it passed into the hands of Kant. The
student of Berkeley could not well have a more thorough introduc-
tion than is here supplied. Perhaps, as is natural, the editor assigns
New Books. 287
a more important place in this movement to Berkeley than can fairly
be granted to him. The entire novelty of Berkeley's question cannot,
we are inclined to think, be altogether admitted. He did, undoubtedly,
effect a great and important change in the mode of viewing certain
philosophic problems, but it was through insistence on the necessity
of applying the new analysis to all philosophic notions rather than
through radical change in the method of analysis. In all fairness,
too, it must be said, that the first statement of Berkeley's new
principle, that by which he has taken a place in the historic sequence
of modern thinkers, was by no means adequate to the problems left
unsolved by Cartesianism, and was so modified in the course of
Berkeley's, own development as to assume an altogether new aspect.
For our part we should be inclined to say that Berkeley is interesting,
both in the history of philosophy and for the student, because he
contains in an imperfect, half-developed manner, the germs of two im-
portant lines of later thinking. On the one hand his early empiricism,
that by which he is historially known (e.g., to Reid and Kant), is but
an incomplete anticipation of Hume : while, on the other hand, the
deeper, more spiritual side of his thinking, never in him worked out
to its logical issues, but becoming in him always more prominent, is
an imperfect, crude foreshadowing of the Kantian thought. Con-
taining, thus, fundamental ideas which point in two directions, Berkeley
is peculiarly well fitted as the subject of first studies on the history
of modern philosophy. As above said, the notes in this second
edition seem to recognise very fully the half-developed character of
Berkeley's speculations, and point continuously to the quarters in
which they find completion or rectification. [R. A.]
T7ie Balance of Emotion and Intellect : an Essay introductory to the
Study of Philosophy. By CHAELES WALDSTEIX, Ph.D. London :
Kegan Paul & Co., 1878.
The aim of this work is " to bring forth the feeling for philosophy,
the philosophical spirit and mood, der philosophische Sinn, as the
Germans would call it " ; the growth of such a spirit being hindered
by the erroneous assumption that certain antitheses and incom-
patibilities obtain amongst important departments of culture, as, e.g.,
between Emotion and Intellect, Fine Art and Science, and again
between Common Thought and Science, Science and Philosophy.
There is a tendency among some men of science " to favour Intellect,
and to disfavour, if not actually to repress, Emotion " ; whereas both
pow*ers are equally necessary, that to guide, and this to impel us to
action. And as for Common Thought, Science and Philosophy, so
far from being truly opposed to one another, they are merely, as Mr.
Spencer observes, successive stages in the development of cognition.
These and similar errors obstruct the formation of the philosophical
mood ; and the best way to dissipate them is to encourage and foster
that mood as much as possible. Accordingly, the author says,
" contrary to recently expressed views " (perhaps referring to a
discussion in MIXD, Xo. X.), " I found that the best means of
288 New Books.
producing this mental attitude was to give a short history of
philosophy ". Such a history accordingly occupies the larger and
central portion of the book. In order to make it useful to beginners,
Dr. Waldstein has disencumbered it of technicalities and simplified it
as much perhaps as the matter would permit. He tries to show how
the History of Philosophy answers the great questions about "the
mighty sum of things forever speaking," as they may (by a stretch of
imagination) be supposed to arise in the mind of a youthful inquirer.
At the close of the historical chapters, he says : " One of the most
important of the results derived from the study of the History of
Philosophy is a cultivation of intellectual sympathy, the power of
transplanting ourselves into the different modes of thought of different
individuals in different ages and climes, of thinking with and in
others : and in thinking with others we learn to feel with others ".
The author then adds some observations upon the characters of
various classes and nations, in so far as they are remarkable for
deficiency or excess of intellect or of emotion ; and ends with an
appendix upon the emotional endowments of Germany and England,
as illustrated by a comparison of their languages. Fortunately the
result is unflattering to the only nation that does not love flattery
(" being then most flattered " when told so ?). But perhaps language
is not the surest clue to feeling : other things equal, we might expect
that nation to be richest in the language of emotion which had had
least opportunity of venting it in action. Is not this a better criterion
of the right balance of national character : Which nation needs least
government 1 [C. E.]
Philosophy : Historical and Critical. By ANDRE LEF^VRE. Trans-
lated with an Introduction by A. H. Keane, B.A. London :
Chapman & Hall, 1879. Pp. xxiv.. 598.
This work is divided into two parts, the first of which passes in
rapid review the various historical systems of philosophy from " the
period of the cosmogonies " to Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer.
Its five chapters deal respectively with Primitive Times (" from the
Thirtieth or Fortieth to the Seventh Century " before Christ) ;
Antiquity ; the Intermediate Period ; the Renaissance ; and Modern
Times. The second part consists of a resume of the author's own
views, which resolve themselves into a crude materialism, not unlike
that of Dr. Johnson, grafted on to the evolution theory. M. Lefevre
criticises the various philosophies with which he deals from his own
standpoint. His account of each system is meagre in the extreme
he gives just one page to Berkeley and four to Hume and his
judgment is much more influenced by the tendency of any philosophy
as regards religious belief than by its real content. Altogether the
work was hardly worth writing in France, and certainly not worth
translating into English. It is characterised throughout by a fierce
opposition to clericalism and Christianity, often expressed in a most
offensive tone, and always colouring both the critical and the positive
part of the book. The polemical style of the first part is fatal to the
New Books. 289
exegetical value of the work, which, for the rest, displays no great
personal acquaintance with the authors criticised, except those who
have written in French. The second part divided into four chapters
on the Universe, the Living World, the Intellectual Mechanism in the
Individual, and the Intellectual Mechanism in Presence of the
Universe and Society contains a brief sketch of evolution, physical,
organic and social, but nothing which the English reader cannot
better obtain elsewhere. It is greatly disfigured by its dogmatic
materialism, and its absolute denunciation of any attempt to investigate
the relations between subject and object, the latter apparently a
legacy of Comtism, which in other matters the author disavows. The
translation is very indifferently performed, and often fails to bring out
or even positively distorts the meaning of the original. Altogether a
feeble declamatory work, weakly written and badly translated. [G. A.]
Cheaters on the Art of Thinking : and other Essay*. By the late
JAMES HINTOX. With an Introduction by Shad worth Hodgson.
Edited by C. H. Hinton. London : Kegan Paul, 1879. Pp. 393.
This volume, edited by the lamented Hinton 's son and introduced
by his intimate friend Mr. Sh. Hodgson, is composed partly of
manuscript papers left in a form ready for publication, partly of
essays previously published in literary or scientific periodicals. The
" Chapters on the Art of Thinking," hitherto unpublished, are five in
number (pp. 15-46) and date from 1872. The majority of the Essays
have already seen the light in one way or other, but they are now
most fortunately brought together. Particularly welcome, by the
side of two other articles (republished) of an ethical character, is the
appearance of the exquisite little essay " Others' Xeecls," formerly not
to be had without difficulty in the shape of an anonymous tract.
Besides four more properly " Scientific Papers," the volume also
includes under the title of " Eecollections " some records, from
different sources, of Hinton's conversations or rather monologues on
favourite topics. Of the volumes (printed for his own private use)
containing his thoughts in the fruitful years from '59 to '63, and
again from '69 to '70, no use has been made in the present collection,
but the hope is held out that at some future time something of their
contents may be made public. Mr. Hodgson, in his fine introduction,
seeks especially to bring out a fundamental affinity of thought between
Hinton and Coleridge.
The Metaphysics of John Stuart Mill. By "VV. L. COUKTNET, M.A.,
Fellow of .New College, Oxford. London : Kegan Paul, 1879.
Pp. 156.
" This book deals with some of the main metaphysical problems in Mr.
Mill's philosophy, the subjects successively discussed being ' Conscious-
. : ' Body and Mind, 1 ' Primary Qualities of Matter, 5 ' Causation,'
'Necessary Truths,' and 'General Ideas'. In each of these the author
attempts to prove the difficulties of Mr. Mill's Sensationalistic and Empirical
position, contrasting it with the Idealistic solution of Kant. An Intro-
duction, commenting on the possibility of Metaphysical progress, and an
Epilogue, summing up the main characteristics of Mr. Mill's philosophy as
standing half-way between the Sensationalism of Hume and the Scientific
Empiricism of Spencer and Lewes, complete this little volume."
290 New Books.
Superstition and Force. Essays on ' The Wager of Law,' ' The Wager
of Battle,' The Ordeal,' < Torture '. By HENRY C. LEA. Third
Edition, revised. Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1878. Pp. 552.
The first three of the Essays brought together under this somewhat
fanciful title originally appeared in a greatly condensed form in the
North American Review. In their book-form, all four have been
added to in the present edition by a clearer indication than before of
" the source in prehistoric antiquity of some of the superstitions which
are only even now slowly dying out and which ever and anon re-assert
themselves under the thin varnish of modern rationalism". The
truly psychological spirit in which the author conducts a quite
admirable investigation over a historical field of vast extent cannot be
better displayed than in these words of his own :
" The history of jurisprudence is the history of civilisation. The labours
of the lawgiver embody not only the manners and customs of his time, but
also its innermost thoughts and beliefs, laid bare for our examination with
a frankness that admits of no concealment. These afford the surest
outlines for a trustworthy picture of the past, of which the details are
supplied by the records of the chronicler. It is from these sources that I
have attempted, in the present work, a brief investigation into the group of
laws and customs through which our forefathers sought to discover hidden
truth when disputed between man and man. Not only do these throw light
upon the progress of human development from primitive savagisin to
civilised enlightenment, but they reveal to us some of the strangest
mysteries of the human mind."
De I' Intelligence. Par H. TAINE, de I'Acade'mie Francaise. 3me
Edition, Corrige'e et augmented. 2 Tomes. Paris : Hachette,
1878. Pp. 419, 492.
The present edition of M. Taine's psychological work (originally
published in 1869, and shortly afterwards translated into English),
while considerably extended, especially in the first or analytic part, is
yet presented in a reduced form, which makes it a much handier
book than before. The chief additions to the text are in the chapter
on the Functions of the Nervous System, which is not only brought
up to the level of the more recent investigations but contains in a new
section (I. pp. 291-315) a rather elaborate speculation as to the
mechanism of the thinking organ. M. Taine reprints as an appendix
to* Vol. I. the note " On the Acquisition of Language by Infants
and by the Race " which appeared in the first number of the Revue
Philosophique, and of which the first half was translated in MIND
VI., calling forth further contributions by Mr. Darwin and Mr.
Pollock to the natural history of infant mental life. He also
appends to Vol. I. two other psychological records one a case of
" progressive hallucination with reason intact," and the other a case of
" acceleration of the play of the cortical cells," supporting the view
that in special circumstances, like what is reported of people saved
from drowning, the flow of representation may be indefinitely
quickened. Vol. II. has added to it a note " On the elements and
formation of the idea of the Ego," as disclosed in the pathological
New Books. 291
cases described by Dr. Krishaber under the name of " cerebro-cardiac
neuropathy" (Paris: Masson, 1873). The general preface to the
work is also considerably extended, including a striking statement of
the chief desiderata of psychological science at the present time, and a
summary of what M. Taine considers his own positive contributions to
it. It cannot be said that he in the least exaggerates the amount or
value of his performance. Though the merits of his book have never
been overlooked since it made its mark on first appearing, it has hardly
even yet received all the praise it deserves for its admirably methodical
exposition and for its firm scientific handling of many of the most
perplexed psychological questions.
Petit Traite de Morale a TiLsage des ficoles primaires la'iques.
Paris : Au bureau de La Critique Philosophique, 1879. Pp. 195.
The two first parts of this work (' [Morality of Childhood,' ' Morality
of Adults ') have already appeared in the Critique Philosophique from
time to time since 1875 ; not so the third part ('General Morality').
The basis of the work is supplied by Dr. W. Fricke's Sittcnlehre fiir
confessionslose Schulen (Gera : Strebel, 1872), of which an English
translation exists under the title of Ethics for Undenominational
Schools (London : Grant, 1872) ; but, while seeking to incorporate
all they could from their German predecessor, MM. Renouvier and
Pillon have freely altered the order and treatment of topics " wherever
this was necessary in order to substitute the methods and ideas of
criticism for vaguer doctrines of mixed origin and imperfectly
rationalised ". " It is not yet in the country of Kant (they add) that the
morality of Kant is best understood." In particular, they have sought
" to strengthen the principle of Eight, to set rights over against duties
wherever this was necessary, to complete or point the definitions and
precepts, and this progressively in such a way as to end by binding
together the fundamental notions after the manner of less elementary
works ". Like Dr. Fricke's original book, the present one is sent
forth as a first draft to be filled in and amended by the co-operation of
all who are concerned in the education of the people on a basis of
rational morality. It is fresh evidence of the zeal and insight with
which MM. Renouvier and Pillon continue their philosophical crusade.
La Science positive et la Metaphysique. Par Louis LIARD, Professeur
de Philosophic a la Faculte des Lettres de Bordeaux. Ouvrage
couronne par 1'Academie des Sciences morales et politiques.
Paris: Germer Bailliere, 1879. Pp. 485.
The object of this work, inspired by^the formal teaching its author
received from M. Lachelier at the Ecole Normale, as also by the
ideas of M. Renouvier, M. Ravaisson and M. Secre'tan, is to show
that Metaphysic, which once stood for all human knowledge, has not
been so displaced by the special sciences as that beyond their results
there is nothing left to occupy the mind. Beyond phenomena men
must still seek to know the absolute, beyond the conditions the reason
of things ; and Metaphysic has thus an inalienable province. But it
292 New Books.
is not its proper function to aim at being a science of first principles
and first causes, as the ancient philosophers dreamt of, and as genera-
tion after generation of thinkers have ever since vainly attempted to
prove it. The Metaphysical notion of the Absolute is a purely moral
one, as Socrates alone among the ancients divined, and as Kant, among
the moderns, was first able clearly to establish.
sur la Vie et les (Euvres philosophises de G. Berkeley. Par
A. PENJON. Paris : 1878. Germer Bailliere. Pp. 448.
M. Penjon, who has already in the pages of the Revue Philosophi-
que shown competent acquaintance with more recent English specula-
tion, gives in the above work a clear and succinct account of the life
and philosophy of the writer who in many respects has had the
greatest influence in determining the course of English thought. For
the facts of Berkeley's life, and for the greater portion of the brief
summaries of Berkeley's works, M. Penjon, as he amply acknowledges,
is indebted to the careful labours of Professor Eraser. So far as English
readers are concerned, indeed, the tude has little or no value, as it
merely reproduces, often verbatim, what can be had in Professor
Eraser's volumes. The conclusion (pp. 370-448), containing M. Penjon's
contribution to the discussion of the questions raised by Berkeley,
consists of seven brief sections or articles of rather too slight texture to
require special notice. At the same time full credit must be given to
him for the ability and completeness with which he has presented
Berkeley to French readers.
Geschichte der neuern Philosophic,. Von KUNO FISCHEB. Erster
Band, Erster Theil. Dritte neu bearbeitete Auflage. Miinchen :
Bassermann, 1878. Pp. 440.
In publishing a third edition of the first volume of his now well-
known History of Modern Philosophy, the author reminds us that,
since he published the second edition of the same volume, he has
carried forward the exposition beyond Kant to Fichte and then to
Schelling. JSTow he stands face to face with the last part of his great
task the treatment of Hegel and the later developments of philosophy
down to the present day. In the new edition here begun, the work,
which has grown to a size not originally intended, will be brought
as far as possible into a more compressed shape, partly by the adoption
of a different type, but also by a systematic revision of the whole
exposition. The compression will make room, where necessary, for
extensions ; as, in the present first part of Vol. I., there is a considerable
increase in the General Introduction dealing with earlier philosophy,
especially the sections on the periods of the Renascence and of the
Reformation. Account has also been taken of the latest new researches
bearing on Descartes. It is needless to remark on the merits of
Fischer's treatment of Descartes. The volume has become indis-
pensable to the student of modern philosophy, and, being no longer to
be had in the first or second editions, is greatly to be welcomed in its
new and improved form.
New Books. 293
Studien uber das Bewusstsein. Yon Dr. S. STRICTER, Universitats-
Professor in Wien. Wien : Braumiiller, 1879. Pp. 99.
Dr. Strieker, the eminent physiologist, publishes here in a separate
form for general readers his studies on Consciousness, begun with
reference to pathology and already embodied in a larger work addressed
to medical men. The studies here reproduced are all of a character to
be understood without professional training, and deal with common
questions of psychology, only taken up with the freshness of spirit
that is apt to mark the inquiry of really good scientific heads when
they turn from their own to a related department of science. The
little work is brimful of suggestive observations not least suggestive
where they might perhaps be modified by further inquiry. In
particular, should be noted the author's peculiar view that every
sensation has bound up originally with it a double consciousness of
locality as occupying a definite place centrally (in the head) and a
definite place peripherally. " Seated (he says) in the head, Conscious-
ness knows apart from all exercise, from all other indications and on
the very first excitation that something is going on at definite places
of the peripheral nerves ; and this amounts to saying that Conscious-
ness reaches from the brain into those nerves as its outposts."
Metapliysik : Drei Bucher der Ontologie, Kosmologie und Psychologic.
Von HERMANN* LOTZE. Leipzig : Hirzel, 1879. Pp. 604.
This volume is the second of the series in which the author is
embodying his System of Philosophy. The first volume, which
appeared in 1874, contained his Logic, and the present one includes
the whole of his Metaphysic. In its latest form his metaphysical system
has diverged even more widely from Kantianism than was the case in
the book published under a similar title in 1841 ; and all the traces of
Hegelian influences, which were then apparent, seem now to have
disappeared. The volume, as its title indicates, is divided into three
books, Avhich deal with the Relations of Things (Ontology), the Course
of Xature (Cosmology), and Spiritual Existence (Psychology) respec-
tively. The remaining volume of the series will treat of Practical
Philosophy, ^Esthetics and Philosophy of Religion.
Die Schein-Bewegungen. Von Prof. Dr. J. J. HOPPE, Doctor der
Medicin et Philosophic. "VViirzburg: Stuber, 1879. Pp.212.
A remarkably thorough investigation, from the physiological point
of view, of the extraordinary variety of apparent movements which we
are liable to experience in the way of perception. These are grouped
by the author round the impressive case where a river-bank seems to
move to the spectator standing upon it ; the explanation of this case,
which can be distinctly studied in connexion with the muscular and
sensitive structure of the^eye, leading on to an understanding of the
others, both those that are related and those that are different in
character. He touches but slightly the apparent movements of
hallucination, and leaves aside, for want of space, the apparent
movement of double images ; but otherwise almost the whole multitude
20
294 New Books.
of cases is treated. Information is given as to the earlier attempts at
explanation; and the author ends with a short excursus into the
general theory of knowledge viewed in the light of his particular
research. The investigation is one of that special kind that is most
wanted in the present state of psychological science.
Monaden und Weltphantasie. Von J. FROHSCHAMMER, Professor der
Philosophic in Miinchen. Miinchen : Ackermarin, 1879. Pp.181.
This work is a sequel to the author's Die Phantasie als Grund^rlin-!p
des Weltprocesses (1877), critically noticed in MIND VI. The first
part is a short re-exposition of the main ideas of that book, intended
to remove misunderstandings. The second part is an exposition and
criticism of the various modifications of the doctrine of Monads from
Leibnitz through Herbart to contemporary philosophers like J. H.
Fiehte, Carriere, Ulrici, and contemporary men of science Preyer,
Nageli, Hackel, Zb'llner. In the author's former book this line of
" monadological or individualistic " speculation received less attention
than the other line of more properly " monistic or dynamical " thought
which, in the manner of Spinoza, seeks to account for the variety of
phenomena from the absolute unity of Substance. The author's own
position in the middle is that true monistic explanation, that is to
say, of real individuals from a single principle, is to be had only upon
the assumption of " Phantasy " as that principle.
Analisi fisiologica del Libero Arbitrio Umano. Del Dottore ALES-
SAXDRO HERZEX. Terza Edizione. Firenze : Bettini, 1879.
Pp. 271.
Professor Herzen's work first appeared as little more than a
pamphlet, and was then considerably extended in a second edition
(1870). Still farther extended and revised, it next appeared in
a French translation in 1874, under the title Physiologie dela Volonte
in BailHere's ' Bibliotheque de la Philosophic Contemporaine ' ; and
the present third edition is a reproduction of this last in Italian.
Two articles by the author are appended (one a polemic against
spiritualism in the form of a letter to Professor Luigi Ferri, the other
on some modifications of individual consciousness) ; besides a statement
of the theory of Eesponsibility based on the negation of free-will,
extracted from a work by Dr. Enrico Ferri.
Sulla Dottrina psicologica dell' Associazione. Saggio storico e critico.
Di LUIGI FERRI, Professore di Filosofia nella Eegia Universita di
Roma. Koma : 1878. Pp. 92.
A dissertation republished from the proceedings of the Accademia
dei Lincei (16 June, 1878). The author divides his compendious
survey of Associationism into three parts, devoting attention mainly
to the work of English thinkers, but making side-references, where
necessary, to others. The fir.-t part traces the doctrine from Ilobbes
and Locke to Hartley ; within which period (between" Hume and
Hartley) falls the work of the Bolognese Francesco Maria Zanotti, Delia
Miscellaneous. 295
forza attrattiva delle idee (1747). In the second part, "the inter-
mediate period of criticism and restriction," beginning with Eeid and
prolonged in Stewart and Hamilton, is briefly characterised, with side-
reference to the Italians Galluppi and Kosrniiii, and to Herbart and
Condillac. The tliird and largest part deals somewhat minutely with
the two Mills, Professor Bain, and Mr. Spencer. Finally, in an
epilogue, the author expounds his view of the imperfections and short-
comings of Associationism, even at its best, as a philosophical theory
of knowledge.
X. MISCELLANEOUS.
Professor "William Kingdon Clifford died of consumption at Madeira
on the 3rd March, in his 34th year. Xone of those who took leave
of him two months before, when he sailed for the warmer climate that
might lengthen out his days a little, can be surprised that the end
has come so soon ; yet none can have so reconciled themselves to the
inevitable as to hear of it at last without the most poignant regret.
