sible for him to sit. In the second place Mr. Mill had not only rebuked in this was the pretentions of all contemporary science and philosophy but had himself most manifestly broken down among the seeming simplicities of that very experience whose interpretation he thought philosophy might venture to undertake. For one thing he was forced to confess, which he did with characteristic candor, that the principle of Association of Ideas which had carried him safely through the superficial operations of the mind failed with the fundamental faculty, or fact, of Memory, a mystery which he turned over in despair to future speculation. But as memory is implicated in all perceptions and all reasonings the mystery turned over was really nothing less than the materials of his entire philosophy. It was, however, precisely in the region of Associated Ideas where he felt himself secure that ruin overtook him, for the very light thrown among the phenomena of feeling and thought by his masterly expositions only made it more apparent than ever that their real foundations were still out of sight, that the superficial strata deposited by experience are moulded from beneath and pierced in every direction by the rugged granite of intuitions anterior to all possible association of ideas. There are most certainly things, not only necessarily believed by all men to be true (the necessary, universal truths of Mr. Spencer) but which we know are true everywhere and forever (the necessary, universal truths of Rationalism). We do know beyond any peradventure, and if that were possible all the more certainly for Mr. Mill's counter-argument, that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line, that all trilaterals are triangular, that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another, that cruelty is base, that justice is due to all. These propositions are necessarily and universally true. If they are at the same time synthetical propositions, if the things affirmed "(triangularity," "baseness)" are exterior and additional to the things of which they are affirmed " (trilateral," "cruelty") then we have got an extension of knowledge which experience never gave nor can give, belonging to the primeval granite and not to the sedimentary formations of the mind, whether the thin alluvium of experience as Mr. Mill describes it, or the ancient strata of ancestral experience which figure in Mr. Spencer's Theory of Evolution. The Problems of Life and Mind is the distinct confession of Empiricism that the controversy over the question as originally formulated is closed and that the field of battle must be abandoned to the Rationalists. The news of the evacuation never reached Mr. Mill who fell where he fought, like Marmion, and the followers of Mr. Spencer are still serving their guns with all the enthusiasm of victory; but Mr. Lewes, who understands the theory and history of war, knows perfectly well that the battle is over. He is, however, confident that there is still time to win another and with the promptitude of a veteran he has executed a change of front which completely alters the situation. Kant he declares to have been in the right as against the Empiricists in holding that the mind has cognitions of necessary, universal truths; Mill and Spencer to be right as against the Rationalists in holding that all cognitions are supplied by experience; but both to be wrong in holding that any of our cognitions are synthetical. Experience alone teaches us that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, that cruelty is base; but this intuition of the particular, contingent fact carries with it the intuition of the universal necessary truth -we know that a straight line must be the shortest distance between two points, that cruelty must be base. And why? for the perfectly simple reason that these are all analytical truths and the pure form of their expression an identical proposition. What we mean by "straight line" is exactly what we mean by "shortest distance," what we mean by "trilateral" exactly what we mean by "triangular," what we mean by "cruelty" exactly what we mean by "base;" so that all we have affirmed is this, that the same is the same, or that whatever is, is, and the slightest experience is as competent for that affirmation as pure reason" or any other transcendental faculty of the soul. Mr. Lewes therefore resumes the engagement with artillery and ammunition captured from the enemy; more than this, with happy audacity he carries the war into the enemy's country. He has appropriated the whole fund of necessary truths under the plea that they belong to him as identical truths supplied by experience; and he has promised a cosmology as comprehensive as Mr. Spencer's on the assumption that such truths are sufficient to explain the universe. Now, as it hap pens, this identical manoeuvre (if a pun is permissible in so serious a discussion) has been executed at leat once before in modern philosophy, and an examination of the earlier experiment, besides being of interest to any one who cares for historical connection, may prepare us for the examination of Mr. Lewes's two postulates (that all our cognitions are reducible to the form of identical propositions; and that identical propositions can yield a theory of the universe). II. In the year 1629 Descartes, goaded by the perplexities born of much study and vast experience of men and life, retired to Holland, to see whether in the midst of Dutch security and tranquility he could not find some solid interior ground of assured knowledge and reasonable faith. The very doubt which had carried Bacon out of doors to the observation and interrogation of nature drove Descartes into solitude and self-inspection; and, although such generalizations are always to be taken loosely, it may be said that Modern Philosophy was born of the meditations of Descartes as Modern Science of the experiments of Bacon. Having put aside with unflinching skepticism, item by item, the entire universe with which his great compeer had been busy, the one absolute certainty which Descartes found left within him was this: Cogito ergo sum; Je pense donc je suis; I think therefore I am. An astonishing amount of irrelevant criticism has flourished over this famous dictum, all of which might have been saved by a little attention to Descartes' exposition and use of it. It is neither the flagrant petitio principii of some of the critics; nor the empty truism of others; nor yet is it a