Letter II. Mr. Mansel’s Preface.—Sir William Hamilton

My dear Sir,

In Mr. Mansel’s preface you will find these words:—

“It is to a philosopher of our own age and country that we must look for the true theory of the limits of human thought, as applicable to theological, no less than to metaphysical researches, a theory exhibited indeed in a fragmentary and incomplete form, but containing the germ of nearly all that is requisite for a full exposition of the system. The celebrated article of Sir William Hamilton, on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned, contains the key to the understanding and appreciation of nearly the whole body of modern German speculation. His great principle, that ‘the Unconditioned is incognizable and inconceivable, its notion being only negative of the Conditioned, which last can alone be positively known or conceived,’ has suggested the principal part of the inquiries pursued in the present work; and his practical conclusion, ‘We are thus taught the salutary lesson, that the capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure of existence; and are warned from recognizing the domain of our knowledge as necessarily coextensive with the horizon of our faith,’ is identical with that which is constantly enforced throughout these Lectures.” (p. viii.)

Our attention is drawn in this passage to a very remarkable article published originally in the 99th No. of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ (Oct. 1829), included afterwards in a volume of ‘Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform,’ which appeared in the year 1852. Obtain, if you can, the Essay in its latest form. The notes which have been added at the bottom of the pages are very important for the illustration of this particular subject. The accompanying Dissertations are scarcely less important for the illustration of the writer’s mind. But at all events, do not study Sir William Hamilton merely in the pages of his Oxford disciple; if you take that course, you will not appreciate either his philosophy or Mr. Mansel’s theology.

I do not give you this caution because I think Mr. Mansel has perverted the doctrine of his Edinburgh teacher, but because that doctrine, as it stands in his quotation, I apprehend would be simply unintelligible to the majority of those who turn to his Lectures as to an armoury which will supply them with weapons against unbelievers. Hence I fear they will be involved in practical dishonesty. They will not care what the ground of the argument is. That they will leave to Mr. Mansel, taking it for granted that so profound a logician knows all about it. Nay, I am not sure that their want of comprehension of his fundamental maxim will not lead them to regard the conclusions which he has deduced from it with more devout astonishment, and more perfect credence. “These great words, unconditioned, incognizable,” so they will reason, “must be sufficient to demolish the German speculations. We may receive the practical advantages of the demolition in the security of our own opinions.”

No such satisfaction to easy inquirers was contemplated by Sir William Hamilton. He did not overlook the fact that there was a relation between his maxim and the controversies of theologians. But he was nearly indifferent to the use which adverse divines might make of it. The theological hints which are contained in his notes are of great worth from their sincerity, from their not being adapted to fit into any system, sometimes from their startling boldness, sometimes from—what you would less expect in so accurate a thinker, such an abhorrer of contradictions—their obvious inconsistencies. But the substance of the Essay has an interest of another kind. What strikes one in Mr. Mansel’s quotation as a piece of dry technical logic, insignificant till we can see its effects in the downfall of some party foe, is taken out of its folds and translated into life. It suggests an historical examination of English, Scotch, French, German habits of thought. It is not merely destructive, for Sir William Hamilton appears as the patriotic champion of Reid and his doctrine of consciousness, if the schools of other countries are to be swept utterly away.

The Essay is a criticism on M. Cousin’s Cours de Philosophie. It explains, with a clearness and candour which the subject of it generously acknowledged, what the design of M. Cousin’s work—properly speaking, of his life—was; how he had rebelled against the sensualism which Condillac had developed out of Locke; how much he had been influenced for a time by the philosophy of Reid, which had expanded the limits of experience as they were settled by Locke and his French followers, but had confined itself rigidly within those limits; how he had yielded to the influence of certain Germans who held that the pursuit of the Absolute is the pursuit of Philosophy; how he had attempted to reconcile the two in an Eclectical or Catholic Philosophy of his own. Sir William Hamilton’s object is to show that this experiment is hopeless; that all which Cousin had learnt from the Germans was mere delusion; that for the mind to discover that which is beyond its own conditions, is simply impossible. He thus enumerates the opinions which may be entertained respecting the Unconditioned as an object of knowledge or thought:—