It is calamitous that this splendid intellect should cease when it
had just come near to satisfying itself of the range to which its proper
activity might extend. While nobody could come into any sort of
personal contact with Clifford and escape the charm of his nature a
charm that won him troops of devoted friends, nobody could become
really intimate with him and not recognise the presence of one of those
rare minds fit for the exactest work of science yet endowed with the
habitual elevation of view that can only be called philosophic. One
dwell? upon the character of the man, because his work has been
fated to remain for the most part a promise. Even in mathematics
which had his first devotion, his fame lies less in actual performance
than in the sense which the greatest of his contemporaries had of his
almost unlimited faculty. But everything he did accomplish in that
field has the stamp of genuine originality on it ; while nothing could
surpass the skill with which he interpreted to his countrymen those
newer geometrical conceptions that have sprung from the fertile brains
of the philosophical mathematicians of Germany. In philosophy he
had a passion for clearness ; he had also a singular docility and can-
dour. And if the note of the philosopher is to seek for the highest
and widest truth with a fixed regard to the guidance of human con-
duct, surely no one was ever more a philosopher. To those who saw
him passing calmly through suffering into the unknown, with brain
as marvellously active and heart as full of the enthusiasm of humanity
as in the day of his strength, he leaves the memory of a bright and
dauntless spirit whose like they will hardly meet again.
He was born at Exeter on the 4th of May, 1845, and, after being
at school there, was educated at King's College, London, and Trinity
College, Cambridge. His mathematical studies were mixed with
classical learning, before they became supplemented by philosophy.
296 Miscellaneous.
Impatient of the academic routine at Cambridge, he yet missed
only the very highest honours at the end of his student-career in
1867, and was soon afterwards elected Fellow of his College.
From being assistant-tutor at Trinity he passed in 1871 to the
chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics in University Col-
lege, London, which he held till the time of his death, though
he was disabled from lecturing for about a year before. He was made
Fellow of the Eoyal Society in 1874. The Royal Society Catalogue
mentions 16 mathematical papers which he published between 1863
and 1873, besides the printed report of the lecture " On some of the
Conditions of Mental Development " delivered at the Eoyal Institu-
tion in 1868, the first of the series of brilliant addresses or articles
on scientific or philosophic subjects by which he has become most
generally known. The more important of these are the following :
" On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought " (Macmillan's
Magazine, 1872); "Body and Mind" (Fortnightly Rev., 1874);
" The Ethics of Belief" (Contemp Rev., 1875) ; "Philosophy of the
Pure Sciences " (Contemp Rev., 1874, 1875, XlXth Century, March,
- 1879) ; " On the Nature of Things-in-themselves " (Misn IX.). His
Elements of Dynamic, Part I. (Macmillan) appeared in 1878. Shortly
before his death, at a meeting of his friends at the Eoyal Institution
(the President of the Eoyal Society in the chair), it was resolved, in
view of his enforced retirement from active work, to make "public
recognition of his great scientific and literary attainments " by raising
a fund to be placed in the hands of Trustees for the benefit of himself
and his family. Subscriptions will still be received for his wife and
two children by Messrs. Eobarts, Lubbock & Co., Lombard Street,
E.C. (to be paid to the Account of "The Clifford Testimonial Fund").
Prof. Campbell Fraser, of Edinburgh, has undertaken to prepare
for the Clarendon Press a library edition of Locke's Essay concerning
Human Understanding, with an Introduction, Memoir, Excursuses,
&c., in two octavo volumes, uniform with his edition of the Works of
Bishop Berkeley. Locke's Essay has been many times reprinted since
its first publication in 1690, but the want of an annotated edition has
been made matter of reproach to Englishmen by critics and historians
of philosophy. It is now proposed to supply this deficiency, under
the auspices of Locke's own University of Oxford, in an edition with
a revised and interpreted text, and with discussions connecting Locke,
for the modern reader, with his contemporaries and predecessors, as
well as with the later course of thought in Europe and America. Prof.
Fraser will be obliged to anyone who will send him special informa-
tion on the subject, to 20 Chester Terrace, Edinburgh.
The Editor of MIND has undertaken to write for Messrs. Mac
millan's series of Elementary Lessons in Science a short manual of
Psychology, which, while forming an introduction to the study of the
Science generally, will keep specially in view its practical bearings on
the work of Education.
Miscellaneous. 297
As we are going to press, M. Ribot's promised work La Psychologie
AUemande Coriemporaine (Germer Bailliere), dealing with the Ex-
perimental School from Herbart to Wundt, has come to hand. It
will receive due notice later on.
A new two-monthly journal has begun to appear at Oporto under
the title Posit ivi-smo, understanding Positivism chiefly in the sense
of Comte as interpreted by M. Littre", and covering very much the
same ground as the long-standing French review La Philosophie
Positive.
Dr. Julius Frauenstadt, the devoted disciple, editor, biographer and
expositor of Schopenhauer, died at Berlin on the 15th January, in his
sixty-sixth year.
Busy St. Louis in the far "West finds even the Journal of Specu-
lative ^Philosophy not speculative enough or not philosophical enough
for its taste, and means to have another quarterly periodical really
and entirely devoted, this one, " to the advocacy of Philosophy in its
actual and ideal comprehension ". It will be called TJie PhilosopJier
(English agents, Triibner & Co.), and the spirit of it may be gathered
from the following sentences in its prospectus :
" It is a lamentable fact that the current thinking discusses the ideal, as
scientifically invalid, and exults in the repudiation of all knowledge not
exclusively derived from the senses. The very term, Idea, together with its
content, has suffered degradation, even unto perdition, in the atmosphere of
human sense. It is necessary that Philosophy itself, the ' Science of
Sciences,' be rescued from its oblivion in the sensuous consciousness of the
age, and restored to its own peculiar and distinctive sphere the Intelligible
Order from which the physical world and all sensible things are constituted
in which Nature and all true Science ground their procedure.
the present time, though there are various journals which give more
or less attention to the presentation and discussion of philosophical specu-
lations and systems, there is none specially devoted to this aim, and this
vacant niche in periodical literature The Philosopher proposes to fill. It
will be principally, therefore, the exponent of Platonism and Mysticism,
the organ of communication for those of our generation who are disposed to
the study of Divine Philosophy, and the vehicle of the profoundest thought
of this and past ages."
The Eev. J. Fordyce of Great Grimsby sends the following :
" In a work on Theism by the Eev. E* E. Conder, M.A. (The Basis of
Faith, being the Congregational Lecture for 1877 : Hodder & Stoughton),
there is a chapter on the Nature and Validity of Knowledge which has not,
so far as I know, been examined critically by any of our British
philosophers. The theological character of the book may have something
to do with its being overlooked. This chapter is devoted to Metaphysics,
and has an independent character and value, though of course related to
the book. In order that some of the readers of MIXD may be tempted to
examine and discuss Mr. Gender's theory, I give his concluding summary.
He claims to have ' made good the following theses ' :
(1.) That human knowledge, being dependent for development on
language, imitation and instruction, is collective ; implying in it* very
xistence the mutual action of tt least two minds.
298 Miscellaneous.
(2.) Consequently, that no criticism of knowledge can be valid which
proceeds from the standpoint of a single isolated mind.
(3.) That the Eelativity of Knowledge involves a fourfold relation : (a)
of each mind to outward nature, (b) of nature to each mind and all minds,
(c) of the parts and elements of nature to one another, (d) of human minds
to each other.
(4.) Consequently, that any doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge
which takes account solely of the relation of the Subject to the Object, or
of Reason to Phenomena, must be so defective as to be virtually false.
(5.) That the Relativity of Knowledge in place of being any impediment,
disability or limitation to our knowledge, is that which renders knowledge
possible, and on which its worth and truth depend.
(6.) That there are no ' things-in-themselves ' out of relation to other
things and to the First Cause.
(7.) That knowledge is composed of judgments ; the criteria of the
judgments composing it being truth and certainty.
(8.) That our primary judgments have no logical subjects, but are
predicated either of phenomena immediately present to consciousness (or
represented in memory), or of those realities of. which phenomena are
natural signs ; namely, (a) self, (6) other selves or (c) causes, that is, forces
or centres of force external to the mind.
(9.) That while a large part of our knowledge is conversant about
phenomena, our ultimate judgments, in which the application or use of
knowledge lies, respect the realities underlying phenomena, of which
realities phenomena are the natural signs.
(10.) That the truth of judgments, and consequently the validity of
knowledge, depends not on any resemblance of thoughts to things, but in a
correspondence of relations, that is, in the facts of nature being so related
'to one another as our judgments affirm them to be.
(11.) That the Validity of Human Knowledge, subjectively assured by
the imperative necessity we are under of trusting our own faculties (notably
memory and reason), is objectively verified (a) by the results of our action,
which pass from our control into the outward world, and fulfil or disappoint
according as action is conformed to knowledge ; (b) by the independent
course of nature, which fulfils all predictions based on correct calculation
from true data.
(12.) Lastly, that Philosophic Scepticism has no valid foundation, but
that if the phenomena or facts of the universe and human nature afford
adequate evidence of a First Cause, there is nothing in the nature of know-
ledge to make us suspect this evidence."
Prof. A. Herzen writes from Florence :
" I have already for some time been engaged in observations such as Mr.
C. Evans (MiND XIII., p. 147) wishes to be made on arms and legs ' gone
to sleep '. That some differentiation exists between the sense of touch and
the thermal sense is, at present, owing to pathological observations,
ascertained ; the two senses do not necessarily perish together, the one
sometimes surviving the other ; but a very strange fact, which I am at
present submitting to more rigorous experimental control, is the following.
If I purposely put one of my arms into the most favourable position for its
' going to sleep,' and from time to time test its sensibility, I find that it
loses almost simultaneously the faculty of feeling tactile impressions and
impressions of cold, whilst it continues for a long time to feel the liecA
communicated by the contact of a warm body. This is in direct contra-
diction with Mr. Evans's statement that the foot which is asleep, although
insensible to touch, is still sensible to cold. In due time I will inform you
of the result of my experiments."
Miscellaneous. 299
Mr. Grant Allen sends the following :
" Bastian asserted, and Mr. Gladstone has given currency to the assertion,
that the Burmese are generally unable to discriminate between blue and
i. In order to test the truth of this statement, I obtained two pieces
of blue and green paper, as nearly as possible alike in intensity of shade,
texture, and other particulars, and only differing in colour properly so-
called. These I enclosed in a letter to Mr. H. L. St. Barbe, British
Resident at Mandalay, requesting him kindly to cut up the paper into
small squares, and then ask several Burmese to match the pieces. Un-
fortunately, the answer did not arrive in time for inclusion in my lately-
published work The Colour-Sense ; but I give the particulars here as being
of some general interest. Mr. St. Barbe says
' I have tested casual strangers belonging to the following distinct races :
Burmese, Shans, Chinese, Maingthas, Kachyens.
' I conducted the experiment in the way you prescribed and examined at
least three of each nationality separately, and without a chance of com-
municating with their companions. The results were as follows :
'All the "patients" were able to discriminate at once and without
difficulty or hesitation between the two slips of coloured paper you enclosed,
and to match detached pieces promptly and accurately. The Burmese and
Shans have special names for the exact shade. They divide each prime
colour into dark, medium, and light, and assigned the slips to the third
division. The Chinese and Maingthas recognise (hereabouts) only two
shades to a colour, while the Kachyens are altogether vague in their
nomenclature. They easily distinguished between the two, but in many
cases called the green "brown," and the blue "green". I am convinced
that this arises, as you surmise, from a defect of language, not of vision.'
" After mentioning the fact that he had seen the same assertion in the
Spectator, but had attached no importance to it, Mr. St. Barbe continues :
'The error may have sprung from the fact that, though the Burmese
invariably call grass and vegetation green, they occasionally term the sky
of the same colour, especially in their poetry '.
" I think we may conclude, therefore, that here, as in so many cases, the
supposed deficiency of vision is really due to insufficient vocabulary."
THE JOURNAL OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY. Vol. XIII. Xo. 1. J.
Hutchison Stirling ' Schopenhauer in relation to Kant '. H. Grimm
' On Raphael and Michael Angelo ' (tr.). \V. James ' The Spatial Quale '.
1 A Letter on the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas ' (tr. by Thomas Davidson).
G. B. Halsted ' Algorithmic Division in Logic '.
REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE. IVme Annee, Xo. 1. P. Janet ' La perception
lie de la distance '. A. Espinas ' La philosophic experimentale en
: I. R. Ardigo '. C. S. Peirce ' La logique de la science '. Xotes
> ocuments ' Le ue"terminisme me*canique et la liberte ' par M. Bous-
>j. Analyses et Comptes-rendus. Rev. des Period. Correspondance
Analyses psychologiquts : MM. Horwicz et Th. Reinach. Xecrologie
I. Lewes. No. 2. P. Tannery ' La theorie de la connaissance
oiathematique. A. Espinas ' La philosophic experimentale en Italic '
^fin). A. Penjon 'La me"taphysique phenomeniste en Angleterre' (fin).
Analyses et Comptes-rendus. v Rev. des Pe'riod. Xo. 3. J. S. Mill
ignients inedits sur le soeialisme' (1.). E. Xaville 'La physique et
aorale '. A. Dastre 'Le probleme physiologique de la Vie '(suite).
3uyau ' Herbert Spencer et I' Heredite morale . Analyses et Comptes-
rendus. Rev. des Period.
300 Miscellaneous.
LA CRITIQUE PHILOSOPHIQUE. Vllme Annee, Nos. 46-52 ; YHIme
Annee, Nos. 1-5. F. Pillon ' M. Wallace et le Darwinisme ' (52). L.
Dauriac ' De la methode subjective selon Auguste Comte et M. Pierre
Lafitte '(5). Bibliographic Spencer, Prindpes de Sociologie ; Penjon, filude
sur Berkeley (4). (These numbers are almost wholly taken tip with
subjects political or literary : the full title of the journal is La Critique
philosophique, politique, scientifique, littdraire.)
LA FILOSOFIA DELLE SCUOLE ITALIANE. Vol. XVIII. Disp. 1. T.
Mamiani ' Delia crescente necessita delle sintesi abbreviative.' G. Barzel-
lotti ' La critica della conoscenza et la metafisica dopo il Kant'. F.
Bonatelli ' Truccioli di filosofia, ossia Girolamo Clario'. G. Allievo ' La
personalita umana' (I.) Bibliografia, &c. Disp. 2. Luigi Ferri ' L' idea
(analisi de' suoi caratteri) '. G. Danielli ' Della fisiopsicologia del prof.
Her/en'. E. Bobba ' La dottrina della liberta secondo Spencer in rapporto
colla morale'. F. Ragnisco ' Le cause finali in Platone e Aristotele'. G.
Allievo 'La personalita umana ' (II.) Bibliografia, &c. Vol. XIX. Disp.
1. T. Mamiani ' Al prof. Luigi Ferri, intorno al suo clettato L'Idea '. R.
Bobba ' La dottrina della liberta secondo Spencer in rapporto colla
morale '. F. Ramorino ' Platone filosofo, artista e scrittore '. T. Mamiani
' Filosofia della realita '. V. di Giovanni ' Sopra una sentenza di
Giordano Bruno '. Bibliografia, &c.
ZEITSCHRIFT FUR PHILOSOPHIE, &c. Bd. LXIV., Heft I. H. Sommer
' Die Lehre des Spinoza und der Materialismus ' (I.). J. B. Weiss
' Untersuchungen iiber F. Schleiermacher's Dialektik ' (II.). E. Dreher
' Zum Verstandniss der Sinneswahrnehmungen ; (V.). Recensionen (J.
Grote, Moral Ideals ; Flint, Theism ; Hodgson, Philosophy of Reflection, &c.).
Bibliographie.
VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FUR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE. Bd.
III., Heft 1. C. Goring' Zur philosophischen Methode '. K. Ch. Planck
' Sinnesanschauung und logisches Causalgesetz : Eine Entgegnung auf die
neuesten Ausflihrungen von E. Zeller' (L). L. Tobler ' Ueber die
Anwendung des Begriffes von Gesetzen auf die Sprache '. R. Avenarius
' In Sachen der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie ' (III.). Recensionen.
Selbstanzeigen. Phil. Zeitschriften. Bibliog. Mittheilungen.
PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE. XIV. Bd. Hefte 8, 9. R. Eucke
' Untersuchungen zur Gesch. der alteren deutschen Philosophie (II.) :
Nicolaus von Cues '. J. Witte ' Die Lehre vom subjectiven Autheile des
Geistes an allem Erkennen und der Apriorisnius '. A. Scheuten ' Aphor-
istische Gedanken iiber Raum u. Zeit '. Re'censionen und Anzeigen (Sully,
Pessimism, &c.). Literaturbericht. Bibliographie, &c. Heft 10. M. J.
Monrad ' Hamlet und kein Ende '. Recensionen u. Anzeigen (Carriere,
Die sittliche Weltordnung ; Dittmar, Vorlesungen uber Psychiatric, &c.). C.
Ueberhorst ' Zur Abwehr '. J. H. Witte' Replik '. Bibliographie, &c.
No. 15.] [July, 1879.
MIND
A QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
I. THE ORIGIN OF THE SENSE OF SYMMETRY.
THERE are few peculiarities which seem at first sight more
eminently characteristic of man, as distinguished from the
lower animals, than his employment of symmetrical patterns
for ornamental purposes. Whether we look at the rose windows
of a Gothic cathedral or at the graceful tracery of a New
Zealand canoe, at the beautiful designs of European decorative
artists or at the regular tattooing of a Caroline Islander, we are
alike struck by the special nature of the geometrical figures
employed for the self-same object in the most diverse cases.
And when we go back in time to the earliest prehistoric monu-
ments of our race, we find the like regularity in the huge circles
of Stonehenge or Abury, in the polished flints and arrowheads
of the neolithic remains, nay, even to some rude extent in the
roughly-chipped stone implements of the very first human in-
habitants of the earth. Yet this last and qualified assertion
shows us that the love for symmetry among mankind is some-
thing that has grown and developed during the whole of
historical and prehistoric time : and we are consequently led to
inquire what is the origin of the taste which we see thus
displayed in every existing race of men. Obviously, we cannot
find an answer to this question by examining such finished
products of art as the Gothic cathedral or the New Zealand
canoe. If we wish to trace the developed taste to its origin we
21
302 The Origin of tJie Sense of Symmetry.
must begin by asking the simple question, why did man first
take to the two primordial elements of symmetry, the straight
line, and the circle or other regular curves ?
So far as we know, no monkey ever draws a straight line, or
ever makes a definite circular mark. But even the lowest men
practise these primitive arts as it were instinctively. The
monkey may crack a coco-nut or an egg-shell ; he may perhaps
even use it as a scoop to hold water for a single occasion ; but
he never cuts it into a regular cup with an even section. A
savage, on the other hand, makes a calabash or an ostrich-egg
into a definite and graceful vessel. The monkey uses a stone to
break hard nutshells, but he never fashions it into a celt or a
knife. A savage, on the other hand, makes his arrowheads and
his club bilaterally symmetrical with an amount of care which
puts to the blush his civilised competitors. So thoroughly
distinctive of mankind is this love for regularity, that whenever
we find an object artificially shaped into a symmetrical form,
we at once regard it as a human product ; we conclude that its
maker was some animal sufficiently resembling ourselves to
deserve the name of man. We have thus, in fact, informally
recognised the taste for symmetry as a real differentia of
humanity.
Yet if we look a little further into the question, we shall see
that this apparent distinction between man and the lower
animals, like all the other artificial distinctions whereby man
seeks to hide the community of origin between himself and the
brutes, fades away to a great extent upon closer consideration.
There is no object to which symmetrical figures are more
frequently applied than the house or hut. Not to take into
account our own palaces, churches, and mansions, the houses of
most modern savages are strikingly noticeable for their pretty
circular or oval shape. So, too, the Swiss lake dwellings were
regularly laid out in squares and rings : while the ground-plan
of most other pre-historic villages, wherever recoverable, shows
them to have contained domestic architecture of a strictly
symmetrical character. The woodcuts in Dr. Schweinfurth's
Heart of Africa and in Sir Charles Lyell's Antiquity of
Man will best illustrate the nature of the patterns ordinarily
employed. But when we examine the homes of those among
the lower animals which construct themselves definite nests, we
find that they are almost always marked by exactly similar
symmetrical plans. The circle, the regular curves, the straight
line, and the principle of bilaterality all enter into them quite
as prominently as into the construction of human villages.
Hence we are led to guess that a general tendency toward the
production of symmetrical art-products may perhaps exist
The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry. 303
throughout the whole animal world. If we examine a few cases
in detail, we may possibly be able to estimate the worth of this
conjecture, as well as to free ourselves from the conventional
entanglements which beset the half-understood distinctions of
instinctive and rational action.
The very lowest type of animal architecture can hardly be
distinguished from mere organic growth. The coverings of
echinodenns, such as the sea-urchin, are just as much results of
simple unconscious development as are the bones of vertebrates.
But in the mollusca we get a sort of intermediate stage ; for
though the shell is deposited by the mantle in a purely organic
manner, yet the animal can slightly alter the direction of the
whorls, so as to avoid an obstacle which had accidentally
adhered to their surface. Thus the garden snail occasionally
produces open spiral shells with disconnected whorls, resembling
a corkscrew ; while normally discoid species sometimes assume
a turbinate form. These instances, however, scarcely differ from
those of common monstrosities, to which indeed they are often
clearly referable. But the cocoons of insects give us a nearer
approach to externally-formed dwellings, and lead us naturally
on to more advanced cases. In the web of the geometrical
spider we see an excellent specimen of symmetrical workman-
ship of a very interesting sort : while in the hexagonal cells of
honey-bees, in the curiously shaped nests of many wasps, and in
the regularly planned hillocks of the termites, we find that the
organised habits of the various species have resulted in the
production of perfectly symmetrical figures. Numerous other
instances amongst the articulata, such as the trap-doors of
certain spiders and the neatly constructed nests and galleries of
many ants, will at once occur to the biological reader : but
further illustration would merely be tedious without adding
weight to the analogy here suggested.
When we turn to the vertebrates, we find an abundance of
similar constructive instincts. Besides the nests of ordinary
birds, which are almost always approximately circular, there are
certain special cases like those of the weaver-birds, in which the
nest assumes a much greater definiteness and regularity of shape.
The bower-birds, in addition to their own private nests, build
common meeting-places or " assembly rooms " as they have been
well called, from which they derive their English name.
