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Hamilton's theory lies-pretty well completelyin these extracts; and, using an illustration, it is shortly this:-The mind inhabits a certain vase, and so that it is directly present to every unit of the extension of this vase. But, single unit or entire extension, these are quite unknown to it till lit. Lit, however, the entire vase is exhibited to it (the mind) with the constituent units of the vase relatively localised and reciprocally out of one another, as extension implies. Further, now, this vase moves; and, moving, is resisted. If before, then, the vase itself gave knowledge of a partly outer and a partly inner, resistance gives knowledge now of a wholly outer. To this wholly outer, the facts learned of the partly outer are next inferentially transferred. Lastly, the light that lit the partly outer, is also inferentially transferred to this same wholly outer as to its cause. In this way it is, that, to Hamilton's belief, the knowledge of the external world is constituted.*

Of this theory the mind's net, the nervous envelope, the organism, or, rather we may say at once, the ocular membrane, is the centre of gravity. Reference to the quotations generally, and especially to that from Reid's Works, pp. 862-3, will readily decide this. In short, throughout the entire theory, it is the lit ocular membrane that is present to Hamilton's thought. This membrane affected, a light is struck in it, and the threads of its extension seen. Or, in the light of the secondary quality, the mind perceives the extension

* See the last paragraph of the quotations for a point in the above where Hamilton vacillates.

of the primary quality. The passion of colour first rising into consciousness, not from the amount of the intensive quantity of the affection, but from the amount of the extensive quantity of the organism affected, is necessarily apprehended under the condition of extension.' (Reid's Works, p. 885.) Each ultimate fibril of the membrane is a lit point, and these lit points are relatively localised and reciprocally external. The light, as it were, carries these points into the mind which cognises them, consequently, as they are thus mutually in situ. However small the ocular membrane, any amount of an externality actually known is enough: all the rest follows easily on resistance-to transference-through inference.

Hamilton, then, evidently, presupposes mind, body, and outer world; and the only question to him is, How does the first come to know the second and the third? The netted mind is further netted: how does it come to perceive its own net, and its net's net? The latter Hamilton does not conceive to be perceived,' to be 'immediately known' at all. It is certainly a place of knowledge, but there is nothing known in it that is not the result of inference and transference referred to the former. It is in the mind's net, then, that all that is important to Hamilton occurs; and this is neither complicated nor hard to conceive. The mind, already present to the net, is, by sensation in the net, This is the

as it were, fired to perception of the net. whole—there is, indeed, no more than this; for resistance itself only adopts this for simple externalisation one step further. That is to say, the nervous net

being flushed, coloured, or lit by a sensation, or secondary quality, there is perception of this net itself in its primary qualities. This is the ultimate fact-the ultimate that (OT). On sense of resistance then, again, these primary qualities of the nervous net (together with the secondary of the same) are transferred to an unknown substrate that resists; and so by continued process of inference there gradually rises around us the formed world.

The mind, then, to Hamilton, though pervading the nervous net that envelops it, perceives this net only when it (the net) is lit by a secondary quality; and even then, be it remembered, not in itself—no, only in its modes, which modes are the primary qualities. These primary qualities-modes of a non-ego; for the nervous net, if on one side within the mind, is on another side without the mind, and in that aspect other than the mind-are transferred by inference to the non-ego beyond the nervous net; what we called the net's net; which ulterior non-ego, or net, is itself inferred on occasion of resistance to the voluntary locomotion of the netted mind.* Thus is it that

* Hamilton certainly figures sensation of secondary and perception of primary quality (though impossibly else than a sequence of first and second both in nature and in time-though quite as much so, indeed, as any sequence of two terms that can be anywhere referred to), as a single organic act; and it is very possible that he would wish to associate with these, and in this act, the element of resistance as well. Such association, at least, might, perhaps, relieve the difficulty as to when and where Hamilton places the first cognition of outness; for cognition of a non-ego that is at once within the mind and without the mind, seems competent rather to otherness than to outness. Thorough outness is, perhaps, hardly possible before resistance. This difficulty, however, probably never occurred to Hamilton.

Hamilton conceives the mind to arrive at cognition of its entire abode. All knowledge of outer things is but an inferential transference from the netted mind to resistants without. These resistants without, again, are unknown things in themselves actually presented to the netted mind; but they are also only phenomena, in that they are not known in themselves, but only through, first, the primary qualities transferred, so to speak, in to their interiors, and, second, the secondary qualities inferentially transferred on to their exteriors. The former inference, again, to Hamilton, is presentative or noumenal in its validity, while the latter is only representative or phenomenal: that is to say, the resistants he conceives to possess the primary qualities; but they are not, by any means, necessarily even the causes, excitants, or stimuli of the very secondary qualities which by inference of the mind are, as their effects, reflected to them.

Hamilton thus conceives himself surrounded by unknown resistants which, substantiated by the primary qualities and clothed by the secondary, open up into, or rather simply take on, this coloured and variegated universe; and we may now more clearly realise to ourselves the precise burthen and bearing of his presentative phenomenalism, or of his presented phenomenon. Cognition, as only relative (which is simply a matter of course to Hamilton), must be phenomenal, but to this cognition the phenomenon concerned is an actually present other, or to this cognition an external something is actually there, under whatever amount of phenomenal shimmer. A hat may, by design, by

accident, by age, take on this shape, that shape, and a hundred shapes; this colour, that colour, and a hundred colours; but, under every shape, and under every colour (or however phenomenally varied), it may conceivably retain the same substance, and remain the same non-ego, or hat, still. Each of the surrounding, unknown substrates, then, is but such presented phenomenon; noumenal knowledge does not exist even the primary qualities are relative and modified modes (Hamilton's own language); nevertheless, knowledge is not confined to one's own self, to one's own states it really concerns a non-ego, or non-egos, actually presented. There are outer things that, though unknown in themselves, hold up, through force of the primary qualities, all the variegated colouring of the secondary. Hamilton evidently cannot do without the supporting frames and skeletons of these outer substrates; they are to him what the Anstoss was to Fichte, the plane and planes of reflexion from which there return to the ego-but now as outer and other-the ego's own states (the secondary qualities). An outer kernel of support plays a rôle indispensable to Hamilton, and he can see for it no substitute, no surrogate, anywhere else. Had Hamilton, it is true, as we have seen, but understood the relative doctrine, he might have found this substitute, this surrogate, in the space of Kant, in which his own primary qualities are admittedly implied. Had projection, indeed, from within out, of such a spectrum as Kant's space, occurred to Hamilton, he would probably not have hesitated to adopt the simpler, the more comprehensive, the

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