sciousness, and uninstructed, there. You do yourself, in very truth then, thus question consciousness.

At this a light falls on Hamilton, and his doggedness thaws, as he suddenly recalls Kant with, That is true; consciousness, on one aspect, says only A is there, and shows it not; while, on another aspect, it is only philosophy that brings the naked fact in final appeal to consciousness. Consciousness, however, even by this appeal, remains mistress of the situation; and from this situation, consciousness declares the object of its cognition to be not the ego, but 'the nonego, modified and relative, it may be, but still the non-ego.'

Should Kant have relented and returned, we may conceive him to respond:-It is, at bottom, but by subterfuge, then, that you would claim for your consciousness the authority of common consciousness; but of common consciousness, your consciousness has yet to abide the question. Meantime, and in reference to your modified non-ego, I may say that an outer object is to you like a parcel of tea tied up in so much sheet-lead and brown paper. The paper is yours, the lead is yours, the string is yours; the tea alone is not yours. You strip off what is yours, the three former then, and you have the tea. But this tea is not yet the naked tea; for you admit the naked tea to be still concealed from you by the relativity and modifiedness, &c., fallen on it from your own faculties. After all, it is not the tea you know. So little, indeed, is there now left you to know even or it, that it is hardly worth mentioning, especially in such circum

stances. This 'little' itself, however, your own admissions shall now definitively remove.

An apparatus of outer and objective substrates (the primary qualities), to be clothed into the variegated universe by the inner and subjective secondary qualities: this is your hypothesis, and it is mine. To me, however, these primary qualities have their seat and their source, quite as much, or more than, the secondary, within. Not the less, on that account, however, are they to me, as they are to you, really without, and presentant from without. This peculiarity is due to a demonstrated provision in my space. You yourself identify your primary qualities with space, and you accept my space. Your primary qualities. are also, then, within. But the primary qualities were the 'little' of a non-ego still left you. Your own admissions, then, have now removed this 'little' into the ego. Your ascription, indeed, of the primary qualities to the non-ego, but resulted from failure to understand my space and your own primary qualities; but of this ascription, in view of my demonstrated space, Occam's razor would compel the recall.

Presentationism, on such a small ground as the mere assertion of so scanty and equivocal a non-ego, was always almost absurd in you-so perfect a phenomenalist otherwise; but now the last filament of the already transparent septum has vanished from between us, and we are one-Kant and Hamilton are one-in cosmothetic idealism!

You always knew, not A, but A+B+C+D. Even when isolated, A was still a phenomenon, into which

you yourself largely entered; or A was not yet known in itself, but only in or as A'+A"+A". Of theseand it was not known, it was only known of-A' was all that remained to you capable of being named outer. This last remnant has now disappeared: your actually there and my actually there have coalesced and are the same.

As regards our common theory, however, you have been contradictory, misintelligent, imperfect, incomplete, and you still want-possess not a thread of never attained to a glimpse of a thread of-the innermost net of all, that fine net of the categories that brings the crass nets of space and time, with all their crasser contents, into the punctuality of apperception -into the unity of the I. It is not so certain, then, that I deserved the ostentatious, blind, and somewhat coarse rating you have given me!

In the above discussion, our hypothetical Kant has, in some respects, certainly outgone, not only his own position, but even that of the reader. Nevertheless, the latter, with a look to the future and sufficient intelligence perhaps for the present, may find his own advantage even so.

On the whole, we are not allowed now much difficulty in deciding how far Hamilton, in associating presentationism with phenomenalism, was inadvertent, and how far conscious. So far as the latter alternative is concerned again, we may presume that the reasons of his action are now quite plain; and equally plain, probably, the insufficiency of these.

There is still left to surprise us, indeed, the want of

apology on the part of Hamilton-the want of, at least, acknowledgment. We wonder how, while he cuts off, with the most peremptory expression, the most trenchant emphasis, either side from the other, he would, at the same time-almost without naming it-occupy both. Whether, with the 'philosophers,' he folds his hands in 'learned ignorance,' under the shadow of his equivocal phenomenon, or whether he vociferates, with 'the vulgar,' from the platform of his no less equivocal noumenon, that 'the very things which we perceive by our senses do really exist,' and that he shares 'the natural conviction of mankind,' the breadth of clamour with which he calls attention to his position for the time is quite as unmisgiving as it is enormous. It seems to us, indeed, that, while no language can be stronger to say the ink-bottle is the ink-bottle, neither can there be any language stronger to say the inkbottle is not the ink-bottle. One might almost suspect Hamilton of taking delight in this utterly abrupt and incommunicable distinction of opposites that were both held. The astonishment it might excite was, possibly, not uncongenial to a mind like his, in which, indeed, a certain procacity, a certain protervity, a certain wilfulness seems always to have place.

Be this as it may, with the deliverances of our hypothetical Kant we may regard the discussion as now terminated, and any assertion of presentationism on the part of Hamilton as now, in his own phrase, summarily truncated.

We may profitably spend, however just to complete the subject in all its possibilities-one word on

this, that, had Hamilton asserted a noumenal knowledge of A (his external reality), and not such phenomenal knowledge as converted it into A'+ A"+A"" (or his mode + his relativity + his modification), we might have been obliged to conclude differently. As concerned A, at least, we should have been forced then to allow him noumenalism, presentationism, if, with regard to B, C, D (or organ, medium, and mind), he could only have claimed for himself phenomenalism. This, too, properly considered, ought, perhaps, really to have been his position. To make A phenomenal, indeed, was but, as we have seen, assertoric, gratuitous, and his own subjective act. Having got the mind into direct contact with matter in the nervous organism, which is the operation peculiar to him, he ought, perhaps, to have announced simpliciter his ultimate orithat the mind now had, and held, and knew matter. To what end still thrust between a tertium quid of phenomenalism? Why still talk of modes, modifications, and relations? This has been definitively brought up to that, and the that is a cognisant element; what is there now any longer to forbid the union? The mode is still the matter, the matter the mode. To call extension, &c., mere modes, and to fancy matter only still an unknown noumenon under these modes,—this is an industry that takes with the left, if it gives with the right. When are we to know noumenally, if not in the position conceived by Hamilton? To suppose the thing in itself absent when its characters are present, is the same absurdity as to suppose the thing in itself present when its characters are absent.