Amongst mammals, the beaver constructs for himself circular
houses, together with straight dams, curved at the point where
the stream runs strongest. The harvest mouse weaves a pretty
little globular nest. Even the all but sightless mole excavates
a series of galleries whose ground-plan displays a couple of
regular circles, surrounding a spherical chamber, with definitely
304 TJie Origin of the Sense of Symmetry.
arranged intercommunications. In fact, we see as a rule that
wherever animals build themselves any but the rudest shelters
or burrows, their architecture tends to assume a symmetrical
shape.
It is of course quite beside the question to refer these habits
to instinct, that blind and empty catchword of an extinct school
of thought. No doubt the bee, the weaver-bird, and the beaver
all work at the present time by inherited instinctive tendencies.
But those tendencies are the result of ancestral habit ; and the
habit must have had a beginning at some time or other. The
main differences between these cases and that of man resolve
themselves on close inspection into two very simple points of
detail : first, while in the beaver the building habit has become
so far ingrained in the nervous system that it exhibits itself
spontaneously and without the aid of teaching, in man it has
never apparently become so ingrained as to be strictly instinctive:
and secondly, while with the beaver the same kind of house is
produced from generation to generation, with man circumstances
are always producing modifications of many sorts, far more
marked, however, amongst the civilised than amongst the savage
races. Even these differences ultimately depend upon a single
further fundamental difference, that while the relatively poor
and fixed nervous centres of the lower animals have become
stereotyped in particular directions, the relatively rich and
modifiable nervous centres of man admit of much greater latitude
in their constant adaptation to the changing phases of their
environment.
Accordingly, we may conclude that primitive man shared
with all other animals an inherent tendency towards the
construction of regular figures. Whether he at first exerted his
native bent in the erection of permanent buildings is indeed very
doubtful, because the earliest men with whose remains we are
acquainted appear to have been dwellers in caves and rock
shelters. Yet we should recollect that such among these
remains as have yet been explored are chiefly confined to
northern latitudes ; and as man in all probability was first
evolved under a tropical climate, it is quite possible that in his
southern home he may have very early built for himself such
temporary huts as we still find in almost all warm countries.
On the other hand, the existence at the present day of tribes
like the Fuegians who have practically no shelter worthy of the
name of huts, would seem to render it doubtful whether the art
of building in its rudest shape was really a primitive acquisition
of humanity. Indeed, I attach no special importance to the
hut in itself, further than as illustrating the general continuity
of habit between man and the lower animals. We ought not,
TJie Origin of tlie Sense of Symmetry. 305
however, to forget that our nearest relatives, the anthropoid
apes, construct themselves rude shelters.
A far more important question is that which relates to the
origin of this common tendency towards symmetry in workman-
ship which we find running through the whole of human and
animql architecture alike. And here I think we must trace its
existence to the general nature of organic movement. Our
muscles and limbs all act in a rhythmical manner, and the
products of their activity have a certain general tendency to be
symmetrical in accordance with the natural rhythm. Thus, to
begin with obvious instances, in walking, the feet leave prints
at certain regular distances : and if we carrv a stick, its mark
tf
will similarly occur at measured intervals. So, too, if we make
a sweep with a cane on the sand, the figure described is an arc
of a circle. Again, if we sharpen a stake with a knife, we
naturally make its tapering part at or about the middle. Or, if
we pile up a snow house, after the fashion of Esquimaux and of
Canadian schoolboys, standing in the middle as we work, we
shall naturally produce a more or less correct circle. The whole
tendency of all bodily acts, and therefore of all constructive acts,
is towards a certain kind of rough symmetry. Just as the
mouse produces a rude circular hole in a wainscot by biting all
round alike, just as a bird produces a fairly circular nest by
weaving in pieces all round alike, so a man produces a decently
circular hut by building up mud all round alike.
The first among such buildings, human or animal, will
naturally possess only a very incomplete and partial symmetry.
But as the habit becomes strengthened, the symmetry will grow
more and more complete, though by the action of different
causes in the two instances. Amongst animals, as the process
of building became gradually instinctive, greater regularity
would necessarily appear ; because the most symmetrical form
is the type of all the other forms, with the individual diver-
gences omitted. So, since the instinct in each individual
represents the inherited habits of countless prior individuals, it
must necessarily happen that instinctive actions will grow more
and more typical, will conform more and more to the central
plan with less and less of accidental variation. That this is
really the genesis of symmetrical building amongst animals we
may infer even a posteriori ; because we find every stage from
the rudest to the most finished structures, actually in existence.
Thus amongst bees, there are some in which the cell-making
instinct has only gone a very little way : while there are others,
like the honey-bee, in which it produces the most perfect
hexagonal shapes. Again, amongst birds, there are some, like
the night-jars whose nests are a mere rough collection of twigs
306 The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry.
and stubble ; others, like the humming-birds, whose festhetic
instincts lead them to build very round nests, completely lined
with the softest materials, and decorated outside with interwoven
feathers. With man, on the other hand, increase of symmetry
is gained not by habit becoming instinctive, but by the interven-
tion of the intellect in a manner hereafter to be examined.
The mere rhythmical play of limbs and muscles thus gives us
what we may call the active factor in the production of a feeling
for symmetry. The passive factor is given us by the general
existence of symmetry in nature, amongst organic products at
least.
Every leaf (roughly speaking) consists of a bilaterally sym-
metrical mass of green, sometimes simple, sometimes composed
of many corresponding leaflets. Several of these, as in the
horse-chestnut, the palma christi, and the acacias, are extremely
noticeable for their regularity. The fronds of ferns show us a
still higher degree of symmetry and correspondence in parts.
The waving branches of palms, the circular arrangement of the
foliage in aloes, yuccas, and numerous other liliaceous plants,
especially of the tropics, and the alternate or whorled disposition
of the leaves upon the axis in all plants, are facts of a similar
sort. More noteworthy in the eyes of primitive man, however,
are the bright-coloured flowers, all of which exhibit symmetry
of the most varied types. Some, like the dog-rose and daisy
head, are circular or radial ; others, like snapdragon and sal via,
are bilateral ; yet others, like the iris and the snow-drop,
display curious variations on the ordinary form. Not less
important are the shapes of fruits ; spherical, like the orange
and cherry ; bilateral, like the pear and peach ; beaded, like the
raspberry and mulberry. These again are often made up of
symmetrical parts, as in the septa of the orange and the
pomegranate; or are marked internally with symmetrical or
radial patterns, as in the pine-apple and star-apple. Finally,
the arrangement of the fruits upon the axis is often itself
symmetrical, as in the head of wheat or barley, and in the
" clock " of the dandelion or the thistle.
Animal forms would impress the same expectation of sym-
metry yet more deeply on the primitive mind. The radial
distribution of parts in the star-fish and sea-urchin ; the twin
valves of half the molluscs, and the discoid or turbinate shells
of the other half ; the corresponding wings of the butterfly or
the beetle ; the whole form of the mammal or the bird all these
display some variety of symmetry in a most marked and
unmistakable manner. Still more do certain special parts of
animal organisms, which are particularly employed by primitive
man in his early arts. The twin horns of deer and antelopes,
Tli& Origin of the Sense of Symmetry. 307
the two blades of a feather, the tusks of elephants and wild
boars, the very bones and skull used as implements or vessels,
are strikingly symmetrical both in their wholes and their
component pieces. Above all, however, we must place the
influence of the human figure and features themselves, the
bilateral symmetry of legs and arms, of eyes and ears, of nose,
mouth, and cheeks, which strikes every child and every savage
so forcibly, and which imprints itself upon all the earliest
attempts at imitative art, from the picture-writing of the
American Indian to the rude human shapes drawn in chalk by
English boys upon wall or black-board. In every one of them
we see the same wooden arrangement of a round head fixed upon
a straight body, with two equal arms and legs, diverging at
exactly the same angle on either side.
Notice, once more, that the symmetrical objects in nature are
exactly those with which primitive man has most to interest
himself. The fruits and berries which he searches for food in
the tropical forest ; the shell-fish and crustaceans which eke out
his subsistence on the Baltic shore ; the fish which he catches
in his Swiss lakes ; the stags, the antelopes, and the birds, which
he brings down with his arrow, his hatchet, or his boomerang ;
the feathers, flowers, leaf-mats, cowries, seeds, and crystals with
which he adorns himself are among the most markedly sym-
metrical products of the organic world. The reindeer and the
mammoth, whose horns and tusks form his earliest material for
incipient works of art; the untilled cereals whose heads he
gathers for winter use ; the beasts whose skins he employs for
decoration ; the very fossil echini and rhynchonellae which he
drills to make his primaeval necklets all impress the same idea
upon his developing mind. And the limbs or features of his
chosen squaw, not yet a mere domestic drudge like the Austral-
ian jin, but somewhat of a helpmate for the lord of the forest,
aid in fixing the notion of symmetry still more deeply in his brain
as a natural element of beauty. For we must never forget that
aesthetic feelings, from first to last, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has
pointed out, are closely interwoven with that most powerful of
impulses which, purified and intensified into human love, forms
finally the source of inspiration for half our highest poetry and
half our noblest art.
One other predisposing cause "of a passive sort we must notice
before we pass on to the actual evolution of the taste for
symmetry. Many objects used as vessels or implements by
primitive man are not only themselves symmetrical but must
almost necessarily undergo symmetrical alterations to make
them useful for human purposes. Thus a coco-nut, a calabash,
or an ostrich-egg is originally oval in shape. The monkey which
308 The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry.
cracks and eats the kernel or the yolk destroys the symmetry of
the object. But if man wishes to make himself a cup or a
water-bottle, he must cut the shell instead of breaking it : and
the cutting will almost inevitably result in a symmetrical vessel.
So far as it fails to be symmetrical, so much the less of its
content is utilised ; and therefore there will always be a tendency
for such vessels to grow more and more accurate in their
sections. So, too, with bamboos or sticks of wood. Themselves
circular in segment and straight in longitude, they can only be
used in more or less symmetrical arrangements. Posts for huts
made from these materials must stand perpendicularly. Chairs,
stools, or benches will topple over unless their supports are
evenly placed and straight in line. Single joints of large
bamboos, used as vessels for water or provisions, must be cut off
just below each joint. Similarly with basket work and many
other primitive arts. The naturally symmetrical material must
be symmetrically employed for domestic purposes or it fails to
attain the object of the maker.
And now that we have considered these two original elements
in the production of a habit or taste in mankind for making
symmetrical objects the active element, due to the rhythm and
recurrence of organic movements, and the passive element, due
to the constant observation of symmetry in external nature we
may go back to consider the steps by which primaeval man first
applied the notions thus evolved to the production of weapons
or implements.
In the first place we may notice that the very idea of an
implement is closely bound up with that of artificial symmetry.
An evolving anthropoid, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out,
might accidentally splinter a flint with which he was cracking a
nut ; and he would then naturally make use of the sharp
fragments as knives. 1 But such very rude implements as these
would scarcely deserve the name. The first forward step would
be taken when the anthropoid began consciously to aim at
regularity in his flint fragments. That is precisely the stage at
which we begin to call him a man. How very rough is the
regularity at first attained, all who have examined palaeolithic
stone implements know well enough. Yet even in these very
shapeless masses of chipped flint, we find a clear recognition of
symmetry as the aim and final intention of the artist, however
imperfectly realised. The hatchets are broken into a rude
approximate regularity, both laterally and longitudinally, so that
two transverse sections will each exhibit a certain approach to
1 If, however, the Abbe Bourgeois is right in regarding his tertiary flints
as human products, then the earliest stone implements were cracked by
means of fire, and only retilnimed by the hand.
The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry. 309
symmetry. Indeed, if we consider the slight means at the
disposal of the hatchet-maker, the wonder is rather that he
shoidd have taken so much pains to ensure regularity than that
the regularity actually attained should be so imperfect.
The arrowhead demands even more attention to symmetry
than the hatchet. It is true, barbed arrowheads were probably
by no means the earliest form, the very first lances or arrows
being tipped, apparently, with mere sharp points of flint. But
as soon as the principle of the barb was discovered, we get a
great advance in the direction of a regularly-shaped bilateral
weapon. Arrowheads of this type, especially in bone, are
common during the palaeolithic age, and often show considerable
pains and workmanship.
The other art-products of the drift and cave period also
display no little feeling for symmetry. This is especially
noticeable in the horn or bone implements, such as knife-handles,
fish-hooks, and needles ; and in the whistles formed from small
bones. The taste is more passively displayed in the drilled
fossil shells and pebbles, apparently employed for personal
decoration ; and we can hardly doubt, though we have no
positive evidence, that flowers and feathers were also used
during the same period for like aesthetic purposes.
But just in proportion as man went on framing implements
and vessels for himself in symmetrical forms, the notion of
symmetry as a proof and test of human workmanship would
grow stronger and more developed from day to day. The art of
grinding stone implements necessarily brings about a great
improvement in this respect. By the neolithic age we find the
conception so deeply ingrained that all human products have
become scrupulously even and regular, and a high degree of
artistic finish has been attained. We can see clearly that
symmetry is now prized for its own sake, and that pains are
taken to make every weapon, every tool, and every vessel not
only effective but also workmanlike and thorough. And we
must remember that from age to age those tribes which
acquired the greatest skill in the manufacture of weapons
would gain an advantage over their neighbours, not only directly
by the superiority of their arms, but also indirectly by the
increased power of muscular co-ordination which would be
developed in the manufacturing process.
We have necessarily very little evidence as to the origin of
most other arts, whose products are less imperishable than stone
hatchets and arrowheads. But it is clear that they must have
greatly increased the general habit of producing symmetrical
objects and the general taste for the symmetry so produced.
Thus the arts of wattling and weaving, essentially identical,
310 TJie Origin of the Sense of Symmetry.
yield alternate patterns. If pigments be used in staining
the material, as with the baskets of the American Indians and
the rude cloth of some South Sea Islanders, the result will be a
regular alternation of colours which often produces a very pretty
effect. In like manner, the art of pottery (developed as early
as the age of the Danish shell-mounds) helps on the taste for
symmetry ; because all early pottery is modelled upon natural
shapes, such as gourds, calabashes, nutshells, eggs, and perhaps
skulls. The native markings upon these objects, when they
possess any, will of course be symmetrical, and will accordingly
transfer their symmetry to the artificial vessels. Other modes
of decoration spring up in analogous manners. For example,
it has been shown that a very common string-course pattern
found on rude pottery was originally due to the marks of a
twisted rope, wound round the jar or bowl : and when the rope
was no longer used, the marks were roughly imitated by splashes
on the soft clay made with a knife. Here we see the conscious
desire for ornamentation begotten by its common occurrence
through adventitious circumstances.
The art of navigation must also have contributed largely to
form the taste for symmetry. The canoe must be hollowed out
of a straight log, and its sides must be evenly balanced so as to
swim true in the water. The paddle must have a straight
handle and an even flattened blade to guide the canoe aright.
In this case and in that of weapons, we see in part the origin of
the preference for straight lines over irregular curves. For in
the same way the arrow must be perfectly straight to hit the
mark ; and the spear or lance must be perfectly straight to take
a steady aim. Even the club and the stick used in walking
will perform their work much the better for being perfectly
straight. All these cases may go side by side with the props or
pillars used in building the hut, the wattles employed for its
walls, and the beams or cross pieces which make the conical
roof. The practical value of the straight line must soon ensure
it a recognised place in all primitive arts.
A further step in the same direction is that of conscious
numerical equality. Thus, beads of different shapes and colours
are not strung by savages, nor were probably by primitive man,
in irregular order, but in some definite numerical proportion,
say in the recurrent form B, A, B ; or C, B, A, B, C ; or C, B, B,
A, B, B, C. So, too, feathers or cowries are arranged in regular
patterns, according to size and length ; or are alternated in
colour ; or are placed together in diamonds or quincunx order.
Similarly with the posts of a hut, which are placed at definite
intervals, and perhaps with alternating sizes. This kind of
symmetry is naturally suggested by the contemplation of organic
The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry. 311
bodies, and in some instances is actually made almost necessary
by the proportions of the material.
In architecture, the cromlech offers a good example of such
rudimentary symmetry. The stone circles and avenues show us
a more developed form of the same principle. The posts of the
old Achaian hut thus grew slowly into the regular columns of
the Doric or Ionic temple ; and the fixed proportions which
these buildings maintained throughout their purest age probably
represent on an enlarged scale the original dimensions of the
herdsman's cottage. Architecture, indeed, is preeminently the
symmetrical art, in every stage of its development, and it is
partly for this reason that I have laid so much stress upon the
building instinct of the lower animals and its relation to the
habit of building in early man.
As soon as the taste for symmetry has become fixed and
definite in these various ways, it will follow that symmetrical
ornamentation will be consciously applied to those objects in
which decoration is a desired effect. Thus the club of the chief
comes to be delicately sculptured with dainty tracery, and the
royal canoe to be ornamented with regular and intricate patterns.
In this manner the feeling for fine workmanship grows stronger
and stronger, till at last we habitually think of detail in
symmetrical patterns, even in natural products, through the
analogy of human handicraft. Thus we speak of the delicate
sculpture on a shell, the exquisite tracery on an ammonite, the
minute carving of an echinus, the intricate lacework in a
microscopic diatom. The idea of a maker or workman, definitely
or indefinitely present to our minds, is always bound up with
our admiration for these beautiful objects : and when we wish
to sum up our pleasure in beholding them, we call them gems
or masterpieces of nature's handiwork. It is the notion of
human skill, actual or ideal, which gives us our standard for
judging of minute symmetrical patterns. In human works, as
for instance a Hindoo chased vase or a piece of Chinese ivory
carving, the more delicate the detail, the greater we know was
the labour and the skill expended, and hence the greater our
admiration. Accordingly, we transfer the same feeling to nature,
and think of the results attained by organisation or crystallisa-
tion as though they had been attained by deliberate design.
Another point deserving notice is the part played by repetition
in ornamentation. Almost every pattern consists of certain
separate parts repeated at regular intervals. Take as an
excellent example the plaster " roses " with which builders
disfigure the centres of our ceilings. Now, in most cases, this
repetition produces an excellent decorative effect, and indeed it
lies at the very root of almost all decorative art. Yet at the
312 The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry.
beginning it naturally results from the mere paucity of the
materials at the command of the decorator. Thus, in the
Polynesian Islands, cloth is stamped and dyed with really
pretty patterns in the following very simple manner. Two
stamps are prepared, having square dies, on one of which say, a
cross is cut, and on the other a diamond. These stamps are
then stained with dark red dye and applied to the cloth
alternately ; and the result is a very artistic chequer pattern of
crosses and diamonds. In the same way, a wedge-shaped die,
applied successively round a fixed centre, will form a circular
pattern ; and a single application at each corner of a handker-
chief will complete the decoration very prettily. In fact,
repetition of a single figure (which need not itself be sym-
metrical) is at once one of the simplest and most effective
devices of ornamental art.
The longer man continues to build and to manufacture, the
stronger do these habits grow of symmetry in useful objects, and
of decoration for mere ornament's sake. Every human product
comes to be definitely shaped, until we at last forget how
universal is the practice, even on account of its very universal-
ity. But we need only look around our own rooms to notice
the straight lines and rectangular figures of floor, walls, ceiling,
doors, and windows ; the regular breaking up of the last into
panes and panels ; the square, oblong, round, or oval tables ;
the shape of the chairs, sofas and ottomans ; the mantelpiece,
fireplace, grate and fender ; the pattern on the carpet, wall-
paper and curtains ; the very door-handles, bell-pulls, gas-
brackets and key-hole-shields. Not an object in our modern
human world which does not bear manifold marks of symmetrical
design. It is worth while, in this connexion, merely to take up
the poker and observe what an immense amount of workmanship
is involved in the various kinds of symmetry which occur in its
fluted knob, its cylindrical shaft, and its square extremity.
Ages of previous aesthetic culture are presupposed in our kitchen
fire-irons.
And now the question naturally arises, why is symmetry thus
pleasing to the human mind ? I have already hinted the
answer to the question in great part, but we shall gain in
clearness by once more putting the problem in this definite form.
In the first place, the high position which symmetry occupies in
human ideas of beauty is doubtless largely due to the developed
intellectual faculties of man. There can be little hesitation in
admitting, it is true, that the lower animals share this feeling to
some extent, at least if Mr. Darwin be correct in attributing to
sexual selection the ball-and-socket ornamentation of the argus-
pheasant, the magnificent plumage of the lyre-bird, and the
The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry. 313
gracefully spiral horns of the Koodoo antelope. But the
intellectual superiority of man makes him far more capable than
any other animal of deriving pleasure from that order and
regularity which are the central features of symmetry. The
first germ of the taste must therefore be set down to the recogni-
tion of an intelligible plan as distinct from a mere chaos. There
is probably no savage so low as not to perceive the superiority
in this respect of a fern to a cabbage-leaf, or of a carved club to
a rough and shapeless stick. And it may not be irrelevant here
to note that the flora of the tropics, where we have reason to
believe man was first developed, is largely distinguished from
the flora of the temperate zone by its much greater symmetry of
arrangement. The radial principle in the various palms, the
banana, the aloe, the bromelias, the bamboos, the tree-ferns, the
club-mosses, and the cactuses, is one of the first peculiarities
which strikes the visitor on lauding in a tropical country ; and
it may be realised to some extent even in the hothouses of Kew
and the Jardin des Plantes. It is not, perhaps, extravagant to
suppose that this symmetrical arrangement of nature on a large
scale may have had some influence in quickening the primitive
love for symmetry, just as I believe the great tropical fruits and
flowers, and the beautiful plumes of tropical birds, had some
influence in quickening the primitive love for bright colours.
At any rate, we may hold it as certain that the coco-nuts,
calabashes, ostrich-eggs, gourds, cowries, and bamboo stems of
equatorial climates have been of great practical service in
originating the use of symmetrical vessels, dwellings, and
furniture amongst early man.
Next to the original pleasure of a comprehensible arrangement,
we must place the inherited effect of usage. The more man
grew accustomed to be surrounded by symmetrical objects, the
more would he demand symmetry in all articles of human
manufacture. A rough or unshapely implement he would
naturally reject as inferior ; while a finished and shapely one
would recommend itself to him as the best and handsomest.
Here, too, he would be partly determined by practical utility,
which generally coincides (roughly speaking) with artistic finish.