“1°, The Unconditioned is incognizable and inconceivable; its notion being only negative of the conditioned, which last can alone be positively known or conceived.— 2°, It is not an object of knowledge; but its notion, as a regulative principle of the mind itself, is more than a mere negation of the conditioned.—3°, It is cognizable, but not conceivable; it can be known by a sinking back into identity with the absolute, but is incomprehensible by consciousness and reflection, which are only of the relative and the different.—4°, It is cognizable and conceivable by consciousness and reflection, under relation, difference, and plurality. The first of these opinions we regard as true; the second is held by Kant; the third by Schelling; and the last by our author.” (p. 12.)

The mere statement of the opinion of so eminent a man as Sir William Hamilton, that these experiments are utterly unreasonable, would of course carry great weight with ignorant people like you and me. But, moreover, how much there is in our own minds which seconds his decision! He appeals directly to our common sense. He asks whether the notion of thought passing beyond the boundaries of thought is not absurd upon the face of it,—whether we can conceive the inconceivable,—whether we can know that which we do not conceive? Set such questions before any number of civilized persons,—say in a London drawing-room,—and what answer could you expect but just as much laughter as the courtesies of society permitted? What need, as Sir W. Hamilton sometimes asks himself,—and Mr. Mansel frequently echoes him,—of debating the point? Is it not like entering into a controversy with lunatics?

I wish you to give this consideration all possible weight; to observe how ridiculous a pursuer of the Absolute makes himself in the eyes of these eminent logicians and in his own; and then to reflect upon a few other facts which also are vouched for by Sir W. Hamilton, and are as indisputable as any in history.

I. The first is expressed in these words:—“From Xenophanes to Leibnitz, the Infinite, the Absolute, the Unconditioned, formed the highest principle of speculation.” In other words, from the beginning of the most earnest Greek philosophy,—of that Eleatic school of Greek philosophy to which the discovery of the science of logic is commonly attributed,—down to the commencement of the eighteenth century,—after Bacon and Locke had written,—the most thoughtful and vigorous minds were devoting themselves to that pursuit which it would seem that only madmen can engage in. This conclusion is deduced, not from any statement of mine, but from one which I have given you in the very words of Sir W. Hamilton.

II. But a time came shortly after Leibnitz, when one might have hoped that this running after visions would have been stopped for ever. That which was not effected by the sensualism of Locke, was on the point of being effected, Sir W. Hamilton thinks, by Kant’s ‘Critique of the Pure Reason.’ If there should chance to linger in any Scotch or English mind the notion which was very prevalent at the beginning of this century, that the philosopher of Königsberg was himself a dreamer or an idealist, the following sentences from one who did not speak of him from hearsay, but from study, may suffice to scatter it.

“In his first Critique, Kant undertakes a regular survey of consciousness. He professes to analyze the conditions of human knowledge,—to mete out its limits,—to indicate its point of departure,—and to determine its possibility. That Kant accomplished much, it would be prejudice to deny; nor is his service to philosophy the less, that his success has been more decided in the subversion of error than in the establishment of truth. The result of his examination was the abolition of the metaphysical sciences, of rational psychology, ontology, speculative theology, etc., as founded on mere petitiones principiorum. Existence is revealed to us only under specific modifications, and these are known only under the conditions of our faculties of knowledge. ‘Things in themselves,’ Matter, Mind, God,—all, in short, that is not finite, relative, and phenomenal,—as bearing no analogy to our faculties, is beyond the verge of our knowledge. Philosophy was thus restricted to the observation and analysis of the phenomena of consciousness; and what is not explicitly or implicitly given in a fact of consciousness, is condemned, as transcending the sphere of a legitimate speculation. A knowledge of the unconditioned is declared impossible; either immediately, as a notion, or mediately, as an inference. A demonstration of the absolute from the relative is logically absurd; as in such a syllogism we must collect in the conclusion what is not distributed in the premisses: And an immediate knowledge of the unconditioned is equally impossible.” (p. 16.)

