I r is a fair criterion of the advantage which
Mr. Mill as a critic has over Mr. Mill as a constructive philosopher that of two por- tions of this masterly disquisition, with both of which we absolutely and equally differ, his teaching on perception and his teaching on the will, the former, which is constructive, seems to us feeble and forced, as, well as conspicuously sophistical, while the latter, which is critical, is undoubtedly one of its ablest chapters. In dealing briefly with each, we do not of course pretend to do more than just point to the fundamental fallacy of Mr. Mill's method of thought. It would take a volume equal in magnitude to his own—and there is, as far as we know, only one English philo- sophical thinker now living who could produce a criticism its equal in ability—to illustrate and defend against all Mr. Mill's probable replies the drift of our criticism.
We maintain that Mr. Mill's attempt to show how from mere subjective sensations, which, as he thinks, are all of which we have any direct knowledge in consciousness, we may and must come to a belief in external objects of these sensations, and an external world generally, is one of the most glaring in- stances of the liability of the most accomplished logicians to slide into their premisses what they wish to find in their conclusions with which we ever met. The common sense of the thing is against Mr. Mill, to begin with. If I know that I am immured in a mere cell of the universe, and hear a knocking at the door of that cell, I may fairly conclude that the knocking comes from outside, because I already believe in an outside. But Mr. Mill will not allow us any means of attaining to so much knowledge as this. He considers that all our sensations are merely affections of ourselves, both those which arise in us and those which arise (as people suppose) outside us, and thit we have absolutely no direct access of any kind to the knowledge that there is anything in the world at all but our own sensations. And yet he is bent upon explaining to us how, with nothing but sensations for our instruments, we may yet break our way out of sensations to a belief in a world beyond our sensations, and which is in some respects the cause of our sensations. Now to maintain this is an enterprise wanting in common sense, and opposed to the old adage that you cannot get more hay out of a field than there is grass in it. If, I know nothing but sensations, I cannot conceive why I ever should surmise anything but sensations. Mr. Mill holds that to the baby the fluidity, whiteness, and so forth of its mother's milk are as much mere sensations as the taste of that milk, and its mother herself as much a sensation as the milk. But, he argues, since memory and expectation are primary assumptions of all schools of philomAy ajlike, idealist, realist, or half-realist and half- ideali4,—the baby remembers and expects the return of the sensa- tion called taste of the milk and the other sensations in addition to that which make up the properties of milk, and the further sen- sations which make up the qualities of ' mother,'—moreover, ex- pects them to return under given circumstances not depend- ent on its own conscious proceedings, and so gets the idea of independence of itself, or externality. Now who does not see at once that the whole assumption of externality is here slipped in without notice? If there be no original perception of exter- nality why should ' independence of self ' suggest it ? All the successions of feelings in the baby's body, all the alternations of heat and cold to which it is exposed, and all the initial sensations of colour and light and thought, are practically independent of its own control, or if it can exclude any, it can exclude them only by the help of others which it cannot exclude,—that is, it excludes one sensation independent of self by substituting another sensation equally independent of.self. Why, then, should any one more than another suggest externality ? Sleepiness is probably as involun- tary a sensation as any the body has, and recurs as certainly at fixed intervals ; yet does sleepiness suggest externality ? Involuntary sensation, if truly a sensation, must remain so, and cannot become anything external. Why should the baby believe its milk or its mother to be at all more external than its sleep? Or if Mr. Mill asserts that sleepiness is the fading away of sensation, and not a positive sensation (which we deny), then why should not hunger, • An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in Ms Writings. By John Stuart Milt Landon : Longman.
which is a very positive sensation, and which returns periodically withoutanyconscious preparation, suggest externality quite as much as the substances (also mere sensations, according to Mr. Mill) which satisfy hunger? Mr. Mill appears to reply that all our pleasurable and painful sensations get closely associated with ourselves, and all our milder sensations, such as those which we call perceptions,'—those of fluidity, hardness, colour, &c., get associated with the " guaranteed possibilities of sensation" which we ascribe to external objects. But this is just the petitio principii. Where on earth does Mr. Mill get the guarantee from, except from the laws of the only things we know, our own sensations? If I expect a sensation to come independently of my consciousness, and in a given connection with other sensations,—that does not make it the less a mere sensation. The baby expects in time the sen- sation hunger,' the sensation ' food,' the sensation ' mother,' the sensation light,' to recur in given orders,—all independently of itself, though some are accompanied with more, some with less pleasure. But if it has no original perception of anything but itself, how can the regularity of the recurrence provide any? All the laws of its own mind and body are already independent of itself, and bring specific states of feeling in specific orders, and if it does not ascribe externality to one sort of involuntary feeling, why to another? If there is nothing but sensation knowable,— the laws of memory and expectation can only suggest that the known sensation will recur after the known antecedents ; but there can be no conceivable reason why the sensation ' mother,' when it recurs, should be more separated from self than the sensation ' hunger.' The truth is that for any one who denies an original knowledge of anything out of self, not all the manipula- tion in the world will ever manufacture it. Fichte's idealism is the true logical result of Mr. Mill's premisses,—the idealism which asserts the periodicity of external nature to be only a law of con- sciousness, which assumes that the revolution of the stars and the history of mankind as