For just as we saw that the straightest arrow flies best to its
mark, so does the roundest stone fit best in the sling, and the
smoothest spear-head pierce most easily through the hide of wild
beasts or the enemy's skulL And thus utility goes hand in
hand with beauty, as the principle of evolution would teach us
to expect even a priori that it would do.
Finally, we get the pleasure of human handicraft, a distant
form of sympathy, not unmixed with admiration for skill.
When the symmetry and the workmanship are merely such as
314 TJie Origin of the Sense of Symmetry.
we find in everyday life, we feel this pleasure only to a very
slight extent. But when the skill displayed is very great, as in
the marvellous lattice screens of wrought marble which adorn so
many works of Indian architecture, or in the beautiful tracery
of an Admiralty Islander's club, or in the rose window of an
English cathedral, our feeling becomes one of distinct sesthetic
pleasure, in which the elements of sympathy and admiration
are very obviously recognisable. And in the case of natural
productions, we read-in by analogy a similar admiration for the
being or entity to whom we actually or implicitly assign their
creation.
Hence it will be seen that the pleasure in symmetry is far
more derivative and intellectual than the pleasure in colour or
in simple musical sound, both of which are comparatively
primitive and sensuous. At the same time it is a pleasure
which can be shared and appreciated by many savages whom
we are accustomed to place very low in the scale of humanity.
A point of some interest is connected with the old dispute as
to the line of beauty. Looking at the question from a scientific
and inductive stand-point, it may be said that the straight line
represents practical beauty, and the curve ornamental beauty.
The straight line is the best and simplest boundary, on the
whole, for houses, walls, furniture, boxes, architectural details,
roads, streets, canals, railways ; the shortest route for the path
of a ship, a wain, an army, a moving body generally; the
natural limit for a book, a paper, a piece of cloth, a brick, a
plank of wood, and in short for most raw material. Even in
fine art, strictly so called, a straight and rectangular boundary
is often convenient ; and I suppose Mr. Euskin himself would
hardly demand that all pictures should cover an oval or circular
canvas and have curved frames. A glance around the room will
show the reader how largely and necessarily the straight line
enters into both the constructive and decorative part of his
surroundings. But the curved line is certainly the chosen
ornamental contour. It may of course be occasionally employed
for mere practical purposes, as in an arch, a bow window, a
bowl, a ship-timber, or possibly a barrel : yet even in these it
possesses a certain special beauty of its own. In most cases,
however, it is used for decorative effect alone, and in the hands
of savages it is employed with admirable results in tattooing
and in ornamental work generally. Amongst ourselves, it
contributes to the beauty of all architecture and of all internal
decoration : and even where it has been lavished with excessive
ardour, as upon furniture, gas-hangings, and the other " solicitous
wrigglings " which offend against the most cultivated taste, it
must be accepted as accurately reflecting the general sesthetic
The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry. 315
sensibility of average European man. The modern artistic
demand for " simplicity of outline " is a reaction against the
ordinary desire to obtain the greatest possible amount of
ornamental curvature, in season or out of season ; because the
ordinary mind is pleased with external twists and twirls which
give dignity and importance, at the cost, as others may think, of
simple beauty and appropriateness.
The love of symmetry, once introduced, rapidly grows through
the action of all the influences already enumerated, and at length
induces a certain reaction. Early imitative art, as we see not
only in the pictures drawn by savages, but even in the highly
developed paintings and bas-reliefs of the Egyptians and
Assyrians, usually assumes a symmetrical shape. The common
and well-known figures of Pasht afford excellent examples
which must be familiar to every reader : a cat-faced goddess,
seated bolt upright on a chair or throne, with ankles and feet
set together, and either hand placed symmetrically upon its
corresponding knee. Gradually, however, a spirit of discontent
sets in against this formal symmetry. Some bolder artist
observes that mankind in the actuality, though possessing
typically bilateral bodies, do not habitually hold themselves in
such stiff and abstractly human attitudes. Even in Egyptian
sculpture, and much more in Egyptian painting, we get
occasional variations from the traditional positions : and there
is at least one group of statuary in the British Museum, as early
as the IXth Dynasty, which is almost Greek in the natural pose
of its two figures a husband and wife, seated side by side as
they might have sat in actual life. But it is not till the rise of
. Hellenic sculpture that we find symmetry carefully eschewed in
imitative works. The fundamental distinction of imitative and
decorative art begins with the Greeks. Before them, almost all
painting and sculpture was half ornamental, half representative
in character : it was they who first drew the definite line
! between the two, and thoroughly emancipated imitative art from
symmetrical arrangements. Nevertheless, we must not forget
that an Egyptian would probably have preferred his own
regular and carefully measured figures to the unsymmetrical and
free pose of a Hellenic Apollo : just as the negro of our own
day prefers a rude full-faced portrait to a profile, and asks with
critical displeasure why the artist has given him only one eye.
Before quitting the subject, I cannot avoid briefly noticing
the special form which this reaction against symmetry has taken
amongst the Japanese. Xo other nation, outside the regular
line of Helleno-Italian and Western European civilisation, has
ever advanced so far in imitative art as the people of Japan.
They have studied nature at first hand, and have succeeded in
316 TJie Origin of the Sense of Symmetry.
completely throwing aside the primitive symmetrical treatment
of the human and animal form. But at the same time, they
have gone much further than all other nations in their systematic
rejection of symmetry even in comparatively decorative art.
Whether this habit or tendency is of artistic merit or otherwise,
I shall not attempt to determine, since it is well to keep
critical questions quite apart from such a positive discussion as
that upon which we are now engaged. But it is at least certain
that the Japanese do, as a matter of fact, carefully avoid
symmetrical arrangement of figures, patterns, or designs, even
on fans, vases, fictile ware, and other ornamental objects. It is
this deliberate and conscious attempt at asymmetry which gives
to Japanese workmanship much of its distinctive quaintness.
Apparently, the Japanese artists first observed that absolute
symmetry was rarely found in concrete nature, though it is
almost always found in the abstract form ; l and hence they
began a revolution somewhat analogous to that which produced
the later Hellenic art. But w r hen the revolution was once set
up, they probably grew to look upon asymmetry as a differen-
tiating peculiarity of Japanese civilised art, when compared with
the rude workmanship of other or earlier races. Moreover, this
peculiarity fell in naturally with a generic tendency of the
Turanian mind, which has always sought after the odd as a
separate element of aesthetic feeling. In a higher way, too, it
encouraged artistic freedom ; and this is the special quality
which recommends Japanese art to western connoisseurs. Of
course, it must not be supposed that the Japanese utterly and
entirely abjure the employment of symmetry : their plates and
cups are on the whole just as circular as our own : but they do
reject the symmetrical arrangement of decorative designs in
many cases where European art has almost invariably employed
it. This subject, however, though interesting in itself, would
lead us too far afield from the simple consideration of symmetry.
In conclusion, I would only add that the treatment of so large
a theme as that of the causes which produced our human love
for symmetry can be but very roughly sketched in a single short
paper. It must suffice to suggest briefly the most important
steps, leaving the minor details to be filled in from the know-
ledge of the reader.
GRANT ALLEN.
1 This assertion may seem at first sight opposed to what has been pre-
viously said with regard to the symmetry of natural forms ; but the contra-
diction is only apparent. Every leaf upon a tree is in itself symmetrical ;
but the tree as a whole, and each leaf as seen in perspective, is unsymme-
trical. Early man represents the object conventionally as he conceives it,
in its abstract regularity : the advanced artist represents it accurately as he
sees it, in its accidental variety and freedom.
II. THE SEXTDIEXT OF RATIONALITY.
I.
WHAT is the task which philosophers set themselves to per-
form ? And why do they philosophise at all ? Almost every
one will immediately reply : They desire to attain a conception
of the frame of things which shall on the whole be more
rational than the rather fragmentary and chaotic one which
everyone by gift of nature carries about with him tinder his
hat. But suppose this rational conception attained by the
philosopher, how is he to recognise it for what it is, and not let
it slip through ignorance ? The only answer can be that he will
recognise its rationality as he recognises everything else, by
certain subjective marks with which it affects him. When he
gets the marks he may know that he has got the rationality.
What then are the marks ? A strong feeling of ease, peace,
rest, is one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and
perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and
pleasure.
But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive
character. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is
constituted merely by the absence of any feeling of irrationality ?
I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view.
All feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological
speculations, -seems to depend for its physical condition not on
simple discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under
arrest, impediment or resistance. Just as we feel no particular
pleasure when we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of
distress when the respiratory motions are prevented ; so any
unobstructed tendency to action discharges itself without the
production of much cogitative accompaniment, and any per-
fectly fluent course of thought awakens but little feeling. But
when the movement is inhibited or when the thought meets
with difficulties, we experience a distress which yields to an
opposite feeling of pleasure as fast as the obstacle is overcome.
It is only when the distress is upon us that we can be said to
strive, to crave, or to aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom
to energise either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in
i a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt
Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at sucli
, times, " I am sufficient as I am ". This feeling of the sufficiency
of the present moment, of its absoluteness this absence of all
need to explain it, account for it or justify it is what I call the
22
318 The Sentiment of Rationality.
Sentiment of Bationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled
from any cause whatever t'o think of a thing with perfect
fluency, that thing seems to us rational.
Why we should constantly gravitate towards the attainment of
such fluency cannot here be said. As this is not an ethical but
a psychological essay, it is quite sufficient for our purposes to
lay it down as an empirical fact that we strive to formulate
rationally a tangled mass of fact by a propensity as natural
and invincible as that which makes us exchange a hard high stool
for an arm-chair or prefer travelling by railroad to riding in a
springless cart.
Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this
fluency of our thought, produce the sentiment of rationality.
Conceived in such modes Being vouches for itself and needs no
further philosophic formulation. But so long as mutually
obstructive elements are involved in the conception, the pent-up
irritated mind recoiling on its present consciousness will criticise
it, worry over it, and never cease in its attempts to discover some
new mode of formulation which may give it escape from the
irrationality of its actual ideas.
Now mental ease and freedom may be obtained in various
ways. Nothing is more familiar than the way in which mere
custom makes us at home with ideas or circumstances which,
when new, filled the mind with curiosity and the need of
explanation. There is no more common sight than that of men's
mental worry about things incongruous with personal desire,
and their thoughtless incurious acceptance of whatever happens
to harmonise with their subjective ends. The existence of evil
forms a " mystery " a " problem " : there is no " problem of
happiness ". But, on the other hand, purely theoretic processes
may produce the same mental peace which custom and con-
gruity with our native impulses in other cases give; and we
have forthwith to discover how it is that so many processes can
produce the same result, and how Philosophy, by emulating or
using the means of all, may attain to a conception of the world
which shall be rational in the maximum degree, or be warranted
in the most composite manner against the inroads of mental
unrest or discontent.
II.
It will be best to take up first the theoretic way. The facts
of the world in their sensible diversity are always before us, but
the philosophic need craves that they should be conceived in
such a way as to satisfy the sentiment of rationality. The
philosophic quest then is the quest of a conception. What now
The- Sentiment of Rationality. 319
is a conception ? It is a Ideological instrument. It is a partial
aspect of a thing which for our pur-pose we regard as its essential
aspect, as the representative of the entire thing. In comparison
with this aspect, whatever other properties and qualities the
thing may have, are unimportant accidents which we may with-
out "blame ignore. But the essence, the ground of conception,
varies with the end we have in view. A substance like oil has
as many different essences as it has uses to different individuals.
One man conceives it as a combustible, another as a lubricator,
another as a food ; the chemist thinks of it as a hydro-carbon ;
the furniture-maker as a darkener of wood ; the speculator as a
commodity whose market price to-day is this and to-morrow
that. The soap-boiler, the physicist, the clothes-scourer
severally ascribe to it other essences in relation to their needs.
Ueberweg's doctrine 1 that the essential quality of a thing is the
quality of most worth, is strictly true ; but Ueberweg has failed to
note that the worth is wholly relative to the temporary interests
of the conceiver. And, even, when his interest is distinctly
denned in his own mind, the discrimination of the quality in
the object which has the closest connexion with it, is a thing
which no rules can teach. The only a priori advice that can
be given to a man embarking on life with a certain purpose is
the somewhat barren counsel : Be sure that in the circumstances
that meet you, you attend to the right ones for your purpose.
To pick out the right ones is the measure of the man. " Millions,"
says Hartmann, " stare at the phenomenon before a genialer Kopf
pounces on the concept." 2 The genius is simply he to whom,
when he opens his eyes upon the world, the " right " characters
are the prominent ones. The fool is he who, with the same
purposes as the genius, infallibly gets his attention tangled amid
the accidents.
Schopenhauer expresses well this ultimate truth when he says
that Intuition (by which in this passage he means the power to
distinguish at a glance the essence amid the accidents) " is not
only the source of all knowledge, but is knowledge /car' e^o^u
, . . is real insight. . . . Wisdom, the true view of
life, the right look at things, and the judgment that hits the
mark, proceed from the mode in which the man conceives the
world which lies before him . . . He who excels in this
talent knows the (Platonic) ideas of the world and of life.
Every case he looks at stands for countless cases ; more and
more he goes on to conceive of each tiling in accordance with its
true nature, and his acts like his judgments bear the stamp of
his insight. Gradually his face too acquires the straight and
1 Logic, English tr., p. 139.
2 Philosophie des Unbewussttn, 2te Auflage, p. 249.
320 The Sentiment of Rationality.
piercing look, the expression of reason, and at last of wisdom.
For the direct sight of essences alone can set its mark upon the
face. Abstract knowledge about them has no such effect." 1
The right conception for the philosopher depends then on his
interests. Now the interest which he has above other men is
that of reducing the manifold in thought to simple form. We
can no more say why the philosopher is more peculiarly
sensitive to this delight, than we can explain the passion some
persons have for matching colours or for arranging cards in a
game of solitaire. All these passions resemble each other in
one point ; they are all illustrations of what may be called the
aesthetic Principle of Ease. Our pleasure at finding that a
chaos of facts is at bottom the expression of a single underlying
fact is like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused
mass of sound into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified
result is handled with far less mental effort than the original
data; and a philosophic conception of nature is thus in no
metaphorical sense a labour-saving contrivance. The passion
for parsimony, for economy of means in thought, is thus the
philosophic passion par excellence, and any character or aspect of
the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity into
simplicity will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's
mind stand for that essence of things compared with which all
their other determinations may by him be overlooked.
Mere universality or extensiveness is then the one mark the
philosopher's conceptions must possess. Unless they appear in
an enormous number of cases they will not bring the relief
which is his main theoretic need. The knowledge of things by
their causes, which is often given as a definition of rational
knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to a
minimum number whilst still producing the maximum number
of effects. The more multiple are the instances he can see to
be cases of his fundamental concept, the more flowingly does
his mind rove from fact to fact in the world. The phenomenal
transitions are no real transitions ; each item is the same old
friend with a slightly altered dress. This passion for unifying
things may gratify itself, as we all know, at truth's expense.
Everyone has friends bent on system and everyone has observed
how, when their system has once taken definite shape, they
become absolutely blind and insensible to the most flagrant
facts which cannot be made to fit into it. The ignoring of data
is, in fact, the easiest and most popular mode of obtaining unity
in one's thought.
But leaving these vulgar excesses let us glance briefly at some
1 Welt als Wilk u. Vorstellung, II., p. 83
The Sentiment of nationality. 321
more dignified contemporary examples of the hypertrophy of
the unifying passion.
Its ideal goal gets permanent expression in the great notion
of Substance, the underlying One in which all differences are
reconciled. D'Alembert's often quoted lines express the pos-
tulate in its most abstract shape : " L'univers pour qui saurait
1'embrasser d'un seul point de vue ne serait, s'il est permis cle le
dire, qu'un fait unique et une grande verite ". Accordingly Mr.
Spencer, after saying on page 158 of the first volume of his
Psychology, that " no effort enables us to assimilate Feeling and
Motion, they have nothing in common," cannot refrain on page
162 from invoking abruptly an " Unconditional Being common
to the two ".
The craving for Monism at any cost is the parent of the entire
evolutionist movement of our day, so far as it pretends to be
more than history. The Philosophy of Evolution tries to show
how the world at any given time may be conceived as absolutely
identical, except in appearance, with itself at all past times.
What it most abhors is the admission of anything which,
appearing at a given point, should be judged essentially other
than what went before. Notwithstanding the lacimae in Mr.
Spencer's system ; notwithstanding the vagueness of his terms ;
in spite of the sort of jugglery by which his use of the word
" nascent " is made to veil the introduction of new primordial
factors like consciousness, as if, like the girl in Midshipman
Easy, he could excuse the illegitimacy of an infant, by saying it
was a very little one in spite of all this, I say, Mr. Spencer is,
and is bound to be, the most popular of all philosophers, because
more than any other he seeks to appease our strongest theoretic
craving. To undiscriminatmg minds his system will be a sop ;
to acute ones a programme full of suggestiveness.
When Lewes asserts in one place that the nerve-process and
the feeling which accompanies it are not two things but only
two " aspects " of one and the same thing, whilst in other
passages he seems to imply that the cognitive feeling and the
outward tiling cognised (which is always other than the nerve-
process accompanying the cognitive act) are again one thing in
two aspects (giving us thereby as the ultimate truth One Thing
in Three Aspects, very much as Trinitarian Christians affirm it
to be One God in Three Persons), the vagueness of his mode
only testifies to the imperiousness of his need of unity.
The crowning feat of unification at any cost is seen in the
Hegelian denial of the Principle of Contradiction. One who is
willing to allow that A and not-A are one, can be checked by
few farther difficulties in Philosophy.
322 The Sentiment of Rationality.
III.
But alongside of the passion for simplification, there exists a
sister passion which in some minds though they perhaps form
the minority is its rival. This is the passion for distinguish-
ing ; it is the impulse to be acquainted with the parts rather than
to comprehend the whole. Loyalty to clearness and integrity
of perception, dislike of blurred outlines, of vague identifications,
are its characteristics. It loves to recognise particulars in their
full completeness, and the more of these it can carry the happier
it is. It is the mind of Cuvier versus St. Hilaire, of Hume versus
Spinoza, It prefers any amount of incoherence, abruptness and
fragmentariness (so long as the literal details of the separate
facts are saved) to a fallacious unity which swamps things
rather than explains them.
Clearness versus Simplicity is then the theoretic dilemma, and
a man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him
of these two cravings. When John Mill insists that the ultimate
laws of nature cannot possibly be less numerous than the
distinguishable qualities of sensation which we possess, he speaks
in the name of this aesthetic demand for clearness. When Prof.
Bain says 1 : " There is surely nothing to be dissatisfied with, or
to complain of in the circumstance that the elements of our
experience are in the last resort two and not one . . .
Instead of our being ' unfortunate ' in not being able to know
the essence of either matter or mind in not comprehending
their union, our misfortune would rather be to have to know
anything different from what we do know," he is animated by
a like motive. All makers of architectonic systems like that of
Kant, all multipliers of original principles, all dislikers of vague
monotony, whether it bear the character of Eleatic stagnancy or
of Heraclitic change, obey this tendency. Ultimate kinds of
feeling bound together in harmony by laws, which themselves
are ultimate kinds of relation, form the theoretic resting-place of
such philosophers.
The unconditional demand which this need makes of a
philosophy is that its fundamental terms should be representable.
Phenomena are analysable into feelings and relations. Causa-
lity is a relation between two feelings. To abstract the relation
from the feelings, to unify all things by referring them to a
first cause, and to leave this latter relation with no term of feeling
before it, is to violate the fundamental habits of our thinking,
to baffle the imagination, and to exasperate the minds of certain
people much as everyone's eye is exasperated by a magic-lantern
picture or a microscopic object out of focus. Sharpen it, we
say, or for heaven's sake remove it altogether.
1 " On Mystery, etc." Fortnightly Review, Vol. IV. N.S., page 394.
The Sentiment of Rationality. 323
The matter is not at all helped when the word Substance is
brought forward and the primordial causality said to obtain
between this and the phenomena ; for Substance in se cannot
be directly imaged by feeling, and seems in fact but to be a
peculiar form of relation between feelings the relation of organic
union between a group of them and time. Such relations,
represented as non-phenomenal entities, become thus the bete
noire and pet ayersion of many thinkers. By being posited as
existent they challenge our acquaintance but at the same instant
defy it by being defined as noumenal. So far is this reaction
against the treatment of relational terms as metempirical entities
carried, that the reigning British school seems to deny their
function even in their legitimate sphere, namely as phenomenal
elements or " laws " cementing the mosaic of our feelings into
coherent form. Time, likeness, and unlikeness are the only
phenomenal relations our English empiricists can tolerate. One
of the earliest and perhaps the most famous expression of the
dislike to relations considered abstractedly is the well-known
passage from Hume : " When we run oyer libraries, persuaded
of these principles, what havoc must we make ! If we take in
our hand any yolume of divinity or school metaphysic, for
instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning con-
cerning quantity or number ? Xo. Does it contain any
experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact existence ?
No. Commit it then to the flames : for it can contain nothing
but sophistry and illusion." 1
Many are the variations which succeeding writers have
played on this tune. As we spoke of the excesses of the
unifying passion, so we may now say of the craving for clear
representability that it leads often to an unwillingness to treat
any abstractions whatever as if they were intelligible. Even to
talk of space, time, feeling, power, &c., oppresses them with a
strange sense of uncanniness. Anything to be real for them
must be representable in the form of a lump. Its other concrete
determinations may be abstracted from, but its tangible thing-
hood must remain. Minds of this order, if they can be brought
to psychologise at all, abound in such phrases as " tracts " of
consciousness, " areas " of emotion, " molecules " of feeling,
" agglutinated portions " of thought, " gangs " of ideas &c., &c.
Those who wish an amusing example of this style of thought
should read Le Cerveau by the anatomist Luys, surely the very
worst book ever written on the much-abused subject of mental
physiology. In another work, Psychologic realiste, by P. Sierebois
(Paris 1876), it is maintained that " our ideas exist in us in a
1 Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II., p. 135.
324 TJie Sentiment of Rationality.
molecular condition, and are subject to continual movements.
. . . Their mobility is as great as that of the molecules of
air or any gas." When we fail to recall a word it is because
our ideas are hid in some distant corner of the brain whence
they cannot come to the muscles of articulation, or else " they
have lost their ordinary fluidity ". . . . " These ideal
molecules are material portions of the brain which differs from
all other matter precisely in this property which it possesses of
subdividing itself into very attenuated portions which easily
take on the likeness in form and quality of all external objects."