With such a champion arising in the very country of the enemy, what might not have been expected? But hear the result:—

“Kant had annihilated the older metaphysic, but the germ of a more visionary doctrine of the absolute, than any of those refuted, was contained in the bosom of his own philosophy. He had slain the body, but had not exorcised the spectre of the absolute; and this spectre has continued to haunt the schools of Germany even to the present day. The philosophers were not content to abandon their metaphysic; to limit philosophy to an observation of phenomena, and to the generalization of these phenomena into laws. The theories of Bouterweck (in his earlier works), of Bardili, of Reinhold, of Fichte, of Schelling, of Hegel, and of sundry others, are just so many endeavours, of greater or of less ability, to fix the absolute as a positive in knowledge.” (p. 18.)

What have we been told here? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after a denial, by Hume, not only that the Absolute and Eternal could be known, but that there was an Absolute and an Eternal,—after all the efforts of Reid and his school to vindicate the results of experience from what seemed Hume’s inevitable inferences,—finally, after Kant’s annihilating criticism, which seemed to leave no scope for Metaphysic, in its old sense, ever again to lift its head,—there has been more eager search after that which passes the limit of experience, more feeling that somehow that must be the business of human search, than even in the period between Xenophanes and Leibnitz. The kind of ridicule which Sir William Hamilton has poured upon such inquiries, was poured upon them in every age. Schelling knew such jokes from his boyhood; Hegel must have learnt them from doctors and jesters old and new. Yet these men, whose dialectical faculty has never been disputed,—is not disputed by Mr. Mansel,—acquainted with history, interested in the condition of humanity,—amidst the falls of thrones and empires, in the country which most felt the shock of the French earthquake,—could not be withdrawn from these wild inquiries,—could not be prevented from drawing a multitude of disciples after them, or from influencing more or less decidedly the politics, the religion, even the ordinary life of Germans who knew little of the nature or course of their speculations!

III. A line which Sir William Hamilton adopts from an old author with whom his extensive reading had made him acquainted,—

Gens ratione ferox et mentem pasta chimeris,

may perhaps account satisfactorily to some minds for these phenomena in Germany. But what is the occasion of this Dissertation? The passing of the same delusion into France,—that country from which all dreams of the Absolute seemed to have been banished since the days of Malebranche,—that country which is called by our learned author, “the metaphysical antipodes of Germany.” He was led to notice it because some of its most dangerous symptoms appeared in a man who had passed under the healthful discipline of Reid and Stewart, who busied himself, as we all know, in the most practical questions concerning the education of his own country and of other countries, to whose “learning, elegance, distinguished ability,” his Edinburgh critic bears abundant testimony. And it was not a monomania. “Two thousand auditors” (I quote again from the Essay, p. 2) “listened all with admiration, nay with enthusiasm, to the eloquent exposition of doctrines intelligible only to the few; and the oral discussion of philosophy awakened in Paris and in France an interest unexampled since the days of Abelard.”

IV. A madness spread over so many countries and ages, resisting so many remedies which were suggested by the wisest men, starting up again when it was least expected, is a fact demanding investigation. I cannot think that Sir William Hamilton has investigated it. He has merely announced it. Mr. Mansel may perhaps tell us something, in the course of his book, about the causes and growth of the disease which he proposes to extirpate. But we must recollect that his book itself adds one more startling fact to those I have already enumerated. It is not only France which has taken the infection. If he did not believe that England, practical England, was liable to the same danger—if he did not discover indications of it in Oxford, in spite of the number of influences which are likely to counteract it there,—he would not of course have devoted so much of time and toil to the subject of his Lectures. How have we come within the reach of this temptation? How is it that neither the religious culture of Oxford, nor that more thorough and continual discipline of the Stock Exchange to which we are subjected in London, has been effectual to ward it off? It is a point which is worthy of the deepest study. Shall I try to give you one or two reasons which have occurred to me, and which I should like you to ponder?