learned by me are as much laws of my own consciousness as the law of association of ideas. " I see a piece of white paper on a table," says Mr. Mill. "I go into another room, and though I have ceased to see it, I am persuaded that the paper is still there. I no longer have the sensations which it gave me, but I believe that when I again place myself in the circumstances in which I had those sensations, that is, when I go again into the room, I shall again have them ; and further, that there has been no intervening moment at which this could not have been the case." Is not the notion of externality, for which Mr. Mill is try- ing to account, imported wholesale into this sentence ? All that he has a right to say is,—" I have the sensation which I call seeing a piece of paper on the table, and then supersede it by the sensa- tion which I call going into another room, and though I have the sensation of the piece of paper on the table no longer, I believe that when I again repeat exactly the set of sensations which pre- ceded my having that particular sensation, I shall again have that particular sensation, and further that, there has been no interven- ing moment at which the former set of sensations, precisely repeated, would not have led to the latter sensation." That is the proper language, according to Mr. Mill's theory, and we defy him to extract from such a " guaranteed possibility of sensation " as that, any permanent reality outside the world of sensation. Mr. Mill's distinction between vividly pleasureable and painful sensations which associate themselves with the subject, and neutral or indiffer- ent sensations which associate themselves with the object, of course suppose an object,—which he has never shown us how to get. But beyond that it is, we believe, a false distinction. Smell is essentially subjective, and never is supposed by any one to be any- thing but an affection of the organ of smelling ;—yet it undoubt- edly gives much less vivid pleasure to children than colour, which is always conceived as external. There is no more pleasureable sensation in infancy (independently of the appetites) than that afforded by bright colours, and none certainly more unquestion- ably assumed as external to the senses.
Mr. Mill has one most curious and ingeniously-artificial argu- ment to show how an external world may be inferred without any direct perception of a not-self. He says we soon find that the uniform antecedent of one sensation is a quite different sensa- tion, which we get to consider its cause,—as, for example, the sensation of taste is preceded by the sensations of the physical qualities of the food, and of the acts which raise it to the mouth, which are totally different from that of the taste of the food. Now, he says, the mind generalizes from this experience, and inevitably suggests as the antecedent of the sum- total of all our sensations something wholly different from sen- sation itself,—something therefore which we cannot conceive at all, that is an unknown somewhat,—an external world. If this ac- counted for anything, it would account, not for a belief that some of our sensations (as Mr. Mill calls them) introduce us to an external world, but that all our sensations conceal from us an external world. We submit that this is accounting for a belief en- tertained by no one. The present writer fully believes the paper he is writing on, and the room he is writing in, to be external to him, but has no sort of intuitive belief in the externality of an unknown something—their cause—of which no quality is known to him. Nor do we see where this sort of reasoning would end. Would it not necessitate the belief in something inconceiv- able and wholly different from space as the cause of space; and some second inconceivable behind the first inconceivable, as its cause, and so on ? We submit to Mr. Mill that he has here invented a false generalization from experience. The various beliefs in God as original, in force as original, in ideas as original, all show that if we had no experience but an infinite series of sensations, we should be content to acquiesce in sensations as original. Nothing appears to us more absolutely certain than the truth that if we had no original knowledge of anything but affections of self, we should never be able to infer anything beyond self.
One word on Mr. Mill's doctrine of inseparable association. He treats the subject of course very ably, but when he asserts that the one feeling which the laws of " inseparable association are obviously equal to producing" is that of " necessity," and accounts for the necessity of geometrical and arithmetical truths by the universal experience on which their axioms are founded, he appears to us to be building on sand. Does any one suppose that his belief in the truth of geometry is less certain than his belief in the necessity of eyes for the purposes of vision?—yet un- doubtedly the experience of the latter necessity is far more universal than the experience on which the former is founded. As Mr. Mill observes, we have a sort of experience which seems to show that two straight lines might enclose a space,—namely, the sight of the parallel rails of a railway converging by the laws of perspective in both directions, and though this ex- perience is falsified by further investigation, it is far more than we have in the case of vision. Yet it was conceivable even before the supposed facts of clairvoyance were published, that sight might be possible without eyes, say even with the back of the head, and though the idea was laughed at as requiring a great amount of evidence, no one supposed it impossible, or refused to hear the facts on which such an assertion was based, as they undoubtedly would have done an assertion that two straight lines might enclose a space. Or take a still more universal association if there be one more universal, the associa- tion of mind with body. Mr. Mill will not deny that this is a more constant and direct datum of experience than any which leads us to infer the boundlessness of space. Every moment of our lives and every human experience teach it ; but not only is it not an indissoluble association, but the mass of believers in the immortality of the soul believe in the separability of the soul and body, without any experience or even power of imagination to show them how such a belief is possible. We take it that nothing is more certain than that the doctrine of uniform association will not produce in any case that universality and certainty of belief which Mr. Mill admits to belong to geometrical and arithmetical science.
We must reserve a discussion of Mr. Mill's teaching on free- will for one more article.
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