In other words, when I utter the word ' rhinoceros ' an actual
little microscopic rhinoceros gallops towards my mouth.
A work of considerable acuteness, far above the vulgar
materialistic level, is that of Czolbe, Grundzuge einer extension-
alen Erkenntnisstheorie (1875). This author explains our ideas
to be extended substances endowed with mutual penetrability.
The matter of which they are composed is " elastic like india-
rubber". When " concentrated " by " magnetic self-attraction"
into the middle of the brain, its " intensity " is such that it
becomes conscious. When the attraction ceases, the idea-sub-
stance expands and diffuses itself into infinite space and so sinks
from consciousness.
Again passing over these gwm-pathological excesses, we come
to a permanent and, for our purpose, most important fact the
fact that many minds of the highest analytic power will tolerate
in Philosophy no unifying terms but elements immanent in
phenomena, and taken in their phenomenal and representable
sense. Entities whose attributes are not directly given in
feeling, phenomenal relations functioning as entities, are alike
rejected. Spinozistic Substance, Spencerian Unknowable, are
abhorred as unrepresentable things, numerically additional to
the representable world. The substance of things for these clear
minds can be no more than their common measure. The
phenomena bear to it the same relation that the different
numbers bear to unity. These contain no other matter than the
repeated unit, but they may be classed as prime numbers, odd
numbers, even numbers, square numbers, cube numbers, &c.,
just as truly and naturally as we class concrete things. The
molecular motions, of which physicists hope that some day
all events and properties will be seen to consist, form such an
immanent unity of colossal simplifying power. The " infinitesi-
mal event " of various modern writers, Taine for example/
with its two " aspects," inner and outer, reaches still farther
in the same direction. Writers of this class, if they deal
with Psychology, repudiate the "soul" as a scholastic entity.
The phenomenal unity of consciousness must flow from some
Tlie Sentiment of Rationality. 325
element immutably present in each and every representation of
the individual and binding the whole into one. To unearth and
accurately define this phenomenal self becomes one of the
fundamental tasks of Psychology.
But the greatest living insister on the principle that unity in
our account of things shall not overwhelm clearness, is Charles
Benouvier. His masterly exposition of the irreducible categories
of thought in his Ess'iis de Critique gene'rale ought to be far
better known among us than it is. The onslaughts which this
eminently clear-headed writer has made and still makes in his
weekly journal, the Critique Philosophiquc, on the vanity of the
evolutionary principle of simplification, which supposes that you
have explained away all distinctions by simply saying " they
arise " instead of " they are," form the ablest criticism which
the school of Evolution has received. Difference " thus dis-
placed, transported from the esse to the fieri, is it any the less
postulated ? And does the fieri itself receive the least com-
mencement of explanation when we suppose that everything
which occurs, occurs little by little, by insensible degrees,
so that, if we look at any one of these degrees, what happens
does so as easily and clearly as if it did not happen at all ?
. . . If we want a continuous production ex nihilo, why
not say so frankly, and abandon the idea of a ' transition
without break ' which explains really nothing ? " l
IV.
Our first conclusion may then be this : Xo system of philo-
sophy can hope to be universally accepted among men which
grossly violates either of the two great aesthetic needs of our
logical nature, the need of unity and the need of clearness, or
entirely subordinates the one to the other. Doctrines of mere
disintegration like that of Hume and his successors, will be as
widely unacceptable on the one hand as doctrines of merely
engulphing substantialism like those of Schopenhauer, Haitmann
and Spencer on the other. Can we for our own guidance
briefly sketch out here some of the conditions of most favourable
compromise ?
In surveying the connexions between data we are immedi-
ately struck by the fact that some are more intimate than
others. Propositions which express those we call necessary
truths ; and with them we contrast the laxer collocations and
sequences which are known as empirical, habitual or merely
fortuitous. The former seem to have an imcard reasonableness
which the latter are deprived of. The link, whatever it be,
1 Critique Philosophise, 12 Juillet, 1877, p. 383.
326 Tlie Sentiment of Rationality,
which binds the two phenomena together, seems to extend from
the heart of one into the heart of the next, and to be an essential
reason why the facts should always and indefeasibly be as we
now know them. " Within the pale we stand." As Lotze says 1 :
" The intellect is not satisfied with merely associated representa-
tions. In its constant critical activity thought seeks to refer
each representation to the rational ground which conditions the
alliance of what is associated and proves that what is grouped
belongs together. So it separates from each other those impres-
sions which merely coalesce without inward connexions, and it
renews (while corroborating them) the bonds of those which, by
the inward kinship of their content, have a right to permanent
companionship."
On the other hand many writers seem to deny the existence
of any such inward kinship or rational bond between things.
Hume says : " All our distinct perceptions are distinct existences
and the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct
existences ". 2
Hume's followers are less bold in their utterances than their
master, but throughout all recent British Nominalism we find
the tendency to enthrone mere juxtaposition as lord of all and
to make of the Universe what has well been styled a Nulliverse.
" For my part," says Prof. Huxley, " I utterly repudiate and
anathematise the intruder [Necessity]. Fact I know ; and
Law I know ; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow
of the mind's own throwing ?"
And similarly J. S. Mill writes : " What is called explaining
one law by another is but substituting one mystery for another,
and does nothing to render the course of nature less mysterious.
We can no more assign a why for the more extensive laws
than for the partial ones. The explanation may substitute a
mystery which has become familiar and has grown to seem not
mysterious for one which is still strange. And this is the
meaning of explanation in common parlance. . . . The laws
thus explained or resolved are said to be accounted for ; but the
expression is incorrect if taken to mean anything more than
what has been stated." 3
And yet the very pertinacity with which such writers remind
us that our explanations are in a strict sense of the word no
explanations at all ; that our causes never unfold the essential
nature of their effects ; that we never seize the inward reason
why attributes cluster as they do to form things, seems to prove
that they possess in their minds some ideal or pattern of what a
1 Microcosmus, 2nd ed. L, p. 261.
2 Treatise on Human Nature, ed. T. H. Green, I., p. 559.
3 Logic, 8th Edition, I., p. 549.
The Sentiment of Rationality. 327
genuine explanation would be like in case they should meet it.
How could they brand our current explanations as spurious, if
they had no positive notion whatever of the real thing ?
Now have we the real thing ? And yet may they be partly
right in their denials'? Surely both; and I think that the
shares of truth may be easily assigned. Our " laws " are to a
great extent but facts of larger growth, and yet things are
inwardly and necessarily connected notwithstanding. The entire
process of philosophic simplification of the chaos of sense
consists of two acts, Identification and Association. Both are
principles of union and therefore of theoretic rationality ; but
the rationality between things associated is outward and custom-
bred. Only when things are identified do we pass inwardly and
necessarily from one to the other.
The first step towards unifying the chaos is to classify its
items. " Every concrete thing," says Prof. Bain, " falls into as
many classes as it has attributes." 1 "When we pick out a
certain attribute to conceive it by, we literally and strictly
identify it in that respect with the other concretes of the class
having that attribute for its essence, concretes which the attribute
recalls. When we conceive of sugar as a white thing it is pro
tanto identical with snow ; as a sweet thing it is the same as
liquorice ; qua hydro-carbon, as starch. The attribute picked out
may be per se most uninteresting and familiar, but if things
superficially very diverse can be found to possess it buried
within them and so be assimilated with each other, " the mind
feels a peculiar and genuine satisfaction. . . . The intellect,
oppressed with the variety and multiplicity of facts, is joyfully
relieved by the simplification and the unity of a great prin-
ciple." 2
"Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and
the apple are, as far as their relation to the earth goes, identical ?
of knowing respiration and combustion to be one ? of under-
standing that the balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone
sinks ? of feeling that the warmth in one's palm when one rubs
one's sleeve is identical with the motion which the friction
checks ? of recognising the difference between beast and fish to be
only a higher degree of that between human father and son ? of
believing our strength when we climb or chop to be no other
than the strength of the sun's rays which made the oats grow
out of which we got our morning meal ?
"We shall presently see how the attribute performing this
unifying function, becomes associated with some other attribute
to form what is called a general law. But at present we must
1 Ment. and Mor. Science, p. 107. * Bain, Logic, II., p. 120.
328 The Sentiment of Rationality.
note that many sciences remain in this first and simplest
classificatory stage. A classificatory science is merely one the
fundamental concepts of which have few associations or none
with other concepts. When I say a man, a lizard, and a frog
are one in being vertebrates, the identification, delightful as it is
in itself, leads me hardly any farther. " The idea that all the
parts of a flower are modified leaves, reveals a connecting law,
which surprises us into acquiescence. But now try and define
the leaf, determine its essential characteristics, so as to include
all the forms that we have named. You will find yourself in a
difficulty, for all distinctive marks vanish, and you have nothing
left, except that a leaf in this wider sense of the term is a lateral
appendage of the axis of a plant. Try then to express the
proposition ' the parts of a flower are modified leaves ' in the
language of scientific definition, and it reads, ' the parts of the
flower are lateral appendages of the axis '." 1 Truly a bald
result ! Yet a dozen years ago there hardly lived a naturalist
who was not thrilled with rapture at identifications in " philo-
sophic" anatomy and botany exactly on a par with this.
Nothing could more clearly show that the gratification of the
sentiment of rationality depends hardly at all on the worth
of the attribute which strings things together but almost
exclusively on the mere fact of their being strung at all.
Theological implications were the utmost which the attributes
of archetypal zoology carried with them, but the wretched
poverty of these proves how little they had to do with the
enthusiasm engendered by archetypal identifications. Take
.Agassiz's conception of class-characters, order-characters &c., as
" thoughts of God ". What meagre thoughts ! Take Owen's
archetype of the vertebrate skeleton as revealing the artistic
temperament of the Creator. It is a grotesque figure with
neither beauty nor ethical suggestiveness, fitted rather to
discredit than honour the Divine Mind. In short the concep-
tions led no farther than the identification pure and simple.
The transformation which Darwin has effected in the classifica-
tory sciences is simply this that in his theory the class-essence
is not a unifying attribute pure and simple, but an attribute
with wide associations. When a frog, a man and a lizard are
recognised as one, not simply in having the same back-bone,
&c., but in being all offspring of one parent, our thought instead
of coming to a standstill, is immediately confronted with
further problems and, we hope, solutions. Who were that
parent's ancestors and cousins ? Why was he chosen out of all
to found such an enormous line ? Why did he himself perish
in the struggle to survive ? &c.
1 Helmholtz, Popular Scientific Lectures, p. 47.
The Sentiment of Rationality. 329
Association of class-attributes inter se, is thus the next great
step in the mind's simplifying industry. By it Empirical Laws
are founded and sciences, from classificatory, become explana-
tory. Without it we should be in the position of a judge who
could only decide that the cases in his court belonged each to a
certain class, but who should be inhibited from passing sentence,
or attaching to the class-name any further notion of duty, lia-
bility, or penalty. This coupling of the class-concept with certain
determinate consequences associated therewithal, is what is practi-
cally important iu the laws of nature as in those of society.
When, for example, we have identified prisms, bowls of water,
lenses and strata of air as distorting media, the next step is to
learn that all distorting media refract light rays towards the
perpendicular. Such additional determination makes a law.
But this law itself may be as inscrutable as the concrete fact we
started from. The entrance of a ray and its swerving towards
the perpendicular, may be simply associated properties, with,
for aught we see, no inwardly necessary bond, coupled together
as empirically as the colour of a man's eyes with the shape of
his nose.
But such an empirical law may have its terms again classified.
The essence of the medium may be to retard the light-wave's
speed. The essence (in an obliquely-striking wave) of deflexion
towards the perpendicular may be earlier retardation of that
part of the wave-front which enters first, so that the remaining
portion swings round it before getting in. Medium and bend-
ing towards perpendicular thus coalesce into the one identical
fact of retardation. This being granted gives an inward
explanation of all above it. But retardation itself remains an
empirical coupling of medium and light-movement until we have
classified both under a single concept. The explanation reached
by the insight that two phenomena are at bottom one and the
same phenomenon, is rational in the ideal and ultimate sense of
the word. The ultimate identification of the subject and predi-
cate of a mathematical theorem, an identification which we can
always reach in our reasonings, is the source of the inward
necessity of mathematical demonstration. We see that the top
and bottom of a parallelogram must be equal as soon as we
have unearthed in the parallelogram the attribute that it con-
sists of two equal, juxtaposed triangles of which its top and
bottom form homologous sides that is, as soon as we have seen
that top and bottom have an identical essence, their length, as
being such sides, and that their position is an accident. This
criterion of identity is that which we all unconsciously use when
we discriminate between brute fact and explained fact. There is
no other test.
330 TJie Sentiment of Rationality.
In the contemporary striving of physicists to interpret every
event as a case of motion concealed or visible, we have an
adumbration of the way in which a common essence may make
the sensible heterogeneity of things inwardly rational. The
cause is one motion, the effect the same motion transferred to
other molecules ; in other words, physics aims at the same kind
of rationality as mathematics. In the second volume of Lewes's
Problems we find this anti-Humean view that the effect is the
" procession " of the cause, or that they are one thing in two
aspects brought prominently forward. 1
And why, on the other hand, do all our contemporary
physical philosophers so vie with each other in the zeal with
which they reiterate that in reality nerve-processes and brain-
tremors " explain " nothing of our feelings ? Why does " the
chasm between the two classes of phenomena still remain
intellectually impassable " ? 2 Simply because, in the words of
Spencer which we quoted a few pages back, feeling and motion
have nothing whatever in common, no identical essence by
which we can conceive both, and so, as Tyndall says, " pass by
a process of reasoning from one to the other ". The " double-
aspect " school postulate the blank form of. " One and the Same
Tact," appeal to the image of the circle which is both convex
and concave, and think that they have by this symbolic identi-
fication made the matter seem more rational.
Thus then the connexions of things become strictly rational
only when, by successive substitutions of essences for things,
and higher for lower essences, we succeed in reaching a point of
view from which we can view the things as one. A and B
are concretes ; a and & are partial attributes with which for the
present case we conceive them to be respectively identical
(classify them) and which are coupled by a general law. M is
a further attribute which rationally explains the general law as
soon as we perceive it to form the essence of both a and I, as
soon as we identify them with each other through it. The
softening of asphalt pavements in August is explained first by
the empirical law that heat, which is the essence of August,
produces melting, which is the essence of the pavement's change,
and secondly this law is inwardly rationalised by the conception
of both heat and melting being at bottom one and the same fact,
namely, increased molecular mobility.
1 This view is in growing favour witli thinkers fed from empirical sources.
See Wundt's PhysikaliscJie Axiome and the important article by A. Rielil,
" Cansalitat und Identitat," in Vierteljatirssch. f. wiss. Philos. Bd. I., p. 265.
The Humean view is ably urged by Chauncey Wright, Philosophical
Discussions, N.Y. 1877, p. 406.
2 Tyndall, Fragments of Science, 2nd ed., p. 121.
The Sentiment of Rationality. 331
Proximate and ultimate explanations are then essentially the
same thing. Classification involves all that is inward in any
explanation, and a perfected rationalisation of things means
only a completed classification of them. Every one feels that
all explanation whatever, even by reference to the most
proximate empirical law, does involve something of the essence
of inward rationalisation. How else can we understand such
words as these from Prof. Huxley ? " The fact that it is
impossible to comprehend how it is that a physical state gives
rise to a mental state, no more lessens the value of our [empir-
ical] explanation of the latter case, than the fact that it is
utterly impossible to comprehend how motion is communicated
from one body to another weakens the force of the explanation
of the motion of one billiard-ball by showing that another has
hit it." 1
To return now to the philosophic problem. It is evident that
our idea of the universe cannot assume an inwardly rational
shape until each separate phenomenon is conceived as funda-
mentally identical with every other. But the important fact to
notice is that in the steps by which this end is reached the
really rationalising, pregnant moments are the successive steps
of conception, the moments of picking out essences. The
association of these essences into laws, the empirical coupling,
is done by nature for us and is hardly worthy to be called an
intellectual act. On the other hand the coalescence-into-one of
all items in which the same essence is discerned, in other words
the perception that an essence whether ultimate, simple and
universal, or proximate and specific, is identical with itself
wherever found, is a barren truism. The living question always
is, \Yhere is it found ? To stand before a phenomenon and say
what it is ; in other words to pick out from it the embedded
character (or characters) also embedded in the maximum number
of other phenomena, and so identify it with them here He the
stress and strain, here the test of the philosopher. So we
revert to what we said far back : the genius can do no more
than this ; in Butler's words
" He knows ichat's u-hat, and that's as high
As metaphysic wit can fly." 2
1 " Modern Symposium," XlXth Century, Vol. I., 1877.
2 This doctrine is perfectly congruous with the conclusion that identities
are the only propositions necessary d priori, though of course it does nut
necessarily lead to that conclusion, since there may be in things elements
which are not simple but bilateral or synthetic, like straighrness and short-
ness in a line, convexity and concavity in a curve. Should the empiricists
succeed in their attempt to resolve such Siamese-twin elements into
habitual juxtapositions, the Principle of Identity would become the only a
priori truth, and the philosophic problem like all our ordinary problems
332 The Sentiment of Rationality.
V.
We have now to ask ourselves how far this identification
may be legitimately carried and what, when perfected, its real
worth is. But before passing to these further questions we
had best secure our ground by defending our fundamental
notion itself from nominalistic attacks. The reigning British
school has always denied that the same attribute is identical
with itself in different individuals. I started above with the
assumption that when we look at a subject with a certain
purpose, regard it from a certain point of view, some one
attribute becomes its essence and identifies it, pro hac vice, with a
class. To this James Mill replies : " But what is meant by a
mode of regarding things ? This is mysterious ; and is as
mysteriously explained, when it is said to be the taking into
view the particulars in which individuals agree. For what is
there, which it is possible for the mind to take into view, in
that in which individuals agree ? Every colour is an individual
colour, every size is an individual size, every shape is an
individual shape. But things have no individual colour in com-
mon, no individual shape in common ; no individual size in
common ; that is to say, they have neither shape, colour,
nor size in common. What, then, is it which they have
in common, which the mind can take into view ? JThose
who affirmed that it was something, could by no means tell.
They substituted words for things ; using vague and mystical
would become a question as to facts : What are these facts which we
perceive to exist ? Are there any existing facts corresponding to this
or that conceived class ? Lewes, in the interesting discussion on
necessary and contingent truth in the Prolegomena to his History and
in Chap. XIII. of his first Problem, seems at first sight to take up an opposite
position, in that he maintains our commonly so-called contingent truths to
be really necessary. But his treatment of the question most beautifully
confirms the doctrine I have advanced in the text. If the proposition " A
is B " is ever true, he says it is so necessarily. But he proves the necessity
by showing that what we mean by A is its essential attribute x, and what
we mean by B is again x. Only in so far as A and B are identical is the
proposition true. But he admits that a fact sensibly just like A may lack
x, and a fact sensibly unlike B may have it. In either case the proposition,
to be true, must change. The contingency which he banishes from propo-
sitions, he thus houses in their terms ; making as I do the act of conception,
subsumption, classification, intuition, naming, or whatever else one may
prefer to call it, the pivot on which thought turns. Before this act there is
infinite indeterminateness A and B may be anything. After the act there
is the absolute certainty of truism all x's are the same. In the act is A,
x 1 is B, x 1 or not 1 we have the sphere of truth and error, of living experi-
ence, in short, of Fact. As Lewes himself says : "The only necessity is
that a thing is what it is ; the only contingency is that our proposition may
not state what the thing is " (Problems, Vol. I., p. 395).
The Sentiment of Rationality. 333
phrases, which, when examined, meant nothing j" 1 the truth
being according to this heroic author, that the only thing that
can be possessed in common is a name. Black in the coat and
black in the shoe agree only in that both are named black the
fact that on this view the name is never the same when used
twice being quite overlooked. But the blood of the giants has
grown weak in these days, and the nominalistic utterances of our
contemporaries are like sweet-bells jangled, sadly out of tune.
If they begin with a clear nominalistic note, they are sure to
end with a grating rattle which sounds very like nniversalia in
re, if not ante rem. In M. Taine, 2 who may fairly be included in
the British School, they are almost ante rem. This 'bruit de cloche
felee, as the doctors say, is pathognomonic of the condition of
Ockham's entire modern progeny.
But still we may find expressions like this : " When I say
that the sight of any object gives me the same sensation or
emotion to-day that it did yesterday, or the same which it gives
to some other person, this is evidently an incorrect application
of the word same ; for the feeling which I had yesterday is gone
never to return. . . . Great confusion of ideas is often
produced, and many fallacies engendered, in otherwise enlight-
ened understandings, by not being sufficiently alive to the fact
(in itself always to be avoided), that they use the same name to
express ideas so different as those of identity and undistinguish-
able resemblance." 3
What are the exact facts ? Take the sensation I got from a
cloud yesterday and from the snow to-day. The white of the
snow and that of the cloud differ in place, time and associates ;
they agree in quality, and we may say in origin, being in all
probability both produced by the activity of the same brain
tract. Nevertheless, John Mill denies our right to call the
quality the same. He says that it essentially differs in every
different occasion of its appearance, and that no two phenomena
of which it forms part are really identical even as far as it goes.
Is it not obvious that to maintain this view he must abandon
1 Analysis, Vol. I., p. 249.
2 How can M. Taine fail to have perceived that the entire doctrine of
" Substitution " so clearly set forth in the nominalistic beginning of his
Drilliant book is utterly senseless except on the supposition of realistic
principles like those which he so admirably expounds at its close ? How
can the image be a useful substitute for the sensation, the tendency for the
image, the name for the tendency, unless sensation, image, tendency and
name be identical in some respect, in respect namely of function, of the
relations they enter into ? Were this realistic basis laid at the outset of
Taine's De I Intelligence, it would be one of the most consistent instead of
one of the most self-contradictory works of our day.
