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HAMILTON'S HEDGING.

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having, in this manner, been injured in the text, we find ourselves insulted in the notes thus:

:

From what has now been stated [i.e. in the above passage] it will be seen how far and on what grounds I hold, at once with Dr. Reid and Mr. Stewart, that our original beliefs are to be established, but their authority not to be canvassed; and with M. Jouffroy, that the question of their authority is not to be absolutely withdrawn, as a forbidden problem, from philosophy.

Would or could any man that ever existed-but Hamilton-have written that note? Pray, observeand as placed-its full significance and veritable bearing. Cannot we fancy the cosmothetic idealist ironically remarking to Hamilton:- Yes, I see, though true blue with Reid, you are liberal ́ and candid with Jouffroy; the question is not withdrawn either;-only, when my mouth presumes to open on it, there comes a back-hander of veracious, veracious -here ferocious-that shuts it again: well, once I can speak for pain, I will tell you, Sir William, that it is a queer piece of hedging, that of holding both with Reid and with Jouffroy; and I cannot, somehow, feel quite certain that two expressions mean also always two things; for, if allowed by this word, I am forbidden by the other at all to question consciousness -unless under penalty of confounding and embroiling all?

While it is very clear, then, that Hamilton, at his own time, never scruples to allow himself the privilege of putting consciousness to the question, it is equally clear that he absolutely refuses at any time to share this privilege with that to him unclean animal-the

cosmothetic idealist. Him he drives off ever with the fiercest refusals-the angriest denials. But, no more here than elsewhere, can Hamilton assert for himself what he denies for others-without contradiction. This, then, is still the burthen of the tale: wherever we move in Hamilton, there is always present to us the same element of inconsistency, discrepancy, and incongruity. Hence the fallacies; which here, too, are not wanting. It is probably quite impossible, for instance, to find anywhere a more striking example of ' artful diversion' than is furnished by the passage on which we have just commented. We may take the opportunity to remark, too, that an example of this same fallacy (the ignoratio elenchi), in the form of 'mistake' or 'misstatement,' was afforded by Hamilton's ascription to the Representationist in general, and Kant in particular, of regarding the representation (Vorstellung) perceived as, in any sense, a likeness or resemblance of the unknown antecedent. 'Imputed consequences,' again, or the remaining form of the ignoratio elenchi-this is the fallacy that pervades that elaborate description, now so familiar to us, of the results that follow the questioning of consciousness: our personality, our immortality, morality, society, religion, &c., &c. Strange that, with such a picture before him, sophistical though it be, Hamilton should still have so often admitted-if only for himself, indeed the legitimacy of this very questioning -the legitimacy of transcending appearance, and of scientifically and systematically developing and evolving facts! The very lightness and ease with which

HEGEL ON CONSCIOUSNESS.

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he thus contradicts himself, now interdicting a single look into the adytum of consciousness, and again expressly exhorting us to approach, examine, and arrange, should alone be sufficient to demonstrate his own inward consciousness of the sandy and fallacious soil on which he had sought to build.

How different Hegel, to whom the antithesis is present also, but who sees not only one side at a time, like Hamilton, but always both! It is thus, that bringing both thoughts together, Hegel is able to transcend yet hold consciousness.' He, for his part, knows, too, that the vocation of philosophy is just to oppose that with which Hamilton browbeats us-'the dogmatism of ordinary consciousness.' Philosophy, he says, 'begins by rising over common consciousness;' and (Werke, xvi. 108) with a reference that bears on what amounts to Hamilton's loud side—to his or, that is, or the inviolability of consciousness-he declares:

Of this barbarism, to place undeniable certainty and verity in the facts of consciousness, neither ancient scepticism, nor any materialism, nor even the commonest common sense, unless an absolutely bestial one, has ever made itself guilty, -until the most recent times, it has been unheard of in philosophy.*

By consciousness here, we are of course to understand a consciousness, as it were, at first hand-a

* From this allusion in Hegel to the Hamiltonian cry of 'the veracity of consciousness,' and from other allusions in the same volume to other Hamiltonian cries or distinctions, as in reference to Idealism, Realism, &c., and as against an Absolute, we are led partly to see and partly to suspect that, in the works—and they are evidently exoteric—of Krug, Schulze, &c., Hegel had then a matter before him much like that which we, in the works of Hamilton, have now before us, and that thus, probably, this last, even in his most peculiar industry, has been, to some extent, anticipated.

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consciousness that, from the platform of common sense, testifies to 'the natural conviction of mankind' in the independent externality of an actual non-ego. It is to the same consciousness that Hegel alludes when he says elsewhere:-' In place of demonstration, there come forward assertions and the recountments of what is ready-found in consciousness as facts, which is held the purer, the more uncritical it is.' By implication, then, there is also to Hegel a consciousness at second hand, which, critically purged, is the consciousness of trust. It will add one more inconsistency to the long catalogue of such, should we find Hamilton, too, to end in such a consciousness as he could only similarly describe. Meantime we conclude here by the simple dilemma to which the factual position has brought us.

It will not be denied, namely, that Hamilton, while he conceives the testimony of consciousness which we consider here to be in its nature sensuous, conceives it also to be in its validity apodictic. On the first head, we remind only that Hamilton claims for himself 'the natural conviction of mankind'-a conviction which, even were Hamilton disposed to forget that he had himself affirmed, 'The very things which we perceive by the senses do really exist,' will be allowed to believe in the matter-of-fact and sensuous nature of the external reality, the non-ego." * On the second head, again, it is quite certain that Hamilton assigns to the cognition of this non-ego both the universality and the necessity of a first or ultimate principle.

* See also the first extract, pp. 80-81.

CONCLUDING DILEMMA.

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Now, we know that no distinction accentuated by Kant, has been received with greater approbation by Hamilton than that which discriminates between the apodictic and the contingent: what is à priori or native to the mind is apodictic, what is à posteriori or empirical (sensuous) is only contingent. While Hume, too, had this same principle before him when he distinguished between relations of ideas and matters of fact, Hamilton himself-with a certain triumph-has pointed it out in Leibnitz. The evolution of the dilemma, then, has now no difficulty. It is seen at once in the contradiction that would identify a matter of fact, on this hand, and an apodictic validity on the other; and may be expressed thus:—

The cognition in question (Hamilton's or) is either apodictic, or it is contingent; but if, on the one horn, it is apodictic, then it is no matter of fact; and if, on the other horn, it is contingent, then it is no necessary first principle. Hamilton's further proceedings, indeed, as we shall presently see, are not unillustrated by these alternatives.

3. The Analysis of Philosophy; or, Hamilton's Sióti.

Sir William Hamilton has covered, we may say, quite nine-tenths of his canvas with the blinding and dazzling scarlet of his or; and for no other purpose, as the reader is led to suppose always, than to overbear any tint of a diót. It is not uncharacteristic, then, that he should come, in the end, to a dióti himself. It appears that the or, after all, is insufficient, or that if 'every how rests ultimately on a that,'

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