analysis. This is the fundamental point of the whole question, and this is what Reid and Hamilton, the latter especially, emphatically contended for. Descartes

had severed the two worlds of consciousness and extension, and the question was very speedily raised by his followers and others,-how do we connect these? How do we, conscious only, know an extended reality? This question led to various theories as to the possibility of our knowledge of the outward world, all of them thoroughly unsuccessful, in fact, implying the impossibility of knowing it all. It was thus the question came down to the Scottish school, as represented by Reid and Hamilton. It was their merit to challenge the question as to how we know an extended or external world. It was virtually said, that is not the first question; this is, whether, as a matter of fact, we do know anything in the shape of a material and external world. The question as to how we know such a thing, is founded on factitious difficulties, and in any case, it must be second to that of fact, as to whether this extended object comes into our knowledge at all.

Reid had no difficulty in showing the uselessness, in any form, of the theory of representative ideas and images, of an extended world; we cannot picture what we never saw; we cannot know, if we could do so, that the representation is correct. The real world is for ever outside our world of imagery. We can on such a supposition only blindly, irrationally, believe in it. As little can we get at this world, if we know only sensations or states of consciousness. We cannot infer from these an outward material non-sensational reality. We cannot even thus form such a conception. Even if

we could get to an independent cause of these, we could never say that that cause is a material world. It might quite well be an intelligence, like our own. Left to these hypotheses, there is nothing for us but a world of subjective impressions. How then are we to settle this question? Obviously by an appeal to the testimony of our consciousness as intuitive. What is the object of perception? What is it we directly know?

This question is the ultimate question. It cannot be avoided on any system whatever, be it Berkeleyanism or the doctrine of Hume. Hume's statement that sensation or impression is the object in sense, is either a traditional statement, taken from others, or it is a dogmatic statement of fact. In either case, he cannot avoid this court of appeal. No tradition can per se be philosophically accepted; no dogmatic statement as to the fact of the object in perception can refuse to acknowledge the authority of the intuitional consciousness.

1

The question, then, is, is the experience in Perception the same as that in Sensation? In Sensation, I confessedly know only states of my own mind, forms of consciousness, temporary, passing, existing for the moment, pleasant sometimes, painful at others, now thrilling, now depressing. It is a world of subjectivity, in which I am not only spectator, but actor or sufferer. Does Perception reveal to me more than this? Is the world to which I am introduced by it also only a subjective world? Or am I now placed on the threshold, but still on the threshold, of a new sphere of being,

1 Hamilton, of course, regarded Sensation as a state of the animated organism; but this is immaterial to the present point.

another kind of reality, a reality different from myself and all my belongings,—all my passing states and moods, the great sphere of impersonal being? The answer to this question, with its manifold issues, depends entirely, in the first place, on the view you take of those objects in perception which you call resistance and extension. Is this extended, resisting thing on the same level with the heat from the fire, the cold from the snow, the pain from pressure or contact, your subjective states or sensations, or is it a wholly different and new experience? Is it the consciousness of a force, a power, not you, different from you, resisting your power or force, and even overcoming it? And is this thing you call extension, what is no part of you, but a thing subsisting somehow, in some way or other it may be unknown to you, whether you perceive it or not, out of, independently of, your perception?

If you answer in the first sense, then you have a theory of Idealism, as that of the universe, and of subjective Idealism. If you answer in the second sense, you have a theory of Realism or Dualism.

The latter view is the doctrine of Hamilton. Face to face with me the percipient is a resisting something, extended, opposed to my locomotive effort. This is revealed to me in antithesis or opposition to myself, and yet in relation to or synthesis with myself. I do not apprehend it before I apprehend my own effort; the conscious effort and the resisting force are given me in the same indivisible act of perception. This is the beginning, the bare rudiment of our knowledge of the external world, and round it and upon it we gradually build up all the fabric of our sense-knowledge; it grows into definite form or

shape, it is clothed in colour, it is regarded as the source and cause of the innumerable sensations of sound, touch, taste, which we experience. Ask what it is,—the answer is, that in perception it is to us as has been described, certainly a non-ego, or form of a not-self. This is its permanent or abiding character all through our perceptions. I may not be entitled to ascribe to this permanent reality the sensible or perceived qualities, as a thing per se, and absolutely. The sensible quality need not exist as I perceive it, whether I perceive it or not; but the potency exists, and produces its effect the moment there is contact with my organism. In other words, the quantum of being in the sensible world, its qualifying power, subsists, remains undiminished. There is change, transmutation; my sensible perception may now be motion and then heat, it may now be steam and then movement. I may know or suppose ethereal undulation and then light, vibratory motion and then sound; but what is through it all is the permanence of the quantum of existence in our sensible experience; the need for this duration; the impossibility of conceiving it lessened; the possibility of transmutation from quality to quality. This is the substantial in the material world. This is what is independent of us, what changes but perishes not. This is all that an enlightened Realism need ask. It need not ask for the permanent form of our perceptions; it need only ask, philosophically and scientifically, for the permanent quantum of our perceptions in a thing having potency,—a potency that comes into play in correlation with the conditions of our organism and the mental laws of our faculties. This is the fair interpretation of what Hamilton has stated in his doctrine of the ulti

mate incompressibility of matter and in the principle at the root of his theory of Causality, as a change only in the permanent indestructible quantum of being in the universe. The doctrine of Hamilton, got on the philosophical side, is thus seen to concur, to unite itself with the two great modern scientific conceptions, the conservation and the transmutation of energy.

Hamilton's Natural Realism affords a foundation for what is highest in the poetic view of nature. This it does better and in a more marked way than any form of Idealism. In the first place, Nature is not the process in the individual mind or man, of sensations, or subjective states, having but the connection of a contingent custom, as with Hume. In the second place, it is not these bound together by necessary ties, set in subjective frames, and then falsely called objective, as with Kant. In the third place, it is not the other of myself, in which all real distinction is abolished, and nature and self are run back as common manifestations of an empty ground, which has the contradictory capacity of development and development into opposites, as with Spinoza and Hegel. It is not any more a mere relation between me, the percipient, and the thing perceived, neither the percipient nor the thing perceived being real, and yet grounding a relation of reality. But it is that which stands contradistinguished from me, the individual; it is that which has a self-subsistence, it is a power or force which is revealed to me, known by me, but whose existence is not dependent on my knowledge. doubt, if I seek to know it ultimately, in its essence, so to speak, apart from those properties, qualities, manifestations apprehended under the conditions of my physical

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