3 J. S. Mill, Logic, 8th Ed., L, p. 77.
23
334 The Sentiment of Rationality.
the phenomenal plane altogether ? Phenomenally considered,
the white per se is identical with itself wherever found in snow
or in cloud, to-day or to-morrow. If any nominalist deny the
identity I ask him to point out the difference. Ex hypotliesi the
qualities are sensibly indistinguishable, and the only difference
he can indicate is that of time and place ; but these are not
differences in the quality. If our quality be not the same with
itself, what meaning has the word " same " ? Our adversary
though silenced may still grudge assent, but if he analyse
carefully the grounds of this reluctance he will, I think, find
that it proceeds from a difficulty in believing that the cause of
the quality can be just the same at different times. In other
words he abandons altogether the platform of the sensible
phenomenon and ascends into the empyrean, postulating some
inner noumenal principle of quality + time + place -4- concomi-
tants. The entire group being never twice alike, of course this
ground, or being in se, of the quality must each time be distinct
and, so to speak, personal. This transcendental view is frankly
avowed by Mr. Spencer in his Psychology, II., p. 63 (the
passage is too complex to quote) ; but all nominalists must start
from it, if they think clearly at all. 1
We, who are phenomenists, may leave all metaphysical
entities which have the power of producing whiteness to their
fate, and content ourselves with the irreversible datum of
perception that the whiteness after it is manifested is the same,
be it here or be it there. Of all abstractions such entities are
the emptiest, being ontological hypostatisations of the mere
susceptibility of being distinguished, whilst this susceptibility
has its real, nameable, phenomenal ground all the while, in the
time, place, and relations affected by the attribute considered.
The truly wise man will take the phenomenon in its entirety
and permanently sacrifice no one aspect to another. Time, place,
and relations differ, he will freely say ; but just as freely admit
that the quality is identical with itself through all these
differences. Then if, to satisfy the philosophic interest, it becomes
needful to conceive this identical part as the essence of the
several entire phenomena, he will gladly call them one ; whilst
if some other interest be paramount, the points of difference will
1 I fear that even after this some persons will remain unconvinced, but
then it seems to me the matter has become a dispute about words. If my
supposed adversary, when he says that different times and places prevent a
quality which appears in them from ever being twice the same, will admit
that they do not make it in any conceivable way different, I will willingly
abandon the words " same " and " identical " to 'his fury ; though I confess
it becomes rather inconvenient to have no single positive word left by which
to indicate complete absence of difference.
The Sentiment of Rationality. 335
become essential and the identity an accident. Realism is
eternal and invincible in this phenomenal sense.
"We have thus vindicated against all assailants our title to
consider the world as a matter susceptible of rational formulation
in the deepest, most inward sense, and not as a disintegrated
sand-heap ; and we are consequently at liberty to ask : (1)
"Whether the mutual identification of its items meet with any
necessary limit ; and (2) "What, supposing the operation
completed, its real worth and import amount to.
VI.
In the first place, when we have rationally explained the
connexion of the items A and B by identifying both with their
common attribute x, it is obvious that we have really explained
only so much of these items as is x. To explain the connexion
of choke-damp and suffocation by the lack of oxygen is to leave
untouched all the other peculiarities both of choke-damp and of
suffocation, such as convulsions and agony on the one hand,
density and explosibility on the other. In a word, so far as A
and B contain /, m, n and o, p, q, respectively in addition to x,
they are not explained by x. Each additional particularity
makes its distinct appeal to our rational craving. A single
explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of view. 1
The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its
characters have been identified with their likes elsewhere. To
apply this now to universal formulas we see that the explanation
of the world by molecular movements explains it only so far as
it actually is such movements. To invoke the " Unknowable "
explains only so much as is unknowable ; " Love " only so much
as is love ; ' Thought," so much as is thought ; " Strife " so
much as is strife. All data whose actual phenomenal quality
cannot be identified with the attribute invoked as Universal
Principle, remain outside as ultimate, independent kinds or
natures, associated by empirical laws with the fundamental
attribute but devoid of truly rational kinship with it. If A
and B are to be thoroughly rationalised together, I, m, n and o,
p, q, must each and all turn out to be so many cases of # in
1 In the number of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for April 1879,
Prof. John Watson most admirably asserts and expresses the truth which
constitutes the back-bone of this article, namely that every manner of
conceiving a fact is relative to some interest, and that there are no absolutely
:.tial attributes every attribute having the right to call itself essential
in turn, and the truth consisting of nothing less than all of them together.
I avow myself unable to comprehend as yet this author's Hegelian point of
view, but his pages 164 to 172 are a most welcome corroboration of what I
have striven to advance in the text
336 The Sentiment of Rationality.
disguise. This kind of wholesale identification is being now
attempted by physicists when they conceive of all the ancient,
separate Forces as so many determinations of one and the
same essence, molecular mass, position and velocity.
Suppose for a moment that this idea were carried out for the
physical world, the subjective sensations produced by the
different molecular energies, colour, sound, taste, &c., &c., the
relations of likeness and contrast, of time and position, of ease
and effort, the emotions of pain and delight, in short, all the
mutually irreducible categories of mental life, would still remain
over. Certain writers strive in turn to reduce all these to a
common measure, the primordial unit of feeling, or infinitesimal
mental event which builds them up as bricks build houses.
But this case is wholly different from the last. The physical
molecule is conceived not only as having a being in se apart
from representation, but as being essentially of representable
kind. With magnified perceptions we should actually see
it. The mental molecule, on the other hand, has by its very
definition no existence except in being felt, and yet by the same
definition never is felt. It is neither a fact in consciousness nor
a fact out of consciousness, and falls to the ground as a transcen-
dental absurdity. Nothing could be more inconclusive
than the empirical arguments for the existence of this
noumenal feeling which Taine and Spencer draw from the sense
of hearing.
But let us for an instant waive all this and suppose our
feelings reduced to one. We should then have two primordial
natures, the molecule of matter and the molecule of mind,
coupled by an empirical law. Phenomenally incommensurable,
the attempt to reduce them to unity by calling them two
"aspects" is vain so long as it is not pointed out who is there
adspicere ; and the Machtspruch that they are expressions of
one underlying Keality has no rationalising function so long as
that reality is confessed unknowable. Nevertheless the
absolute necessity of an identical material substratum for the
different species of feeling on the one hand, and the genera
feeling and motion on the other, if we are to have any evolu-
tionary explanation of things, will lead to ever renewed attempts
at an atomistic hylozoism. Already Clifford and Taine,
Spencer, Fechner, Zollner, G. S. Hall, and more besides, have
given given themselves up to this ideal.
But again let us waive this criticism and admit that even the
chasm between feeling and motion may be rationally bridged by
the conception of the bilateral atom of being. Let us grant
that this atom by successive compoundings with its fellows
builds up the universe ; is it not still clear that each item in the
The Sentiment of Rationality. 337
universe would still be explained only as to its general quality
and not as to its other particular determinations ? The particulars
depend on the exact number of primordial atoms existing at the
outset and their exact distances from each other. The " universal
formula " of Laplace which Du Bois-Reymond has made such
striking use of in his lecture Ueber die Grcnzen des Naturerken-
nens, cannot possibly get along with fewer than this almost
infinite number of data. Their homogeneity does not abate their
infinity each is a separate empirical fact.
And when we now retract our provisional admissions, and
deny that feelings incommensurable inter se and with motion
can be possibly unified, we see at once that the reduction
of the phenomenal Chaos to rational form must stop at a
certain point. It is a limited process, bounded by the
number of elementary attributes which cannot be mutually
identified, the specific qualia of representation, on the one
hand, and, on the other, by the number of entities (atoms or
monads or what not) with their complete mathematical deter-
minations, requisite for deducing the fulness of the concrete
world. All these irreducible data form a system, no longer
phenomenally rational, inter se, but bound together by what is
for us an empirical law. We merely find the system existing as
a matter of fact, and write it down. In short, a plurality of
categories and an infinity of primordial entities, determined
according to these categories, is the minimum of philosophic
baggage, the only possible compromise between the need of
clearness and the need of unity. All simplification, beyond this
point, is reached either by throwing away the particular concrete
determinations of the fact to be explained, or else it is illusory
simplification. In the latter case it is made by invoking some
sham term, some pseudo-principle, and conglomerating it and the
data into one. The principle may be an immanent element but
no true universal: Sensation, Thought, Will are principles of
this kind; or it may be a transcendent entity like Matter, Spirit,
Substance, the Unknowable, the Unconscious, &C. 1 Such
attempts do but postulate unification, not effect it ; and if taken
avowedly to represent a mere claim, may be allowed to stand.
But if offered as actual explanations, though they may serve as
a sop to the rabble, they can but nauseate those whose philoso-
phic appetite is genuine and entire. If we choose the former
mode of simplification and are willing to abstract from the
particulars of time, place and combination in the concrete world,
1 The idea of " God " in its popular function is open to neither of these
objections, being conceived as a phenomenon standing in causal relation to
other phenomena. As such, however, it has no unifying function of a pro-
perly explanatory kind.
338 The Sentiment of Rationality.
we may simplify our elements very much by neglecting the
numbers and collocations of our primordial elements and
attending to their qualitative categories alone. The system
formed by these will then really rationalise the universe so far
as its qualities go. Nothing can happen in it incommensurable
with these data, and practically this abstract treatment of the
world as quality is all that philosophers aim at. They are satis-
fied when they can see it to be a place in which none but these
qualities appear, and in which the same quality appears not
only once but identically repeats itself. They are willing to
ignore, or leave to special sciences the knowledge of what times,
places and concomitants the recurring quality is likely to affect.
The Essais de Critique generate of Renouvier form, to my mind,
by far the ablest answer to the philosophic need thus understood,
clearness and unity being there carried each to the farthest point
compatible with the other's existence.
VII.
And now comes the question as to the worth of such an
achievement. How much better off is the philosopher when he
has got his system than he was before it ? As a mere pheno-
menal system it stands between two fires. On the one hand the
unbridled craver of unity scorns it, as being incompletely
rational, still to a great extent an empirical sand-heap ; whilst
on the other the practical man despises its empty and abstract
barrenness. All it says is that the elements of the world are
such and such and that each is identical with itself wherever
found ; but the question : Where is it found ? (which is for the
practical man the all-important question about each element) he
is left to answer by his own wit. Which, of all the essences,
shall here and now be held the essence of this concrete thing,
the fundamental philosophy never attempts to decide. We seem
thus led to the conclusion that a system of categories is, on the
one hand, the only possible philosophy, but is, on the other, a
most miserable and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the
truth. It is a monstrous abridgment of things which like all
abridgments is got by the absolute loss and casting out of real
matter. This is why so few human beings truly care for
Philosophy. The particular determinations which she ignores
are the real matter exciting other aesthetic and practical needs,
quite as potent and authoritative as hers. What does the moral
enthusiast care for philosophical ethics ? Why does the
^Esthetik of every German philosopher appear to the artist like
the abomination of desolation ? What these men need is a
particular counsel, and no barren, universal truism.
The Sentiment of Rationality. 339
" Grau, theurer Freund, 1st alle Theorie
Und griin des Lebens goldner Baum."
The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, will take
nothing as an equivalent for Life but the fulness of living
itself. Since the essences of things are as a matter of fact spread
out and disseminated through the whole extent of time and
space, it is in their spread-outness and alternation that he will
enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash and dust and
pettiness, he will refresh himself by an occasional bath in the
eternal spring, or fortify himself by a daily look at the immut-
able Natures. But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in
the region ; he will never carry the philosophic yoke upon his
shoulders, and when tired of the gray monotony of her problems
and insipid spaciousness of her results, will always escape
gleefully into the teeming and dramatic richness of the concrete
world.
So our study turns back here to its beginning. "We started
by calling every concept a teleological instrument (supra p. 31 9).
No concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality
except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver.
The interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification,
is but one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear
their heads it must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn
recurs. The exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers
have claimed for their solutions is thus greatly reduced. The
only virtue their theoretic conception need have is simplicity,
and a simple conception is an equivalent for the world only so
far as the world is simple ; the world meanwhile, whatever
simplicity it may harbour, being also a mightily complex affair.
Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency in our
craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the
most invincible and authoritative of human impulses. All ages
have their intellectual populace. That of our own day prides
itself particularly on its love of Science and Facts and its con-
tempt for all metaphysics. Just weaned from the Sunday-
school nurture of its early years, with the taste of the
catechism still in its mouth, it is perhaps not surprising that its
palate should lack discrimination and fail to recognise how much
of ontology is contained in the "Nature," "Force" and "Necessary
Law," how much mysticism in the " Awe," " Progress " and
"Loyalty to Truth" or whatever the other phrases may be with
which it sweetens its rather meagre fare of fragmentary
physiology and physics. But its own inconsistency should
teach it that the eradication of music, painting and poetry, games
of chance and skill, manly sports and all other aesthetic energies
from human life, would be an easy task compared with that
340 The Sentiment of Rationality.
suppression of Metaphysics which it aspires to accomplish.
Metaphysics of some sort there must be. The only alternative
is between the good Metaphysics of clear-headed Philosophy
and the trashy Metaphysics of vulgar Positivism. Metaphysics,
the quest of the last clear elements of things, is but another
name for thought which seeks thorough self -consistency ; and so
long as men must think at all, some will be found willing to
forsake all else to follow that ideal.
VIII.
Suppose then the goal attained. Suppose we have at last a
Metaphysics in which clearness and unity join friendly hands.
Whether it be over a system of interlocked elements, or over a
substance, or over such a simple fact as "phenomenon" or " repre-
sentation," need not trouble us now. For the discussion which
follows we will call the result the metaphysical Datum and leave
its composite or simple nature uncertain. Whichever it be,
and however limited as we have seen be the sphere of its utility,
it satisfies, if no other need, at least the need of rationality. But
now I ask : Can that which is the ground of rationality in all
else be itself properly called rational ? It would seem at first
sight that in the sense of the word we have hitherto alone con-
sidered, it might. One is tempted at any rate to say that, since
the craving for rationality in a theoretic or logical sense consists in
the identification of one thing with all other outstanding things, a
unique datum which left nothing else outstanding would leave
no play for further rational demand, and might thus be said to
quench that demand or to be rational in se. Ko otherness being
left to annoy the mind we should sit down at peace.
In other words, just as the theoretic tranquillity of the boor
results from his spinning no further considerations about his
chaotic universe which may prevent him from going about his
practical affairs ; so any brute datum whatever (provided it were
simple and clear) ought to banish mystery from the Universe of
the philosopher and confer perfect theoretic peace, inasmuch as
there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations
to spin.
This in fact is what some persons think. Prof. Bain says :
" A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be
shown to resemble something else ; to be an example of a fact
already known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be
apparent contradiction : the resolution of the mystery is found
in assimilation, identity, fraternity. When all things are
assimilated, so far as assimilation can go, so far as likeness holds,
there is an end to explanation; there is an end to what the
The Sentiment of Rationality. 341
mind can do, or can intelligently desire. . . . The path of
science as exhibited in modern ages, is towards generality, wider
and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every
department of things ; there explanation is finished, mystery
ends, perfect vision is gained."
But unfortunately this first answer will not hold. Whether
for good or evil, it is an empirical fact that the mind is so
wedded to the process of seeing an other beside every item of its
experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum which is
all is presented to it, it goes through its usual procedure and
remains pointing at the void beyond, as if in that lay further
matter for contemplation. In short, it spins for itself the further
positive consideration of a Xonentity enveloping the Being of its
datum ; and as that leads to no issue on the further side, back
recoils the thought in a circle towards its datum again. But
there is no logical identity, no natural bridge between nonentity
and this particular datum, and the thought stands oscillating to
and fro, wondering " Why was there anything but nonentity ?
Why just this universal datum and not another ? Why any-
thing at all ? " and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Indeed, Prof. Bain's words are so untrue that in reflecting men
it is just when the attempt to fuse the manifold into a single
totality has been most successful, when the conception of the
universe as a fait unique (in D'Alembert's words) is nearest its
perfection, that the craving for further explanation, the ontolo-
gical 6av[uiZeiv arises in its extremest pungency.
As Schopenhauer says, " The uneasiness which keeps the
never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the conscious-
ness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its
existence "- 1
The notion of Nonentity may thus be called the parent of the
philosophic craving in its subtlest and profoundest sense.
Absolute existence is absolute mystery. Although selbststa.ndig,
it is not sdlistrerstdndlich ; for its relations with the Xothing
remain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher
only, so far as I know, has pretended to throw a logical bridge
over this chasm. Hegel, by trying to shew that Xonentity and
Being as actually determined are linked together by a series of
successive identities, binds the whole of possible thought into an
adamantine unity with no conceivable outlying notion to disturb
the free rotary circulation of the mind within its bounds. Since
such unchecked motion constitutes the feeling of rationality, he
must be held, if he has succeeded, to have eternally and ab-
solutely quenched all its logical demands,
1 JTelt ah JFilk ccc., 3 Axiflage, I., p. 189.
342 Tlie Sentiment of Rationality.
But for those who, like most of us, deem Hegel's heroic effort
to have failed, nought remains but to confess that when all has
been unified to its supreme degree, (Prof. Bain to the contrary
notwithstanding), the notions of a Nonentity, or of a possible
Other than the actual, may still haunt our imagination and prey
upon the ultimate data of our system. The bottom of Being is
left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the
word, something which we simply come upon and find, and
about which, (if we wish to act,) we should pause and wonder as
little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of
Empiricism, and in it Empiricism and imaginative Faith join
hands. The logical attitude of both is identical, they both say
there is a plus ultra beyond all we know, a womb of unimagined
other possibility. They only differ in their sentimental temper:
Empiricism says, " Into the plus ultra you have no right to carry
your anthropomorphic affirmations " ; Faith says, " You have no
right to extend to it your denials ". The mere ontologic emotion
of wonder, of mystery, has in some minds such a tinge of the
rapture of sublimity, that for this aesthetic reason alone, it will
be difficult for any philosophic system completely to exorcise it.
In truth, the philosopher's logical tranquillity is after all in
essence no other than the boor's. Their difference regards only
the point at which each refuses to let further considerations
upset the absoluteness of the data he assumes. The boor does
so immediately, and is therefore liable at any moment to the
ravages of many kinds of confusion and doubt. The philosopher
does not do so till unity has been reached, and is therefore
warranted against the inroads of those considerations but only
practically not essentially secure from the blighting breath of
the ultimate " Why ? " Positivism takes a middle ground, and
with a certain consciousness of the beyond abruptly refuses by
an inhibitory action of the will to think any further, stamps the
ground and says " Physics, I espouse thee ! for better or worse,
be thou my absolute ! "
The Absolute is what has not yet been transcended, criticised
or made relative. So far from being something quintessential
and unattainable as is so often pretended, it is practically the
most familiar thing in life. Every thought is absolute to us at
the moment of conceiving it or acting upon it. It only becomes
relative in the light of further reflection. This may make it
flicker and grow pale the notion of nonentity may blow in from
the infinite and extinguish the theoretic rationality of a universal
datum. As regards this latter, absoluteness and rationality are
in fact convertible terms. And the chief effort of the rational-
ising philosopher must be to gain an absoluteness for his datum
which shall be stable in the maximum degree, or as far as possible
The Sentiment of Rationality. 343
removed from exposure to those further considerations by which
we saw that the vulgar Weltanschauung may so promptly be
upset. I shall henceforward call the further considerations
which may supervene and make relative or derationalise a mass
of thought, the reductive of that thought. The reductive of
absolute being is thus nonentity, or the notion of an alitcr
possibile which it involves. The reductive of an absolute
physics is the thought that all material facts are representations
in a mind. The reductive of absolute time, space, causality,
atoms, &c., are the so-called antinomies which arise as soon as
we, think fully out the thoughts we have begun. The reductive
of absolute knowledge is the constant potentiality of doubt, the
notion that the next thought may always correct the present one
resulting in the notion that a noumenal world is there mocking
the one we think we know. "Whatever we think, some reductive
seems in strict theoretic legitimacy always imminently hovering
over our thought ready to blight it. Doubleness dismissed at
the front door re-enters in the rear and spoils the rationality of
the simple datum we flattered ourselves we had attained.
Theoretically the task of the philosopher, if he cannot reconcile
the datum with the reductive by the way of identification d la
Hegel, is to exorcise the reductive so that the datum may hold
up its head again and know no fear. Prof. Bain would no doubt
say that nonentity was a pseud-idea not derived from experience
and therefore meaningless, and so exorcise that reductive. 1 The
antinomies may be exorcised by the distinction between
potentiality and actuality. 2 The ordinary half educated material-
ist comforts himself against idealists by the notion that, after all,
thought is such an obscure mystical form of existence that it is
almost as bad as no existence at all, and need not be seriously
taken into account by a sensible man.
If nothing else could be conceived than thoughts or fancies,
these would be credited with the maximum of reality. Their
reductive is the belief in an objective reality of which they are
but copies. "When this belief takes the form of the affirmation
of a noumenal world contrasted with all possible thought, and
therefore playing no other part than that of reductive pure and
simple, to discover the formula of exorcism becomes, and has
been recognised ever since Kant to be, one of the principal tasks
of philosophy rationally understood.
1 The author of A Candid Examination of Tlitism (Trubner, 1878) ex-
orcises Nonentity by the notion of the all-excluding infinitude of Existence,
whether reasonably or not I refrain from deciding. The last chapter of
this work (published a year after the present text was written), is on " the
final Mystery of Things," and impresses in striking language much that I
have said.
2 See Renouvier : Premier Essai,
344 The Sentiment of Rationality.
The reductive used by nominalists to discredit the self-identity
of the same attribute in different phenomena is the notion of a
still higher degree of identity. We easily exorcise this reductive
by challenging them to show what the higher degree of sameness
can possibly contain which is not already in the lower.
The notion of Nonentity is not only a reductive ; it can assume
upon occasion an exorcising function. If, for example, a man's
ordinary mundane consciousness feels staggered at the improba-
bility of an immaterial thinking-principle being the source of
all things, Nonentity comes in and says, "Contrasted with me,
(that is, considered simply as existent) one principle is as probable
as another ". If the same mundane consciousness recoils at the
notion of providence towards individuals or individual immorta-
lity as involving, the one too infinite a subdivision of the divine
attention, the other a too infinite accumulation of population in
the heavens, Nonentity says, " As compared with rne all
quantities are one : the wonder is all there when God has found
it worth His while to guard or save a single soul-".
But if the philosopher fails to find a satisfactory formula of
exorcism for his datum, the only thing he can do is to " blink "
the reductive at a certain point, 'assume the Given as his
necessary ultimate, and proceed to a life whether of contempla-
tion or of action based on that. There is no doubt that this half
wilful act of arrest, this acting on an opaque necessity, is
accompanied by a certain pleasure. See the reverence of Carlyle
for brute fact : " There is an infinite significance in Fact."