(1.) You may be surprised when I say that the earnest attention of Englishmen to physical studies and to mathematics as the chief instrument for arriving at any clear and sound acquaintance with physical studies,—has somewhat deadened the force of the ridicule which Sir W. Hamilton would bestow on those who from Xenophanes to Schelling have tried to surmount the conditions of their own minds. For that effort which is said to be monstrous when it is made in the search of metaphysical truth, is the very one which Bacon taught the student that he must make if he would advance one step in the knowledge of Nature. The Schoolmen, who had done such good work in ascertaining the terms under which we judge and name things, had wished to limit Nature by those terms. Therefore, Bacon said, all her secrets were hidden from them. Was it not the business of the ‘Novum Organum’ to show men how they had failed to enter into the true meaning of the objects which they pretended to examine, because they had made their senses and the notions of their understandings the measures of them? Was it not the purpose of that book to point out a method of investigation by which we might rise not only above the conceits of our individual minds, but above those which belong to us as members of a species? The possibility of such a method was easily recognized by the Mathematician. He was rather inclined to affirm that it was not new at all, but the one to which he had always been accustomed, the method of ascending from a particular case to the affirmation of a universal law. The Logician, trained to the opposite method, of descending from general propositions to individual cases, rebelled against the lesson, nay, has never heartily admitted it to this hour, though compelled to pay it a conventional respect. Sir William Hamilton, a Logician in the most thorough and exclusive sense, was too consistent and too honest not to avow his abhorrence of Mathesis.¹ No wonder he thought Mathematics ‘not an improving study,’ likely to ‘induce credulity,’ likely also to ‘induce Scepticism.’ A brave man doubtless, reckless of popularity, ready to overthrow the discoveries of generations past, or the prospects of generations to come, rather than sacrifice his consistency. One cannot but honour him for his sincere, cordial, ‘unconditioned’ hatred of that which had no meaning for him. It is amusing to hear such denunciations connected with the cultivation of humility; but that boast too is instructive, as the fierceness of Sir W. Hamilton’s contempt for some scientific men of European reputation, and for some scholars not thought wholly despicable, at least on this side of the Tweed, is also instructive. The rules of the Logician could not bind the man. The victims of his scorn may have sometimes laughed that such a man should be, and have oftener wept that Atticus was he. Those who contemplate him from a distance may be thankful for all contributions to the illustration of a mind so remarkable in its weakness as well as in its strength. But since Sir William Hamilton has not succeeded in his raid against English Mathematics, he has not succeeded in persuading Englishmen that there is not a way, and a most legitimate way, in which men may ascend above the conditions of their own intellects, in which they must do it if they are not to account the belief ridiculous that the earth moves round the sun, as well as every other belief in that which is, instead of that which appears.