storehouse of materials for building a philosophy, or a germ out of which a philosophy *The idea that the cogito ergo sum begs the question is founded upon the misapprehension that it is an imperfect syllogism, the expression of a particular truth deduced from a universal already taken for granted (" Tout ce qui pense est, on existe"). Perhaps no one ever had a greater contempt for this sort of reasoning than Descartes, and to suppose him capable of it here in his premier principe is to misunderstand his entire philosophy, which is not a deduction from universals but an intuition of particulars. In the Réponses aux Secondes Objections he has explained with his usual distinctness that the fact of existence is not concluded from the fact of thought by the force of any syllogism but as a thing known of itself may be developed. It is simply an absolute certainty and its value for further use is in this, that it may be expected to yield a criterion of certitude applicable to other ideas as well as to this one. "I then went on," says Descartes,* "to consider in general what it is that is requisite to a proposition in order to and by simple inspection of consciousness.-(Œuvres de Descartes; publiées par Victor Cousin, I, 427.) As for the second criticism the proposition is so far from being a truism that it covers the whole ground of the Nihilistic controversy; is an affirmation that the soul differs from its thoughts as substance from mode. Descartes, says Sir Wm. Hamilton (Metaphysics, I, 155), at least as understood and followed by Malebranche and other of his disciples, made thought or consciousness convertible with the substance of the mind." Hobbes thought it necessary to instruct Descartes on this very point. "I, myself, who think, he says, am distinct from my thought; and although it is not separated from myself it is, nevertheless, different from me." To this Descartes replies: "Je ne nie pas que moi qui pense, ne sois distingué de ma pensée comme une chose l'est de son mode," (I, 475), and what he does not deny here he takes for granted everywhere else. If we are not in error, Hamilton's reading is founded upon a misconstruction of the distinction between substance and essence as they are defined by Descartes. "Substance" is the thing in itself, the substratum of all attributes, properties, phenomena; that particular attribute which makes the thing what it is, which determines its nature as distinguished from the natures of other things. Thus with Descartes, the essential attribute, or essence, of the substance "mind" is thought, of the substance "matter" extension. So to-day we would say—it is the essence of matter to resist; but not-resistance is matter, a nihilistic proposition. The Cartesian distinction is exactly expressed by Spinoza in the 3d, 4th, 5th, and 6th Definitions of the First Part of the Ethica: 66 J'entends par substance ce qui est en soi et est conçu par soi-." 66 essence" is "J'entends par attribut ce que la raison conçoit dans la substance comme constitutant son essence." "J'entends par mode les affections de la substance . . . ." "J'entends par Dieu un être absolument infini, c'est-à-dire une substance constituée par une infinité d'attributs dont chacun exprime une essence eternelle et infinie."-(EŒuvres de Spinoza traduites par Emile Saisset, III, 3.) Whence flows the pantheistic conclusion that there is only one substance, of whose infinite number of infinite essences all things are modes or manifestations." On the whole our conclusion is that the cogito ergo sum which gives the criterion of truth is a synthetical proposition, the passage from the subject to a predicate wholly different from the subject, on the authority of an intuition of necessary truth. If it is really nothing but the paltry truism, A is A, it cannot provide a criterion that will avail us when we come to the tremendous synthetical propositions which affirm the existence of God and of the external world. So that the fate of Descartes' philosophy, which is the most daring and extensive synthetical philosophy produced hitherto, is involved in this question about his premier principe. * Euvres de Descartes, III, p. 90. Principes de Philosophie. be certainly true; for having just found one which I knew to be so I thought I ought also to know in what this certitude consists. And having observed that there is nothing whatever in this Je pense donc je suis, which assures me I say the truth save only that I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to be, I concluded that I could take for a general rule that things which we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true things." The philosophy of Descartes is the application of this rule or test to the contents of consciousness; the gathering together of all ideas which, like the first one, are found to be "clear and distinct." The criterion again has been as obnoxious to the critics as the premier principe or first idea from which it was obtained; for, on the one hand, it is affirmed that an idea may be clear and distinct yet not true; on the other, that what we take for a clear and distinct idea may in fact be obscure and confused. According to the sensationalists our "vivid" ideas are all impressions of sensible things, while the ideas furnished by memory and imagination to the reason are all "faint copies" of those vivid originals; so that what the Sensationalist declares to be clear and distinct Descartes declares to be doubtful or false, and what Descartes declares certainly true the Sensationalist declares obscure and confused. But here again we may easily escape the ambiguity in the description of the criterion by attending to the use made of it, for when Descartes talks of a clear and distinct idea, what is it in fact about the idea that is so? Not only the idea itself as an occupant among many more of consciousness (for to this extent any idea may be discriminated by careful attention from any other); but beyond this the absolute necessity the idea is under of being true. His trouble, remember, was doubt; his demand, certitude-the assurance that something must be true; so, he says, in the Discours de la Méthode, "I determined to make believe that all things whatsoever that had ever entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I took notice that while attempting in this way to think that everything was false, it was absolutely necessary that I who was thinking so was myself something ("il falloit nécessairement |