you yourself largely entered; or A was not yet known in itself, but only in or as A'+A"+A". Of these— and 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 orI— that 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 thing in itself present when its characters are absent.

the

GENERAL CONCLUSION THUS FAR.

41

Neither, in such immediacy and directness, is the relation any longer a disjunction. Rather, it is now a junction-direct cognition-identification-an act in which the two are one. No less easy is it to perceive that the modification attributed to the faculties is superfluous: it is the mind itself that cognises; it is matter itself that is cognised. Here if ever, it is a noumenal A that, ex hypothesi, we possess.

In this way, Hamilton might have consistently asserted a knowledge that was at once noumenal and phenomenal a knowledge that was partly this, and partly that; and, through the usual expedient of limitation (in which at the same time the difference is no less eternal), he might have enjoyed at last conciliation of the two sides. Yet, again, by his own act, Hamilton has prescinded this advantage; for despite the loud phenomenal cries with which he runs with the hounds, he still definitively holds with the hare, and calls himself, as in formal antagonism to the hounds (or 'philosophers'), a presentationist. In this way, Hamilton had made for himself the contradiction absolute; in this way he had cut off from himself all possibility of retreat along a bridge of limitation, leaving for himself no resource but suspension by either arm across an incommunicable chasm. so, on his own holding in the face of his own showing, he remains. For Hamilton, if wholly a phenomenalist to us, remains a phenomenalist to himself, that calls himself a presentationist.

.

And

In conclusion, thus far, we may remark that the true metaphysic of the subject nowhere finds itself

menon.

represented in the preceding discussion. The noumenon, if contradictory, is also essential, to the phenoBoth are: either is impossible without the other. The noumenon is identity, the phenomenon difference. The noumenon is the one, the phenomenon the many. The noumenon is the an sich, the phenomenon the für sich. Noumenon and phenomenon are indissolubly one-a one in trinity. This, however, despite his confusion of both, or even in his confusion of both, is a position unknown to Hamilton, and far beyond him. To Hamilton, in fact, his own principles were such that, had he fairly caught the antithesis of noumenon and phenomenon, he would have been compelled to have applied to it his own incessant instrument of infallible divorce-the excluded middle; he would have been compelled to say, noumenon and phenomenon being logical contradictories, both cannot possibly be true, but one must. Instead of this application, however, of what-on the model of Occam's razor-we may be allowed to name Hamilton's wedge, he has, as it were in defiance of his own ordinary principles, produced that incoherent and untenable phenomenal presentationism of his, which, as Hegel would say, is 'neither fish nor fowl,' but a miserable Gebräu, a miserable jumble of mere partial glances (each bright enough, perhaps), in a confused multiplicity of directions. This confusion is evident at once in the two standards to which Hamilton appeals: if it is to ordinary consciousness he trusts for decision, it is absurd for him to advance to philosophy; and if he has once advanced to the