(2.) But if our experimental studies, which we generally regard, and I think rightly regard, as a great protection against some of the worst tendencies of the German mind, makes us indisposed to accept that protection against them which Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel would offer us, I believe there is another influence which works still more powerfully in the same direction. The Bampton Lecturer would speak of the reverence for the Scriptures which we acquire in our nurseries, and which our public Schools and Universities at least design to foster, as one of our great national possessions, which especially distinguishes us from Germans, and which we are jealously to watch over. I entirely accede to this opinion; only expressing my conviction that we are not guarding the treasure, but endangering it, if we make it an excuse for boasting of ourselves, or for triumph over any other country. But this reverence for Scripture is that which, in my judgment, makes it impossible for us to look upon Sir W. Hamilton’s dogma as conclusive against the search after the Absolute which he shows to have had such an attraction for the most thoughtful men. I will not repeat what I have said already, or anticipate what I may say hereafter upon this subject. I will merely refer you to one or two of the passages in Sir W. Hamilton’s notes, in which he gives his own theological application of his position. The first occurs in a note “True, therefore, are the declarations of a pious philosophy:—‘A God understood would be no God at all;’—‘To think that God is, as we can think him to be, is blasphemy.’—The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense concealed: He is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar Ἀγνώστῳ Θεῷ,—‘To the unknown and unknowable God.’ In this consummation, nature and revelation, paganism and Christianity, are at one; and from either source the testimonies are so numerous that I must refrain from quoting any. Am I wrong in thinking, that M. Cousin would not repudiate this doctrine?” Now it cannot help striking any person brought up in our English reverence for Scripture, that Sir W. Hamilton is here, not by inference, but in direct terms, contradicting St. Paul. He affirmed that the altar to the Unknown God was not the last and highest consecration of true religion. “Him whom ye ignorantly worship,” he said, “declare I unto you.”

I am not the least anxious to strain this point, or to use it as the ground of a charge against Sir William Hamilton. Every one knows what an excuse it would have been, if it had occurred in any German philosopher, for raising the cry that he wished to set aside Christianity as an obsolete and imperfect religion, and to “consecrate” a higher system. But God forbid that I should make a man an offender for a word, even if that word is the legitimate deduction from a proposition which is used for the purpose of making all other men offenders, and is vaunted as the basis of all orthodoxy! I rejoice to believe that Sir W. Hamilton meant to be a pious philosopher: I rejoice to discover in this very passage a wavering and uncertainty of mind, showing that the spirit within him demanded that resting-place in the Absolute and Eternal, which he said that men were not permitted, by the conditions of their intellect, to seek after.

A still stronger evidence that it was so, is contained in a note to the 19th page. After quoting a line from Manilius, “None can feel God who shares not in the Godhead,” (which is used as a statement, though Sir W. Hamilton thinks an inadequate statement, of that kind of Pantheism which Schelling at one period of his life advocated,) he goes on to say:

“Manilius has likewise another (poetically) laudable line, of a similar, though less exceptionable, purport:—

‘Exemplumque Dei quisque est in imagine parva;’
(‘Each is himself a miniature of God.’)

“For we should not recoil to the opposite extreme; and, though man be not identical with the Deity, still is he ‘created in the image of God’ It is, indeed, only through an analogy of the human with the Divine nature, that we are percipient and recipient of Divinity. As St. Prosper has it:—‘Nemo possidet Deum, nisi qui possidetur a Deo.’—So Seneca:—‘In unoquoque virorum bonorum habitat Deus.’—So Plotinus:—‘Virtue tending to consummation and irradicated in the soul by moral wisdom, reveals a God; but a God destitute of true virtue is an empty name.’—So Jacobi:—‘From the enjoyment of virtue springs the idea of a virtuous; from the enjoyment of freedom, the idea of a free; from the enjoyment of life, the idea of a living; from the enjoyment of a divine, the idea of a godlike—and of a God.’—So Goethe:—

‘Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken?
Lebt’ nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
Wie könnte uns das Göttliche entzücken?’

So Kant and many others. (Thus morality and religion, necessity and atheism, rationally go together.) —The Platonists and Fathers have indeed finely said, that ‘God is the soul of the soul, as the soul is the soul of the body.’

‘Vita Animae Deus est; haec Corporis. Hac fugiente,
Solvitur hoc; perit hac, destituente Deo.’

These verses are preserved to us from an ancient poet by John of Salisbury, and they denote the comparison of which Buchanan has made so admirable a use in his Calvini Epicedium.” (p. 19, note.)

