of the type of Locke, who held that we are immediately cognizant of impressions or ideas only, and yet sought to pass from these to an external reality. "Let it once be granted that the object known in perception is not convertible with the reality existing," then, he argued, idealism cannot be disproved. But now, when we interpret his doctrine of perception in the light of his doctrine of Relativity, we find Hamilton himself maintaining that "the object known in perception is not convertible" with absolute reality. The arguments which he used against hypothetical realists thus recoil against himself. If they have no right to regard the object immediately known in perception as representative of a reality beyond, neither, by parity of reasoning, has he any right to pass from the relative object of knowledge to the affirmation of an unknown existence, concealed and yet revealed. As Dr. Hutchison Stirling has pointed out, it is one of the curiosities of philosophical literature to find Hamilton comparing the hypothetical realist to Æneas wondering at the adumbrations on the shield while ignorant of the reality, and to find him subsequently using the same illustration to enforce his own doctrine of Nescience. The arguments against the one position apply equally against the other. The mistake lies in supposing that we are for ever shut out from a knowledge of reality. Hamilton's philosophy, like the speculative philosophy of Kant, evokes a vain shadow under the name of absolute reality or the thing-initself. Reject this shadow, and we are back again in the real world which is known to us, and in which, surely, lies the business of philosophy as of life.

Much of our recent Agnosticism is due to the influence of Hamilton. Mansel, in his once famous Bampton Lectures on the Limits of Religious Belief, followed Hamilton in his philosophy of the Unconditioned, asserting the impossibility of conceiving the Infinite or the Absolute, save in the form of negative ideas. He essayed to show that the conceptions of First Cause, Absolute, and Infinite, are mutually destructive; that the co-existence of the Relative with the Absolute, or of the Finite with the Infinite, presents further contradictions; and that to speak of an Absolute and Infinite Person is to use language to which no mode of human thought can attach itself. Having thus relegated the Absolute and Infinite to the limbo of the inconceivable and contradictory, and declared both to be irreconcilable with personality, he yet maintained that it is our duty to think of God as personal, and our duty to believe that He is infinite. The confession that, in such high matters, "the human mind inevitably and by virtue of its essential constitution finds itself involved in contradictions" seemed to him-strange to say the best preparation for an impartial investigation into the internal and external evidences of religion. Religion might well pray to be saved from its friends, when so inconsequent an apology was put forward on its behalf.

Mr. Herbert Spencer's philosophy of the Unknowable, as contained in his First Principles, proposed to "carry a step further the doctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel." His quotations from both these writers show the extent of his indebtedness. He tries to prove in greater detail than either, and

T

with more ingenuity than success, that our ultimate religious and scientific ideas leave us "nothing but a choice between opposite absurdities." And discarding Mansel's belief in a Divine Personality as unwarranted, he asserts the existence of an Unknowable Reality or Power of whom, or of which, all finite things are manifestations. Through Mr. Herbert Spencer, the fundamental principles of Hamilton's philosophy bid fair to preserve their vitality for some considerable time to come, though in a form that Hamilton did not anticipate and would not have approved.

If

But the logical conclusion of that philosophy is reached only in a thorough-going phenomenalism. all our knowledge be of the relative and conditioned, and if every attempt to transgress these limits lead us to the realms of non-conceivability or contradiction, then philosophy is not in a position to affirm or to deny anything which may be supposed to stretch beyond. An Unknowable Reality fades into a mere abstraction from the finite and concrete realities which alone have any meaning for us; and an Unknowable Cause or Power is a contradiction in terms, since Cause and Power are themselves relative. From this point of view, Hamilton's philosophy has strengthened the phenomenalism which, issuing from the scepticism of Hume, has assumed a positive form in such writers as Bain and Mill, and has been further encouraged by the progress of modern science in its exclusive search for facts and uniformities. Thus Huxley, in an article published a few months before his death, tells us that Hamilton's essay on the Philosophy of the

Unconditioned was, so far as he was concerned, the original spring of Agnosticism. Here, then, the wheel of speculation has come full circle. The philosophy of Common Sense, devised by Reid as a safeguard against Scepticism and Idealism, was SO transmuted by Hamilton as to lead back again to the conclusion that nothing can be known, and consequently that nothing can be affirmed or denied, beyond the fleeting phenomena of consciousness.

CHAPTER XVI.

JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER (1808-1864).

THE opposition of Ferrier to his predecessors was so decided that some have found a difficulty in assigning him a place in the development of the national philosophy. But philosophy progresses by antagonism as well as by discipleship. To the acute mind of Ferrier, the psychological method of the Scottish school had already disclosed its weakness; and his revolt against it was due to the natural working of his own thought more than to his acquaintance with other systems of speculation, ancient or modern. those who said that his philosophy was of foreign origin, he replied that, whatever might be its merit or demerit, it was born and bred in Scotland. "My philosophy," he said, "is Scottish to the very core; it is national in every fibre and articulation of its frame. It is a national growth of old Scotland's soil, and has drunk in no nourishment from any other land."

To

James Frederick Ferrier, the son of a writer to the signet, was born in Edinburgh on the 16th June, 1808.