" Necessity," says a German philosopher, 1 and he means not
rational but simply given necessity, " is the last and highest point
that we can reach in a rational conception of the world. . . .
It is not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge,
but also that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal
equilibrium, in an uttermost datum which can simply not be
other than it is. "
Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God's
fiat being in physics and morals such an uttermost datum.
Such also is the attitude of all hard-minded analysts and
Verstandesmenschen. Renouvier and Hodgson, the two foremost
contemporary philosophers, promptly say that of experience as a
whole no account can be given, but do not seek to soften the
abruptness of the confession or reconcile us with our impotence.
Such mediating attempts may be made by more mystical
minds. The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstacy
when logic fails. To religious persons of every shade of doctrine
moments come when the world as it is seems so divinely orderly,
1 Duhring : Cursus der Philosophic, Leipzig 1875, p. 35.
The Sentiment of Rationality. 345
and the acceptance of it by the heart so rapturously complete,
that intellectual questions vanish, nay the intellect itself is
hushed to sleep as Wordsworth says, "Thought is not, in enjoy-
ment it expires". Ontological emotion so fills the soul that on-
tological speculation can no longer overlap it and put her girdle
of interrogation-marks around existence. Even the least religious
of men must have felt with our national ontologic poet, Walt
Whitman, when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer
morning, that " Swiftly arose and spread over him the peace
and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth ". At
such moments of energetic living we feel as if there were some-
thing diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic grubbing
and brooding. To feel "I am the truth" is to abolish the
opposition between knowing and being.
Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality
which the head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a
systematised method would be a philosophic achievement of
first-rate importance. As used by mystics hitherto it has lacked
universality, being available for few persons and at few times,
and even in these being apt to be followed by fits of " reaction "
and " dryness " ; but it may nevertheless be the forerunner of
what will ultimately prove a true method. If all men could
permanently say with Jacobi, " In my heart there is light,"
though they should for ever fail to give an articulate account of
it, existence would really be rationalised. 1
1 A curious recent contribution to the construction of a universal
mystical. method is contained in the Ancesthetic Revelation by Benj. P.
Blood (Amsterdam, N.Y., 1874). The author, who is a writer abounding
in verbal felicities, thinks we may all grasp the secret of Being if we only
intoxicate ourselves often enough with laughing-gas. " There is in the
instant of recall from the anaesthetic stupor a moment in which the genius
of being is revealed. . . . Patients try to speak of it but invariably
fail in a lost mood of introspection. . . . But most will accept this as
the central point of the illumination that sanity is not the basic quality of
intelligence, . . . but that only in sanity is formal or contrasting thought,
while the naked life is realised outside of sanity altogether. It is the
instant contrast of this tasteless water of souls with formal thought as we
come to that leaves the patient in an astonishment that the awful mystery
of life is at last but a homely and common thing. . . . To minds of
sanguine imagination there will be a sadness in the tenor of the mystery,
as it' the key-note of the universe were low for no poetry, no emotion
known to the normal sanity of man, can furnish a hint of its primaeval
prestige, and its ail-but appalling solemnity ; but for such as have felt
sadly the instability of temporal things there is a comfort of serenity and
ancient peace ; while for the resolved and imperious spirit there are
majesty and supremacy unspeakable." The logical characteristic of this
state is said to be " an apodal sufficiency to which sufficiency a wonder or
fear of why it is sufficient cannot pertain and could be attributed only as
an impossible disease or lack. . . . The disease of Metaphysics vanishes
in the lading of the question and not in the coming of an answer."
346 Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy.
But if men should ever all agree that the mystical method is a
subterfuge without logical pertinency, a plaster, but no cure,
that the Hegelian method is fallacious, that the idea of Nonen-
tity can therefore neither be exorcised nor identified, Empiricism
will be the ultimate philosophy. Existence will be a brute
Fact to which as a whole the emotion of ontologic wonder shall
rightfully cleave, but remain eternally unsatisfied. This
wonderfulness or mysteriousness will then be an essential
attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and
emphasising of it will always continue to be an ingredient
in the philosophic industry of the race. Every generation will
produce its Job, its Hamlet, its Faust or its Sartor Eesartus.
With this we seem to have exhausted all the possibilities of
purely theoretic rationality. But we saw at the outset that
when subjectively considered rationality can only be defined as
perfectly unimpeded mental function. Impediments which
arise in the purely theoretic sphere might perhaps be avoided if
the stream of mental action should leave that sphere betimes
and pass into the practical. The structural unit of mind is in
these days, deemed to be a triad, beginning with a sensible
impression, ending with a motion, and having a feeling of greater
or less length in the middle. Perhaps the whole difficulty of
attaining theoretic rationality is due to the fact that the very
quest violates the nature of our intelligence, and that a passage
of the mental function into the third stage before the second has
come to an end in the cul de sac of its contemplation, would
revive the energy of motion and keep alive the sense of ease and
freedom which is its psychic counterpart. We must there-
fore inquire what constitutes the feeling of rationality in its
practical aspect ; but that must be done at another time and in
another place. WM. JAMES.
NOTE. This article is the first chapter of a psychological work on the
motives which lead men to philosophise. It deals with the purely theoretic
or logical impulse. Other chapters treat of practical and emotional motives
and in the conclusion an attempt is made to use the motives as tests of the
soundness of different philosophies.
III. KUNO FISCHEK ON ENGLISH
PHILOSOPHY.
No one perhaps has written the history of Philosophy at once
so agreeably, so fully and so instructively as Prof. Fischer.
His style is clear and for German remarkably unembarrassed.
Every paragraph has its topic, every sentence its own thought.
Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy. 347
The most difficult meanings are always made plain : indeed,
if there is any fault in this respect, it is that lucid exposition is
so easy to Prof. Fischer that, " like wealthy men that care not
how they give," he often falls into a redundancy of felicitous
statements and restatements by his resolve that there shall be
no misunderstanding. This prodigality, which increases the
power of his incomparable lectures, detracts a little from the
perfection of his writings ; and it is even more conspicuous in
his volume on English Philosophy than in his larger work on
the Continental movement. But still more engaging than the
style of these writings is their hearty appreciation of the efforts
of every thinker, however far removed in doctrine from
the author's own stand-point, so that he seems to become
the advocate of any system he expounds, treating it as
its originator might have wished to do. Xor can one help
admiring Prof. Fischer's ingenuity in tracing the connexions
between successive systems and schools : for example, the
relationship between Cartesianisni and French Materialism of
the 18th century, treated in the ninth chapter of the third book
of Francis Bacon und seine Naclifolrjcr ; or the movement from
Descartes to Spinoza in the first volume of the Geschichte der
never ii Philosophic ; or, in the fifth volume of the latter work,
the interval between Kant and Fichte. But perhaps one may
occasionally observe a taint of artificiality in his determination
of the courses of these streams of influence, or of the positions
of these stepping-stones of thought. There is a strong tempta-
tion to discover that events of any kind, especially events of the
I spirit, happened in such an order as a well-regulated mind would
[ have been pleased to witness them in. For my own part, too, I
should like to see a less strict adherence to Bacon's advice to
1 intermix literary history but sparingly with criticism ; or if it
! be admitted that the actual intermixture of exposition with
criticism is bad, there should yet be found somewhere a place
;for criticism, either in notes, or in appendices to the several
chapters. Criticism increases the interest and even the intelli-
gibility of the narrative, and still more its value as a discipline
and as a stimulus to thought.
Scanty as are the criticisms contained in the work on English
Philosophy, 1 it is on them that this article must chiefly
dwell. It may be assumed that readers of MIND are not
unacquainted with the book's general nature and value. The
first edition has long been translated, and it is much to be
desired that the second edition of 1875, which is more than
1 Francis Bacon und seine Nachfolger : Enticickelungsgeschichte der Erfah-
rungsphilosophie. 2te vollig umgearbeitete Auflage. Leipzig : Brockhaus,
1875.
348 Kuno Fisclwr on English Philosophy.
twice the bulk of the former one, should also find a translator.
As the title of the work imports, its author regards Bacon as the
principal figure in the history of the Experience-philosophy,
his successors as for the most part only continuing and devel-
oping his doctrines. Thus nearly two-thirds of the whole
work are given to him. The first book contains an account
of his life ; the second, the most extensive, thorough, and
systematic exposition of his doctrine that anywhere exists.
The excellence of Prof. Fischer's treatment appears at the
outset. Bacon is misunderstood, he says, because critics suppose
that a coherent thinker must be systematic ; they do not find
Bacon systematic, and so fail to perceive his coherence. Yet
this quality becomes manifest, if we observe that whilst most
philosophers are, like Descartes, synthetic thinkers, beginning
with general principles and following them to their consequences,
Bacon begins not with a principle, but with an end : and that
accordingly his procedure is analytic, a search for the means of
attaining that end. Hence " his philosophy is no system but a
method or pathway ". The end is the increase of human well-
being and power ; power is to be got by inventions, inventions
by science, science by experience, and experience must be
directed by a method. It is in this sense that Bacon is the
philosopher of experience ; not that he took experience for his !
principle, but that he saw in it the necessary means to his
supreme end. And thus we may understand the relationship
between the Novum Organum and the De Augmentis : the former
treats of the means of making discoveries in science ; the latter,
as a preparation for this, takes stock of the knowledge we already
have, notices the gaps in it, and endeavours by tracing the
affinities of the sciences to promote that interaction amongst
them upon which their common progress depends.
But I must not linger over the expository portion of the
work, however tempting its excellencies ; nor can one pretend
that it is perfect. It would, for instance, have been advantage-
ous to compare Bacon's teaching with what has since been done
to develop the theory of Induction. There is no worse practice
of critics than to conclude from an author's not happening to
display acquaintance with a subject, that therefore he is of course
ignorant of it, and I by no means bring such an accusation
against Prof. Fischer. But certainly his work leaves many dark
spots in Bacon's doctrines which the light of recent speculations
should have illumined. Thus, in expounding Bacon's method of
comparing instances in his first table, Prof. Fischer, after stating
that we have first to assemble a number of instances agreeing in
the presence of the phenomenon whose form is to be investigated,
goes on to say that, if these numerous cases agree in some of
Kuno Fischer on Eujlish Philosophy. 349
their conditions but not in others, we may safely regard the
latter as unessential and not pertaining to the subject of
investigation (p. 183) ; and he expresses no disapproval
of this position, though if we admit that an effect may have
different causes, it is plainly a bad one. Again, -when expressly
enumerating Bacon's faults, Prof. Fischer does not mention Ms
ignorance of the use of hypotheses ; nor the fatal indefiniteness
in his meaning of the word form. Nor in the otherwise
admirable sections on Prerogative Instances does he explain the
nature of true prerogative instances, namely, their fitness for
direct and easy subsuinption under the law of Causation ; and
accordingly, in describing Solitary Instances, he does not remark
the anticipation of the canons of Agreement and Difference.
Yet some sound remarks upon such points would have greatly
added to the instructiveness of his pages ; so that on the whole
one is not surprised to find that he considers a true Logic of
Induction still wanting (" a work," he says, " which cannot be
accomplished without a true theory of our sensations and the
consequent critique of our faculties of sense-perception"), and
that Bacon has done more toward it and illustrated it better
than any one else before or since.
The most serious shortcomings which Prof. Fischer finds in
Bacon are (1) his having trusted sense-perception without
criticising it, (2) his failure to rightly appreciate poetry and fine
art, (3) his attitude toward history and whatever depends upon
a true historical method, as for instance mythology and religion.
Much might perhaps be urged in extenuation even of the first
and second of these charges; but I prefer to join issue
on the third, because it is brought against not only Bacon but
all his school. According to our author (p. 457), the modern
Realistic Philosophy was from the outset averse to religion, and
in Bacon's successors became positively hostile to it, because
they were incapable of tliinking historically. From which we
might infer that Locke and Berkeley were hostile to religion,
and that Hume and Adam Smith were incapable of understand-
ing history. 1 Historical explanation Prof. Fischer would have
lieve is wholly the fruit of the German Illumination. He
distinguishes between the narration and the explanation of
history (p. 468). To narrate history one has only to discover
:he facts and state them ; and the discovery of facts in whatever
lepartment can only be prosecuted by the Baconian method.
But to explain those facts is, it seems, quite another problem, to
which that method is not equal.
1 Hume's distaste for the more serious phases of religion was certainly
onnected -with some of the worst blemishes of his History. But it is clear
hat in this case inaptitude for historical study was not the cause but the effect.
24
350 Kuno Fisclwr on English Philosophy.
One wonders why not : to explain facts is to find their like-
ness to others and the causes from which they sprang. These
causes are previous facts ; and the relations of likeness and
causation amongst all these facts are also facts. So that if facts
can only be discovered by the Baconian method, it might be
supposed that only by that method can they be explained.
True, Prof. Fischer would perhaps reply ; if the facts of history
were all of them to be sought in nature, the Baconian method
could both discover and explain them. But they are not : the
causes of history lie in the spirit, and Bacon declares that the
things of the spirit cannot be known by his method. But Prof.
Fischer is aware that Bacon elsewhere declares his method to
be as applicable to ethics and politics as to natural philosophy:
and ethics and politics are things of the spirit. Here then is
an appearance of contradiction, which I propose to avoid by
understanding Bacon to mean that his method can discover
nothing as to the substance and immortality of the spirit, witli
such other questions as might have been claimed by the king
and his theologians, with whom he wished to live at peace ; but
that it is quite equal to the investigation of spiritual phenomena
and their processes. It is these phenomena and their laws
spiritual facts that interest us in ethics and politics ; and
surely it is in such facts that we must seek the causes of history,
so far as history depends upon the spirit.
Until then some one produces an historical event which needs
for its explanation some dogma about spiritual substance or
what-not, we may conclude that history, like everything else in
the concrete world, is to be explained by the inductive method.
Bacon himself, to be sure, was not happy at interpreting the
more subtle historical phenomena. One may smile at his in-
terpretations of myths, though consciously incompetent to furnish
in a lifetime as much wit as clothes the poorest of those exercises.
But the cause of failure was not the inadequacy of inductive
method, as we now have ample proof; but that Time, the
mother of Truth, was not yet travailing with this particular
birth.
I cannot help noticing another ground of objection which
seems equally sandy. Bacon's method, says Prof. Fischer,
depends entirely upon the understanding and sense-percep-
tion, quite rejecting the aid of imagination : " But how can
.that which imagination makes [e.g., poetry and art] be explained
without imagination " ? (p. 467). This, however, takes Bacon's
crude division of mental faculties much too seriously. Im-
agination and understanding do not differ in their contents,
I mean, in the ideas of which they consist nor necessarily in
the order of those ideas, but in the way in which ideas are
Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy. 351
believed to correspond, or not, with other ideas or "with facts.
A train of representations may at first be imaginative, if repeated
an affair of memory ; and if, having been forgotten, it is infer-
entially reconstructed, it becomes a product of understanding.
Prof. Tyndall has told us how exact science is aided by imagina-
tion : and on the other hand poetry and art may be understood.
An unimaginative man indeed cannot understand them, but
that is because he lacks the appropriate experience. That
Bacon was unimaginative will be maintained, I presume, by no
one who is not driven to prop up a bad theory with worse facts.
The third book of Prof. Fischer's work treats of Bacon's
successors. No one is so determined as the author to show that
all subsequent English philosophers were merely disciples and
interpreters of Bacon. And this is a case in which, I grant, the
evidence can only be appreciated by the imagination. Is it too
much to say, that the traces of Bacon's influence in the works of
his successors are so slight, that even a critic who had formed a
low estimate of his importance, might well be surprised to find
no more ? This, however, is how Prof. Fischer predetermines
the development of the Experience-philosophy. There are five
stages: (1) According to Bacon knowledge is experience, and
the experiential or natural sciences are the foundations of all
sciences : this position is Naturalism, represented by Hobbes.
(2) The question arises, "What are the conditions of experience ?
and the answer, sense-perception, marks the Sensualism of Locke.
But now what is perception ? Either spiritual impressions,
which gives (3) the Idealism of Berkeley ; or corporeal impres-
sions, which gives (4) the Materialism of the French Illumina-
tion. Lastly, since from impressions of. any sort there can
result no objective, necessary, actual cognition, we have (5) the
Scepticism of Hume.
No reasonable man would complain loudly of this suggestive
outline, as long as it was not too rigorously pressed. But when
Prof. Fischer says the sequence is, in fact, so simple, it could not
have been otherwise (p. 512), one cannot help remembering
what the facts really were ; and then the artificiality of the
arrangement becomes obvious. The impropriety of calling
Locke's philosophy Sensualism, or Sensationalism, has often
been insisted on, and I shall presently revert to it. The word
Naturalism 1 is curiously misapplied to Hobbes's system, the most
1 Perhaps the best use of Naturalism is as a name for the philosophy of
emancipated Positivists I mean, those whom Comte has helped to
enfranchise, as distinguished from those whom he has enslaved. The name
is useful hecause of its twofold opposition, to Supernaturalism on the one
hand, and on the other hand to Artificialism, such as that of Comte and
Hobbes.
352 Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy.
characteristic portion of which, the Politics, postulates the
abrogation of Nature. Was it so called to avoid calling it
Materialism, and thereby to preserve history from an illogical
repetition ? For Materialism, instead of waiting, as no doubt it
should have done, for the fourth place in this series, fell on its
first appearance into the first place, and then, perversely
delaying its second appearance until after Hume, plumped down
into the fifth. Just like its clumsy Geistlosigkeit ! But, says
Prof. Fischer, " never has a post hoc been so little a propter hoc
as in this advent of French Materialism after Hume. French
philosophy of the last century, coming as it does, in chronolo-
gical order, subsequently to the English, looks like a tiling
belated." (p. 663). The same might be said of much other
philosophising of the past and present centimes.
But even were events more obsequious to logic, there remains
a wider objection to thus regarding .the history of philosophy as
entirely embodied in the chief philosophers : such treatment is
too abstract, and falls needlessly short of the fulness of fact.
Works like M. de Remusat's Philosophic en Angleterre (reviewed
in MIND XIII.), dealing for the most part with the less
original and influential writers, are in this respect almost superior:
they are at least a good preparation for a better treatment,
because they assist us in estimating the contents of common
sense. Philosophy and the sciences must have arisen in the
first instance out of the menstruum of common sense, must have
been slowly differentiated from the public stock of less definite
traditions and beliefs. The sciences, growing more and more
certain and definite and making for themselves special spheres,
have gradually (except some of the more backward) escaped
from the influence of common sense ; but philosophy is still to
a great extent under its control. For, having a more general
and vague subject-matter, and discussing problems which
perhaps cannot be dogmatically solved and about whose
solution there has never been much agreement, philosophers
have seldom felt quite sure that they had discovered much truth,
whilst the uninstructed have never hesitated to assure them
that they had invented incredible absurdities. The few, doubt-
ful, divided, docile and sympathetic, cannot with constancy
withstand the many, confident and impenetrable. And accord-
ingly the history of philosophy can only be rightly understood
in relation to common sense, and should be written with a full
consciousness of its connexion with that vast body of public
belief, by which, like a stream flowing through a marsh, it is
continually fed and continually obstructed.
Historians of philosophy, however, too often content them-
selves with relating the intellectual combats and adventures of
Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy. 353
a thin series of thinkers, or exceptionally describe them as
obscurely influenced by climate, soil, race, and other circum-
stances of the remoter environment. Neither course is adequate,
nor is a combination of them. Climates may have helped to
diversify the cast of thought of nations so widely separated as
the Greeks and Hindoos, but cannot account for a difference
between the philosophies of Germany and England. National
genius perhaps stands for something, though it is hard to say what ;
and we cannot cite as explanatory a fact which itself desiderates
explanation. But it is in nearer conditions that we must seek
the origin of any particular school or system ; and probably
these conditions may be best summed up under the heads of
antecedent philosophy and common sense. Whoever has been
led by reflection to anything like a system of opinions will
consider for himself whether these are not its proximate sources.
In common sense I include an element which in many
respects resembles philosophy, and might with much propriety
be considered as a system or school of systems of philosophy ;
though whether it has arisen in like manner by a process of dif-
ferentiation out of the general body of common sense (as it is
certainly alike influenced by it), or has been otherwise formed,
we need not here inquire ; I mean theology. Modern philo-
sophy is distinguished from the ancient hardly less by the fact
of having grown in the presence of a scientific theology than by
the advantage of having ancient philosophy behind it. All the
chief controversies about substance, cause, the origin of know-
,e, are inflamed and aggravated by the impregnation of this
contact. Theology is the earliest philosophy of nearly every
thinker ; and without denying the possibility of his afterwards
approaching all questions quite unprejudiced by his first lessons,
we may be sure that such impartiality is rare, and we ought not
to countenance the fiction that it is the rule. Toward theology
almost everyone's mind must be either favourably or unfavour-
ably disposed. As long as theological doctrines seem best to
explain the facts of the physical, still more of the moral world,
there will be (to use a Kantian phrase) an interest of reason in
their favour. If ever there comes a time when the facts of the
physical, still more of the moral world, seem more intelligible
from another point of view, the interest of reason must change
sides. A fact so weighty, if it be a fact, should be candidly
recognised ; and the historian of philosophy should trace
explicitly the connexions of each system, not only with its
predecessors, but also with the common sense of its age, and
especially with theology. The work that seems to me to fulfil
best these requirements is Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical
Philosophy.
354 Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy.
Prof. Fischer's account of Hobbes is impartial and good, though
somewhat disproportionately short. Much more space is given
to Locke ; and probably many readers would learn more from
these lucid pages than by a first perusal of the original works :
for Locke, easy as he seems, is really a very difficult author ;
and the Essay on Human Understanding, in particular, resembles
the English language, in as much as it is easy to get a smatter-
ing of, but hard to know thoroughly. Prof. Fischer's exposition
of Locke is however marred by the support he gives to an
objection often urged against the great experientialist's doctrine,
and which one is rather surprised to meet with in so able a work as
this, namely, that in strictness the two sources assigned to
experience, Sensation and Keflection, are reducible to Sensation.
As Prof. Fischer somewhere observes, " jeder Dualismus strebt
nach Einheit," every Dualism seeks to merge in Unity : in
other words, the philosophic mind is strongly disposed to
generalise to the utmost. But this high instinct, the creator of
science and philosophy, is apt, like instincts of meaner kind, to
outrun discretion ; and if it has stimulated us to the discovery
of a vast deal of truth, it has at the same time impelled us to
construct unnumbered propositions, which wear a vain appear-
ance of knowledge where there is not, and cannot be, the
reality. Hence Prof. Bain classes it amongst the fallacious
tendencies of human nature ; and I fear its tendency is realised
in error whenever anyone is tempted to reduce Locke's psycho-
logical dualism to unity under the name of Sensation.