This interesting, if somewhat startling, passage exhibits a noble struggle in the heart and mind of a man after a living God, a God nigh and not afar off. By the light of it we must study that passage which Mr. Mansel has taken as the text of his lectures; “We are thus taught the salutary lesson that the capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure of existence, and are warned from recognizing the domain of our knowledge as necessarily co-extensive with the horizon of our faith.” The first half of this proposition brings out with great clearness the philosophical question which is at issue between Sir W. Hamilton and his opponents. Have we anything in us which can apprehend that which is? Are we merely circumscribed by that which we think? In other words; is the opinion of one man or of all men that which determines what we know? This is a fair way of stating the case. We may play with the words Absolute and Infinite for ever; but here is the problem which applies to the least things as much as the greatest. Can we come into contact with the meaning, the substance, the reality of anything in earth or Heaven? Have we nothing in place of that knowledge but a semblance or appearance which is presented to us? Now here I think our child’s faith in the Bible comes in to give its vote, whatever that may go for, in favour of those philosophers whom Sir W. Hamilton and Mr. Mansel condemn. This faith certainly has assumed the Bible to be a book which witnesses against the appearances and notions of men about the Being of whom it speaks,—which testifies that He wishes us to rise above all appearances and notions, and to believe in that which He actually is. And if it be so, then this same childlike reverence for the Bible would lead us to look at the second clause of Sir W. Hamilton’s sentence in quite a different light from that in which it presents itself to his admirer. Our faith may have a very wide horizon, far beyond the limits of our conceptions. But the Being will be the limit and the object of it. It will not be concerned with a multitude of opinions about Him. It will be in direct affiance to Himself. It will be always craving for the knowledge of Him, just as the eye craves for the sight of any of His visible works. I could almost venture to adopt Sir W. Hamilton’s own question to Cousin, “Am I wrong in thinking,” that he who made those quotations from St. Prosper, from Seneca, from Plotinus, from Jacobi, “would not repudiate this doctrine?” Am I wrong in thinking that so far as here on earth he repudiated it, he did so because he had not quite accepted St. Paul’s statement of the way in which the eternal Being has met the seekings of His creatures after Him?

In one of his discussions, that on the Philosophy of Perception, p. 89, Sir William Hamilton has said, “Plato has profoundly defined man, ‘the hunter of truth;’ for in this chase, as in others, the pursuit is all in all, the success comparatively nothing. ‘Did the Almighty,’ says Lessing, ‘holding in his right hand Truth, and in his left search after Truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer;—in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request— Search after Truth.’” I love Plato’s definition as much as Sir W. Hamilton does. I should agree with him and with Lessing, if I did not believe that the revelation of Truth was at once the awakening and the satisfaction of the search after Truth; because it is the revelation of Him who is Truth to the creature who is made in His image. This is the ground of my conflict with Mr. Mansel. He seems to me to crush the search after Truth, all that is expressed in the word Philosophy, by crushing at the same time the discovery of Truth, all that is expressed in the word Revelation. I do not believe that the heart of Sir W. Hamilton would have gone along with him in this experiment, whatever excuse may be found for it in his formal dialectics. I am sure that neither the practical sense nor the reverence of the English mind will go along with him. There is one reason more, besides those I have given, why it should not. It is not only philosophers, Greek, German, French, English, from Xenophanes to Hegel, who have been busy in the search after the absolute. That eminent Oriental scholar, whom Oxford has done herself so much honour by adopting among her sons, Mr. Max Müller, will tell us that Buddhism, the most extensive religion in the world, is just as much as Hegelism a search after the Absolute, may just as much as Hegelism terminate in Nothingness. Is the best message we can send from the West to 300,000,000 of people, “You have been dreaming a dream; we can show you that all you have been living for does indeed mean Nothing”? Or may we say this? “The search after the Absolute becomes a contradiction when we try to comprehend it in a notion of our own minds. But the Absolute Himself has stirred you to it, because it has been His purpose to reveal Himself to you.”

Faithfully yours,