which is an inseparable concomitant of all the present operations of the mind, to be a separate attribute; and in this he seems to be right, inasmuch as it looks at a special object, namely, self in the existing state, and gives us a distinct class of ideas, namely, the qualities of self, such as thinking and feeling.Yet it is curious that, while he gives it half a page in his " Outlines," it has no separate place in the "Elements." It is also a singular circumstance that Reid dismisses it in the same summary way.An inductive observation, with an analysis of the precise knowledge given us by self-consciousness, would give a solid foundation for the doctrine of human personality, and clear away the greater part of the confusion and error lingering in the metaphysics of our day.Nor is there any proper account given in the " Elements " of that important group of faculties which discover relations among the objects known by sense-perception and consciousness.The omission of this class of attributes has led him into a meagre nominalism, very unlike the general spirit 'of his philosophy.He restricts the word conception to the mere imaging power of the mind, and even to the picturing of bodily objects, as if we could not represent mental objects as well, as, for example, ourselves or others in joy or sorrow.In a later age, Hamilton has confined the term in an opposite direction to the logical or general notion.Stewart's classification is also redundant.Attention is not a separate faculty, but is an exercise of will, roused, it may be, by feeling, and fixing the mind on a present object.He does not seem to know what to make of reason as a distinct faculty; and, as defined by him, it ought to include abstraction, which is certainly a rational exercise.But, if the work is defective in logical grasp, it excels in its descriptions of concrete operations, and in its explanations and elucidations of phenomena presenting themselves in real life.All his works are replete with those "intermediate axioms " which Bacon commends as most useful of all, as being removed equally from the lowest axioms, which differ but little from particulars, and from the highest and most general, which are notional, abstract, and of no weight; whereas the "intermediate are true, solid, full of life, and upon them depend the business and fortune of mankind." The fine reflection and lofty eloquence of Stewart come out most pleasingly and instructively {289} in all those passages in which he treats of association and imagination.
On one important point, discussed frequently in the "Elements," the school of Reid and Stewart was led into error by their excessive caution, and by being awed so much by the authority of Locke.Reid maintained in a loose way, that we do not know substance, but qualities; and Stewart wrought this view into a system.We are not, he says, properly speaking, conscious of self or the existence of self: we are conscious merely of a sensation or some other quality, which, by a <subsequent suggestion of the understanding>, leads to a belief in that which exercises the quality.-- ("Phil.Essays," P.58, etc.) This I must regard as a radically defective doctrine.We do not know intuitively a quality of self apart from self; we know both in one primitive, concrete act, and it is only by a subsequent operation that we separate in thought the quality which may change in its action from the self or substance which abideth.Descartes erred I think, when he represented the mental process as being "<cogito, ergo sum>:" the primitive cognition is of the ego cogitans.But I look on Stewart as equally erring when he says, that there is first a sensation and then a belief in self.In a later age, Sir William Hamilton connected the <qualitative> theory of Stewart with the <phenomenal> theory of Kant.In doing so he was guilty, I must take the liberty of saying of a great and inexcusable blunder.Stewart would have repudiated the phenomenal theory of Kant as at all identical with his own.Stewart, no doubt, speaks of the phenomena of the mind; but he means by phenomena not, as Kant did, <appearances>, but individual <facts> to be referred to a law; and qualities with him were realities.But, legitimately or illegitimately, Hamilton identifying the qualitative theory with the phenomenal, deduces from them a system of relativity, which ended in nihilism, or at least in nescience.I am glad to notice that Mr.Mansel, notwithstanding his great and just admiration of Hamilton, has emancipated himself from this fundamental error.He proclaims, " I am immediately conscious of myself, seeing and hearing, willing and thinking." -- (" Proleg.
Logica," P.129; also Art.<Metaph.> in " Encyc.Brit."'.Ihave sometimes thought that, if Stewart had foreseen ail the logical consequences to be deduced from his views, he would have fallen {290} back on the same common-sense doctrine.Iregret that Mr.Mansel has not gone a step farther, and placed our cognition of matter on the same footing in this respect as our knowledge of mind.I am sure, at least, that this would be altogether in the spirit of Reid and Stewart.
I maintain that, just as by self-consciousness we know self as exercising such and such a quality, say thinking or feeling, so, by sense-perception, we know a body as extended and exercising power or energy.This is the simplest doctrine: it seems to be the only one consistent with consciousness, and is the proper doctrine of natural realism as distinguished from an artificial system of relativity.