It appears that the distinction which Locke wished to
establish between Sensation and Reflection may be best under-
stood as that which, in the more precise language of recent
psychology, is drawn between the objective and subjective
orders of feelings ; and this certainly is a distinction which,
under the present conditions of human consciousness, cannot be
obliterated. If we accept the hypothesis that the objective and
subjective orders of feelings have been slowly differentiated out
of more primitive states of consciousness which were neither ;
and if we make the vain attempt to realise what those earlier
states were like ; we may perhaps be led to surmise that on
account of their dimness and indefiniteness they were more
nearly akin to the subjective than to the objective order : in
which case it seems to be the lesser absurdity to regard Sensa-
tion as reducible to Reflection. But we must not forget that
this is a merely hypothetical condition of things, and one that
cannot be verified. That supposed primitive state of mind is to
experientialists what intellectual intuition has been to certain
transcendentalists, and what ecstasy was to the Neo-Platonists ;
a consummation devoutly to be wished, but which no one
Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy. 355
believes ever to have been attained. "We may be sure that an
Englishman, however delicately he balance his body and muffle
his senses, to shut out the pressures and greetings of the object,
never succeeds in swooning back into that paradise where
blissful cuttle-fish presumably dwell, but whence he has been
harshly driven into an outer region of complex relativity and
distinct consciousness. Locke's doctrine, therefore, that Sensa-
tion and Reflection are co-ordinate factors in human conscious-
ness remains true. All known consciousness involves comparison ;
Sensations and Ideas of Reflection cannot be known as such,
except in contrast with one another. And if, on the one hand,
Ideas of Reflection invite us to derive them directly or indirectly
from Sensations ; on the other hand, there cannot be a sensation
that is not distinguished from others, nor a definite sensation
that is not classed with the ghosts of its own former indefinite
excitations, and thus dependent upon Ideas of Reflection.
Prof. Fischer has a sound vindication of Berkeley's descent
from Locke, as against the theory of his descent from Male-
branche which some critics, misled by superficial similarities of
doctrine, have maintained. It is to be regretted that Prof.
Fischer's design of viewing the whole series of English philoso-
phers as dependent on Bacon, seems to have precluded him from
noticing Berkeley's later writings. As to the treatment of
Hume, what occurs to me to say about it may be incorporated
with the following remarks upon our author's animadversions
upon the entire career and results of English Experientialism :
animadversions which are necessary in order to secure a
starting-place and open field for the German movement.
He urges in the first place that the experientialist principle, that
all knowledge is derived from experience, too rigidly limits the
scope of philosophy and from the outset excludes from our view
any knowledge that may be only otherwise obtainable. This is
a plausible objection, which must occur very naturally to an
opponent of experientialisrn, and for which adherents of this doc-
trine, by the way in which they state and maintain it, sometimes
furnish too good excuse. However, it proceeds upon a mistake
as to the nature of the experientialist principle : which is best
understood not as a fundamental dogma with winch all other
propositions must at any cost be squared, but rather as a
scientific hypothesis which in the judgment of its supporters
already explains so many facts, that it is reasonable to go on
endeavouring to apply it to others until it is disproved. Such
an hypothesis is always liable to be disproved by the discovery
of negative instances, and is a perpetual challenge to produce
them. Transcendentalists accept this challenge when they point
out what in their judgment are necessary synthetic truths indepen-
356 Kuno MscJier on English Philosophy.
dent of experience, such as the axioms of mathematics. To
which it is replied that these axioms are indeed amongst the
most certain that we know ; but that we do not know them to
possess absolute certainty, and that, stripped of that factitious
attribute, which now cleaves to them chiefly by the attraction
of asseveration, they seem to be derived from experience.
By a similar defence Prof. Fischer's second dart is blunted.
Experientialism, he says, unable to explain the possibility of neces-
sary cognition, leads to Scepticism. To be sure, if it be Scepticism
to doubt the possibility of absolutely necessary cognition. For
all other general propositions pretending to truth must, of
course, like its own constitutive principle, be regarded by
Empiricism as scientific hypotheses, until they are disproved or
proved to be necessary. They may be disproved by the
discovery of negative instances. How they can be proved to be
necessary is less clear : and to rest such proof upon the
plainness with which they may be realised in an intuition, or upon
a sense of their necessity or of the impossibility of imagining the
contrary, or upon our recognition of them as conditions of
nature as an object so far as our investigations have gone
looks like that attempt to establish an universal upon particular
perceptions which Prof. Fischer says is the vain hope of Experi-
entialism.
To doubt the possibility of necessary cognitions is not however
the same thing as to doubt the possibility of actual and
objective cognitions. Prof. Fischer uses the words objediv,
nothwendig and wirklich (p. 513-4), as if they were of course
concomitant qualifications of knowledge ; yet this is far from
true. If Hume had lived to enjoy the greater precision of
language which has been forced upon his followers by the
disciples of Eeid and Kant, he might (for example), whilst
questioning the necessity of causation, have admitted its reality,
in the sense that it constantly obtains in experience, and its
objectivity, in the sense that it is the same to everybody. But
it was his error, I may say his whim, to place the results of his
philosophy in opposition to the beliefs of common sense. There
is no true opposition between them ; for those results contained
the explanation of these beliefs. Berkeley in like case was far
wiser, maintaining that his theory of matter really agreed with
the belief of unsophisticated men ; and Hume would have done
well to follow his example. He would thus certainly not have
escaped (any more than Berkeley), but he would at least not
have invited, the reproach, which Prof. Fischer still thinks just,
of having broken with common sense.
A last objection to the Experience-philosophy -is that it
assumes the possibility of experience, whereas this should have
Kuno Fisclier on English Philosophy. 357
been explained, and accordingly Kant undertook to explain it.
Moreover, in assuming the possibility of experience, the
experiential philosophers assumed the existence of such elements
of experience as substance and cause ; which, having assumed,
they solemnly proceeded to deduce. In his work on the
Continental philosophy, our author repeats this accusation, which
was first urged by Kant himself. And against Locke the
charge is too nearly just ; but to bring it against Hume implies
a complete misconception. Observe the ambiguity of the word
experience : it may mean (1) the full organic consciousness of
an adult human being (this is wknt Kant means by Erfahrung) ;
or (2) merely a series of feelings (which Kant called sinnliche
Eindrucke). 1 It would have been a scientific procedure for
Hume to try to deduce experience in the former from experience
in the latter sense. Prof. Fischer and Kant imagine that he
pretended to deduce the adult consciousness from the adult
consciousness.
The merely sceptical aspect of Hume's philosophy, however
interesting to himself, and an astonishing performance in its
way, may now be regarded as literary colouring. The permanent
scientific interest of his writings lies in the explanation they
offer of the growth of consciousness, and the nature and forma-
tion of beliefs. As to Causation, for example, his position may
be stated thus : Grant me a series of feelings in which similar
sequences frequently recur, and certain laws of the association
of feelings, and I will show you how a belief in necessary
sequence or causation will arise. Prof. Fischer seems to think
that in such data, " the whole of Experience and Causality " (p.
786) are already implied. But where ? Is it in the series of
feelings and their recurrent sequences ? Hardly : for we know
as a matter of fact that, in a series, similar sequences sometimes
recur by chance, that is, apart from circumstances which are
recognised as causal ; and it is supposable, that the world is so
vast that even all the sequences which we class as causal are
really accidental conjunctures. Does necessity, then, lurk in
the Laws of Association ? Equally not : for those laws state
that feelings which have occurred together, or are alike, do
recur together, but not that they must do so. Hume's data
therefore, taken severally, do not imply necessary Causation ;
nor do I believe they can be shown to imply it if taken
together. But if not, his problem remains legitimate, namely,
to show how by the recurrence of sequences, possibly fortuitous,
there may be generated a sense of their necessity.
1 Krit. d. r. V. Einl. 1. Mr. S. EL Hodgson in his Philosophy of
Reflection, notices Kant's difference from Hume as to the meaning of
experience.
358 Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy.
I cannot help noticing the way in which Prof. Fischer thinks
that Kant improved on Hume. He intended, it seems, to explain
Experience, as Bacon sought to explain Nature, that is, he
investigated the precedent conditions out of which it arises.
These conditions were not to be above experience, nor in it, but
before it (" nicht liber derselben, wie die deutschen Metaphysiker,
nicht in ihr, wie die Englischen Sensualisten, sondern vor ihr,"
p. 786) : and he found them in pure reason. May I not add
together with the manifold of sensation, or feelings ? Pure
reason, then, and perhaps feelings are conditions which precede
experience. One wonders how ! The *manifold apart from
experience, if it be possible, is out of Time, where there is no
before or after. Pure reason, too, I suppose, must apart from
experience (or during it for that matter) be also out of Time :
how then can it precede experience ? Is not this comparison
between Kant and Bacon a little fanciful ? The view which it
suggests of Bacon's method is somewhat surprising in an exact
writer ; but in relation to Kant it is far more strange. Surely,
by conditions a priori Kant meant not prior to, but merely not
derived from experience. 1
Kant's analysis of experience, far from being an improvement
upon Hume's, was of a more antiquated kind. It resulted in
(1) pure reason, containing the most abstract forms of intuition
and thought, (2) feelings. Both Hume and Kant postulated
feelings. These granted, with the laws of association, Hume
undertook to derive from them the most abstract forms of
judgment. But Kant wanted to be given both. Now if we
remember that pure reason is not appropriate to an individual
mind (though a reader of Kant or Fichte is liable to think so), and
if we consider how difficult it is to attach personality of any sort
to such an abstraction, it becomes little else than a place of
forms or ideas, very similar to Plato's intelligible world. The
manifold of sensation, or feelings, corresponds to Plato's matter.
With Kant, as with Plato, a union of the forms with the
material is needed to constitute experience, or nature. In both
cases it is impossible to see how the union is to take place ; a
Demiurgus is needed ; and Kant introduces, by way of
Demiurgus, the minds of individual men. These apprehend the
manifold, imagine, associate, recognise, judge, and so on. Such
at least seems to be the view which breaks least with common
sense ; but perhaps the whole clumsy machinery is meant to be
worked by the self-activity of pure reason. To me these
1 Thus in the section referred to in the previous note he says : " Ob es ein
dergleichen von der Erfahrung und selbst von alien Eindriicken der Sinne
tinabhangiges Erkenntuiss gebe? Man nennt solche Erkenntnisse d priori"
&c.
Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy. 359
agencies are about equally intelligible. How to do without
either, is the metaphysical problem which has confronted us
since the days of Hume.
With Hume Prof. Fischer's history of English philosophy
ends ; and perhaps, like many another observer, he opines that
there the thing itself ended ; or that, if not, it ought to have
done so. But this may be another instance of the illogical
perversity of facts. Certainly much philosophy has been
written in England since Hume, and it is a very interesting
inquiry (which of course at the end of an article I can only
raise) whether any important advance has been made upon his
doctrines.
Not reckoning special improvements effected in the ' moral
sciences,' within which English thought is so apt to straiten
itself, we may perhaps claim to have made two advances of the
utmost consequence : (1) the analysis of Space and Time in reply
to Kant's Transcendental ./Esthetic ; or if this be too special for
particular mention, there is at any-rate (2) the theory of
Evolution with its corollary of inherited experience. The second
step is a long one, and places us upon an eminence from which
we are able to see not only fuller interpretations of many
psychological and metaphysical problems, but also to discover
the deepest and most secret idea of English philosophy.
The conception which that philosophy has worked toward
with ever increasing clearness of vision, is that human conscious-
ness, however ancient its origin, is a natural growth. To
demonstrate the naturalness of the mind was an essential step
to the justification of positive law, to social science, and to a
coherent view of the world. After a crude and premature
introduction by Hobbes, this conception was half-unconsciously
advanced by Locke under the special form of a denial of innate
ideas. Innate ideas were by those who believed in them prized
as witnesses to the soul's supernatural descent ; and in disputing
their existence Locke dealt at the doctrines they were in
harmony with a much heavier blow than he intended. To him,
no doubt, it merely seemed that the greater part of our genuine
knowledge plainly originated in particular experiences ; this
therefore he took to be the natural and universal mode of
acquisition, and endeavoured to prove it to be so by a detailed
examination of the mind's contents. But, if so, innate ideas
were superfluous, and for this amongst other reasons to be
rejected. Whether an individual's consciousness is conditioned
"by any sort of mental antecedents other than innate ideas, be
they perhaps still resolvable into particular experiences,
ancestral actions and feelings, he of course did not inquire.
His work was to make a preliminary classification and analysis
360 Kuno Fischer on English Philosophy.
of mental phenomena, and to suggest the fruitful hypothesis
that the more abstract and complex of these had arisen from
the particular and simple. This was sound method. The
detailed elaboration of his scheme exhibited the shortcomings of
an initiative essay. The analysis, after a step or two, everywhere
halted upon the road. Many highly complex perceptions
appeared to him comparatively simple, and were treated much
too superficially : instance Space and Cause, which in the
guise of Extension and Power he held to be directly gathered
from experience, thus (as it has been objected) assuming the
very thing to be explained. The synthesis was still more
defective. Locke omitted to find, even for the complex states
of mind which he recognised, any intelligible process by which
they might have been produced. He speaks of the mind
" putting together " simple ideas, " compounding " them,
" separating " them, " making haste to get " abstract ideas, and
so on. The mind that had to do all this might as well have
been allowed some innate principles for guidance. But the true
process of association he observed only in some abnormal cases.
The problems left to his successors may be roughly grouped
as follows : (1) To complete the classification of mental pheno-
mena, and prosecute the analysis of those complex perceptions
which he had treated as simple, or had inadequately investigated.
Locke's discussion of the emotions had been conspicuously
feeble ; one could hardly gather from it that any passion was
more voluminous than a bad flavour ; and this topic was not
very successfully enlarged upon in a systematic manner until
the present century. A great example of the analysis of
complex perceptions was immediately given by Berkeley in his
Theory of Vision. Hume, however, did little or nothing to
support the advance in this direction. And it was not until
after Kant had raised the metempirics of intuition (if I may so
express it) into one of the principal stumbling-blocks of
philosophy, that the efforts of English thinkers to clear it away
resulted in those analyses of the perceptions of Space and Time
which I have mentioned as amongst the most conspicuous of
their recent triumphs.
(2) To disabuse men's minds of certain fictions of the same
class as innate ideas, but whose unreality Locke had failed to
discover. Here Berkeley again proved equal to the task before
him, despatching quickly abstract ideas and matter as a thing-
by-itself. Hume followed this time in great force, completing
the critique of Substance, and adding his critique of Causation.
He thus fully accomplished the demolition of what may be called
the metempirics of judgment, and left in this department little
for his successors, except the duty of careful restatement
Kuno Fischer on English, Philosophy. 361
according to their progress in psychological knowledge and
precision of language.
(3) To determine and illustrate the laws in accordance with
which the mind grows and works. This problem Berkeley
overlooked ; though without some solution of it none of his
results could be quite satisfactory. It became, however, the
great achievement of Hume ; who revived the Laws of Associa-
tion, which had been strangely neglected since Hobbes ; and
applied them with far greater subtlety and penetration to the
explanation of human nature. How Hume's work in this
field, supplemented by Hartley's, has been continued by an
unbroken series of philosophers into our own day, is well known.
And upon the faithful pursuit of the same methods English
Experieutialism must depend for the means of completely illus-
trating the naturalness of mental phenomena.
The theory of Evolution, if it has not by itself, as applied to
Psychology, solved any first-rate problem (not having occasion),
has greatly contributed to the solution. of very many, and seems
to me to have immensely confirmed previous results. By
extending the period of time during which the association of
feelings lias been proceeding, it enables us the more readily to
understand the tenacity of inseparable growths, and the
approaches that have been made toward perfection in the corres-
pondence between the subjective and objective orders. The
variety of feelings, the consolidation of emotions, the definiteness
of intuitions, the precision of inferences, and even the persistence
of metempirical illusions and attitudes of thought, are alike
rendered more intelligible, and their gradually accumulative
in more credible, by the antiquity of ancestral experience.
theory of evolution has also given a powerful incentive to
the naturalistic interpretation of the mind, by furnishing a clue
to the agreements and differences which exist between the
minds of men of various races, and between the minds of men
and of lower animals. Suggestions toward a Comparative
Psychology are indeed old enough. In the English school
Hume is conspicuous for having encouraged it as much as might
be in his clay. And Locke frequently adverts to the faculties of
animals, observing that they perceive and remember, but com-
pare only imperfectly, and abstract not: balancing such
reflections, however, on the other side with occasional excursions
mto the conjectural psychology of cherubim and seraphim.
On the whole we may conclude that, although English
philosophy since Hume has no such startling movements,
catastrophes and restorations to point to as may be naturally
looked for by those who are accustomed to re-arch their own
intellectual firmament every decade, it has nevertheless shown
362 On the Position of Formal Logic.
signs enough of living activity to warrant the notice of historians.
Moreover, the impartiality which an historian desires to exercise
seems at length, with regard to the recent period, to have
become possible ; inasmuch as its polemic was directed chiefly
against Kant, and this may be considered as probably at an end.
A yet more uncouth foe now shakes his dart over the island.
CARVETH READ.
IV. ON THE POSITION OF FORMAL LOGIC.
WRITING nearly half a century ago in the Edinburgh Review,
Sir William Hamilton deplored the combined perversion and
neglect which Logic had experienced in this country for more
than a hundred and fifty years. At the period at which he was
writing, however, interest was being revived in the science,
chiefly in consequence of the publication of Archbishop Wbately's
Elements of Logic, and since that time we have had a quick
succession of works, written from various points of view, including
Mansel's Prolegomena Logica and Hamilton's own Lectures, Mill's
System of Logic and Whewell's Novum Organum Renovatum,
Boole's Laws of Thought and De Morgan's Formal Logic, Venn's
Logic of Chance and Jevons's Principles of Science ; but it may
still be doubted whether that branch which was distinctively
revived by Whately, namely, Formal Logic, is yet satisfactorily
established on an intelligible and independent basis. In
Hamilton's own exposition it was in danger of being confused
with Psychology, and, if that view be rejected, it tends to be
overshadowed on the one hand by the material logic of Mill and
his school, and on the other hand by the elaborate and ingenious
developments on a semi-algebraic basis of Boole, Jevons and
others. There is moreover a current danger of its proper nature
being lost sight of in an apparently superficial attempt to
reconcile opposing theories ; for example, in Jevons's and
Fowler's deservedly popular text-books. The former says, in
answer to the question whether logic is concerned with
language, thought or objects, that it treats in a certain sense of
all three, an answer which is scarcely permissible unless we go
on at once to distinguish the different parts of the science in
which it deals with each respectively ; and the latter begins
with a definition that would satisfy Hamilton, but follows almost
entirely on the line of Mill. We cannot rest satisfied with this
way of shirking difficulties, though it may perhaps introduce a
greater seeming simplicity into an elementary treatise.
On the Position of Formal Logic. 363
In a particularly interesting and useful essay published in the
first number of MIND, Mr. Venn gives a brief summary of the
different views as to the nature and province of Logic.
" Everyone," he says, " will admit that a proposition is a state-
ment in words of a judgment about things " ; and here we have
three sides of the proposition, any one of which may be dwelt on
to the exclusion of the others. We may select for special
attention, first, the words in which the proposition is expressed ;
secondly, the judgment of which it is the expression ; or, thirdly,
the reference to things which is contained in it. The same may
equally be said of terms and arguments ; and " hence we should
apparently be led to three alternative views as to the general
nature of logic. One of these views, however, namely, that
which lays the stress on the words in which the judgment is
couched, need hardly be discussed. It has indeed been
maintained by "Whately that logic is concerned with language,
and with language only. But he does not adhere to this
limitation, as indeed no clear thinker could, for the secondary
and dependent nature of language as being a medium of thought,
or having reference to facts, is far too prominent to be
disregarded. Hence it follows that supporters of this view are
under such powerful attraction to one or other of the remaining
two, that for all practicable purposes we need not take any but
these into account." So far as Formal Logic, however, is
concerned, there is still another alternative, and in a discussion
as to the province of logic we shall not get far unless, to
commence with, we treat the formal and material aspects of the
science separately. The attempt to deal with them in too close
connexion is partially accountable for the anomalous position of
formal logic in some works on the science ; while it also tends to
put in an exaggerated form the real divergence between different
schools of logicians. The view that even formal logic is
concerned with language pure and simple is undoubtedly open
to the objection that Mr. Venn urges. But the same cannot be
said if we take language in its distinctive character as the
instrument of thought ; and I shall try to show that formal logic
may be established on this basis without losing its recognised
character : whilst if, on the one hand, it is treated as Hamilton
and Mansel treat it, it cannot be adequately marked off from
psychology, and if, on the other hand, the whole science is to
concern itself with things, the formal side of it cannot but remain
in an anomalous and undefined position.
Wliately and De Morgan are leading examples of logicians
who have given prominence to the connexion between logic and
language ; but these writers either entirely slurred over its
subjective aspect, or referred to it in a crude and apparently
3G4 On the Position of Formal Logic.
inconsistent way. Hamilton's strictures on Whately for having
said that " Logic is entirely conversant about Language " are
well known ; and it is also generally recognised that they are
not fully justified. The statement here quoted must always be
taken in connexion with another statement of the same writer,
namely, that Language" of some kind or other is an indispensable
instrument of all Seasoning that properly deserves the name.
This is the connecting link between Whately's two positions
that logic is concerned with the process of reasoning and also
with language. Reasoning and language considered respectively
as the subject-matter of logic are not in his view opposed to each
other ; logic deals with the latter just because it deals with the
former. At the same time there can be no doubt that Whately
did not sufficiently bring out the connexion in his writings, even
if he ever fully realised it to himself.
De Morgan again is sometimes very explicit : " Formal
logic," he says, " deals with names and not with either the ideas
or things to which these names belong " ; and again, " Names
are exclusively the objects of formal logic". But this is
certainly going too far; if De Morgan had fully adopted this
view in his own treatise, he would have produced not a Logic at
all, but a Grammar. Elsewhere, however, he gives a far better
statement : " Logic is that branch of inquiry in which the act
of the 
