All knowledge must be obtained either through experience, or independent of experience. Knowledge dependent on experience must necessarily be merely knowledge of phenomena. All are agreed that experience can only be experience of ourselves as modified by objects. All are agreed that to know things per se -noumena—we must know them through some other channel than experience.

Have we, or have we not, that other channel? This is the problem. Before we can dogmatize upon ontological subjects, we must settle this question:

Can we transcend the sphere of our Consciousness and know things per se?

And this question further resolves itself into-Have we ideas independent of experience?

To answer this question was the great object of succeeding philosophers. The fact that modern philosophy, until Fichte, was almost exclusively occupied with Psychology has been constantly noticed; but the reason why Psychology assumed this importance, the reason why it took the place of all the higher subjects of speculation, has not, we believe, been distinctly stated. Men have contented themselves with the fact that Psychology occupied little of the attention of antiquity, still less of the attention of the Middle Ages; and only in modern times has it been the real ground on which the contests of the schools have been carried on. Psychology was the result of a tendency similar to that which in science produced the Inductive Method. In both cases a necessity had arisen for a new course of investigation; it had become evident that men had begun at the wrong end, and that before a proper answer could be given to any of the questions agitated, it was necessary first to settle the limits and conditions of inquiry, the limits and conditions of the inquiring faculties. Thus Consciousness became the basis of Philosophy; to make that basis broad and firm, to ascertain its nature and capacity, became the first object of speculation.

THIRD EPOCH.

PHILOSOPHY REDUCED TO A QUESTION OF PSYCHOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.

HOBBES.

PERHAPS no writer except Spinoza has ever been so uniformly depreciated as Hobbes. From his first appearance until the present day he has been a by-word of contempt with the majority of writers; and even by those who have been liberal enough to acknowledge merit in an adversary, he has been treated as a dangerous and shallow thinker. The first person who saw his importance as a political thinker, and had the courage to proclaim it, was, we believe, James Mill. But as long as political and social theories continue to be judged of by their supposed consequences, so long will Hobbes be denied a fair hearing. He has roused the odium theologicum. It will be long ere that will be appeased.

Faults he had, unquestionably; short-comings, incomplete views; and as all error is dangerous in proportion to its plausibility-we will say that he was guilty of dangerous errors. Let the faults be noted, but not overstrained; the short-comings and incomplete views, enlarged and corrected; the errors calmly examined and refuted. We shall be gainers by it; but by inconsiderate contempt, by vilifying, no good result can be obtained. Impartial minds will always rank Hobbes amongst the greatest writers England has produced. He is profound, and he

is clear; weighty, strong, and sparkling. His style, as mere style, is in its way as fine as any thing in English: it has the clearness as well as the solidity and brilliancy of crystal. Nor is the matter unworthy of the form. It is original, in the sense of having been passed through the alembic of his own brain, even when formerly the property of others. Although little of it would now appear novel, it was novel when he produced it. Haughty, dogmatic, overbearing in manner, he loved Truth, and never hesitated to proclaim her. "Harm I can do none,” he says, in the opening of the Leviathan, "though I err no less than they (i. e. previous writers), for I shall leave men but as they are, in doubt and dispute; but intending not to take any principle upon trust, but only to put men in mind of what they know already, or may know by their experience, I hope to err less; and when I do, it must proceed from too hasty concluding, which I will endeavor as much as I can to avoid.”*

In this passage we see Locke anticipated. It proclaims that Psychology is a science of observation; that if we would understand the conditions and operations of our minds, we must patiently look inwards and see what passes there. All the reasoning and subtle disputation in the world will not advance us one step, unless we first get a firm basis on fact. "Man," he says elsewhere, with his usual causticity, "has the exclusive privilege of forming general theorems. But this privilege is alloyed by another, that is, by the privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature is subject but man only. And of men those are of all most subject to it, that profess Philosophy." And the cause of this large endowment of the privilege to Philosophers we may read in another passage, where he attributes the difficulty men have in receiving Truth, to their minds being prepossessed by false opinions-they having prejudged the question. The passage is as follows:-"When men have once acquiesced in untrue opinions, and registered them as authenticated records

* Works, edited by Sir W. Molesworth, iv. 1.

in their minds, it is no less impossible to speak intelligibly to such men than to write legibly on a paper already scribbled over."

Hobbes's position in the History of Philosophy is easily assigned. On the question of the origin of our knowledge he takes a decided stand upon Experience: he is the precursor of modern Materialism :

"Concerning the thoughts of man I will consider them first singly, and afterwards in a train or dependence upon one another. Singly they are every one a representation or appearance of some quality or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object. Which object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other parts of a man's body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of appearances.

The original of them all is that which we call Sense, for there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.'

We have here stated, in the broadest manner, the principle of Materialism. It is in direct antagonism to the doctrine of Descartes that there are innate ideas; in direct antagonism to the old doctrine of the spirituality of Mind. Theoretically this principle may be insignificant; historically it is important.

Hobbes's language is plain enough, but we will still further quote from him, to obviate any doubt as to his meaning.

"According to the two principal parts of man, I divide his faculties into two sorts-faculties of the body, and faculties of the mind.

"Since the minute and distinct anatomy of the powers of the body is nothing necessary to the present purpose, I will only sum them up in these three heads,-power nutritive, power generative, and power motive.

* Leviathan, ch. 1. In the following exposition we shall sometimes cite from the Leviathan, and sometimes from the Human Nature. This genera' reference will enable us to dispense with iterated foot-notes.

"Of the powers of the mind there be two sorts-cognitive, imaginative, or conceptive and motive.

"For the understanding of what I mean by the power cognitive, we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our minds continually certain images or conceptions of the things without us. This imagery and representation of the qualities of the things without, is that which we call our conception, imagination, ideas, notice, or knowledge of them; and the faculty, or power by which we are capable of such knowledge, is that I here call cognitive power, or conceptive, the power of knowing or conceiving."

The mind is thus wholly constructed out of sense. Nor must we be deceived by the words faculty and power, as if they meant. any activity of the mind-as if they implied that the mind cooperated with sense. The last sentence of the foregoing passage is sufficient to clear up this point. He elsewhere says:—“ All the qualities called sensible are, in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth on our organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed are they any thing else but divers motions; for motion produceth nothing "but motion."

Hobbes, therefore, and not Locke, is the precursor of that school of Psychology which flourished in the eighteenth century (principally in France), and which made every operation of the mind proceed out of transformed sensations; which ended, logically enough, in saying that to think is to feel—penser c'est sentir.

It is to Hobbes that the merit is due of a discovery which, though so familiar to us now as to appear self-evident, was yet in truth a most important discovery, and was adopted by Descartes in his Meditations*—it is that our sensations do not correspond with any external qualities; that what are called sen

* Descartes may possibly have discovered it for himself; but the priority of publication is at any rate due to Hobbes-a fact first noticed, we believe, by Mr. Hallam: Literature of Europe, iii. 271.