The Press. — London, England, 1855-02-17 00:00:00

166 substituted in its stead. The questions dis cussed in a treatise on three such alarming subjects as " Epistemology," Agnoiology, and " Ontology," are not likely to be very gene rally interesting; nevertheless, for the sake of the select few among our readers who may be desirous of learning something of the latest English work on philosophy of any importance, we will enter, at the risk, we fear, of tiring everybody else, into a short critique of the first part of the " Institutes," confining our selves, for brevity's sake, to those parts of the work in which Mr. Ferrier appears to us to have fallen short of his original promise of creating a " perfectly reasoned " system of philosophy ; to enumerate his excellencies would extend our notice to an unreasonable length. In section 28 of the introductory chapter, if we correctly understand him, Mr. Ferrier attempts to abolish the famous distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments originated by Kant, and to reduce the criterion of necessary truth to the law of identity—viz., the law that " a thing is what it is.' His assertion that "if the opposites of given " truths be at variance with the law which " declares that Ais A,' then the truths are " necessary ; if they do not involve it, they are " contingent," may certainly be taken as an ex• planation of the sense in which he intends to employ the words " necessary " and "con tingent ; " but if these names be used in their commonly-received significations, we have only to take either of the geometrical axioms which stand at the beginning of the First Book of the Elements of Euclid (which are generally accepted by all who admit the exist ence of necessary truths at all as examples of such truths) to show the existence of proposi tions to which we imagine Mr. Ferrier himself wouli not refuse the attribute of necessity, and of which the opposites involve something more than the contradiction of the law of identity. For example, a straight line being defined to be " a line which lies evenly between its extreme points," or a line which possesses some simple distinctive property of straight lines except that of being such that two can intersect in only one point, it is allowed on all hands that it is a necessary truth (in the common meaning of " necessary "), of which " the opposite is not only false but inconceiv " able, that "two straight lines cannot inter " sect in more than one point ;" and though an opposite of this truth—viz., the falsehood that " two straight lines intersect in more than one " point"—is seen to be false and unimaginable, it is not because it merely contradicts the law of identity " A is A," for on substituting in it the definition of a straight line, the falsehood in question does not assume the form " A is not A " ; but because, on examination of our geometrical intuitions, we see, as a fact, that the two attributes of " straightness " and " capability of intersecting in more than one " point " do not and cannot coexist in the same pair of lines. Without doubt, if the law of identity were denied, we could not make any assertion whatever; and this would seem suffi cient to give us a suspicion that the distinction between " necessary " and "contingent" truths involves something besides the law itself. In fact, the proposition " A is A " is assumed in all truths whatever, as Mr. De Morgan has shown in his " Formal Logic." It appears to us that if Mr. Ferrier's system were (as it professes to be) a chain of necessary truths deduced by rigorous demonstration from one proposition (itself a necessary truth in his peculiar sense of the word) we should be justified in regarding it as a series of merely verbal transformations of a pure identity; and the notion that any im portant new truth can be arrived at by such a process, the mere substitution of one set of words for another set in a succession of transformations of any length whatever, seems to us, as it has seemed to many great thinkers, to involve an insuperable absurdity. But, whatever may be our opinions upon the question of the ground of necessary truth, it is quite clear, on a perusal of Mr. Ferrier's trea tise, that the system is not founded solely upon the proposition which stands at the head of his list. In two or three of the later proposi THE PRESS. as essential to the validity of the conclusions as Prop. 1., and the denial of which would in volve the fall of some of the more important results of the argument. For example, in Prop. XVI., "on the substantial in cognition," the proposition, " No knowledge could take place " if, in order to know a thing, we always re " quired to know something else," is employed, and there are other instances of this insinuation of new truths in the course ofthe first part. It is true these implicit axioms are generally suffi ciently obvious, but it seems somewhat incon sistentin a thinker who considers it worth his while to spend a page and a half in the enuncia tion and discussion of so obvious and general an axiom as the law of identity, to employ other axioms of less general application without ex plicit statement. Certainly, to have rendered all parts of the work in perfect keeping with section 28, Mr Ferrier ought to have warned his reader not to peruse his treatise upside down, or to have informed him at starting that the language he proposed to employ was English, and that commas and full stops re tained their common signification. Again, we meet with occasional apparent contradiction between the enunciations of two different pro • positions which a little more care in their verbal statement would have remedied : for example, Prop. I. asserts that, " along with " whatever any intelligence knows, it must . . . " have some cognisance of itself." But on turning to Prop. XVI. we find in the demon stration that " something must be known which "can be known without anything else being " known along with it," from which it seems to follow that "an intelligence must know " something without knowing itself along with " it," whatever that something may be. But the " worst remains behind." It is clear from the enunciation, and from the explanations appended to it, that in Prop. I. Mr. Ferrier intends to lay down as the fundamental law of all knowledge the axiom that " an intelligence " cannot know anything without at the same time knowing itself." In the demonstration of Prop. XIII. (" The only independent universe " which any mind or ego can think of is the " universe in synthesis with some other mind " or ego") it is quietly assumed that the truth established in Prop. I. is this : " Objects plus a " subject or self is the only universe which can " be known," instead of this : " Objects plus " the subject knowing or myself." Mr. Ferrier evidently feels that this thirteenth proposition is the weakest part of his system, and in the explanations appended to it anxiously at tempts to make Prop. I. do a heavier amount of logical work than its strength will permit, and relapses amusingly enough into the old habit of philosophers, giving, which is not his usual practice we are bound to say, a much larger amount of must than why. The old familiar phrases, " You cannot," (when you know you can) ; " It is matter, not of choice, " but of necessity," (when you are conscious of no necessity whatever), &c., &c., recur again and again. Surely, if it be competent to any intelligence, as Mr. Ferrier is constrained to admit :for once in agreement with " ordinary thinking," perhaps by a slight " inadvertency " of his own) to represent to itself in thought the material universe as existing after its own removal from this " sublunary scene," the said universe suffering no relapse into the " amor• phous and nonsensical" state with which "a " world minus myself" is threatened in these " Institutes," it would appear that the cogi tation (if not the knowledge) of the same uni verse as existing independently of all subjects were not so impossible an operation after all, or that something more than Prop. I. were required to establish Mr. Ferrier's conclusions. " I cannot know an object minus myself," says Prop I. ; " I cannot think what I cannot k n o w, " says Prop. XI. ; therefore, says Prop. XII 1., " I " cannot think an object minus some self," though, say the explanations, " I can certainly "think an object, to wit the material universe, " minus myself." Surely this is not a specimen of " perfect reasoning." To us it appears that the real foundation of Mr. Ferrier's system is the proposition, " That it is impossible to know an object without knowing some self," which is absurd; or that, in the demonstration of Prop. XIII., it must be assumed that, " It is impos exist' hider SATURDAY, tion of Berkeley's idealism. In Mr. Ferrier's view, subject and object are connected in knowledge in such a manner that they are " distinguishable but not separable," as th e " two ends of a stick," or the " centre and cir cumference of a circle," are connected. May it not be possible that the connection re sembles more nearly the juxtaposition of the two legs of an angle : separate them, and the angle vanishes ; yet, in thought, the separation is possible. Mr. Ferrier has a feud with the psycholo gists, in which we so cordially join that the mere fact of any one of his propositions con tradicting some methodical absurdity of these practitioners of the " art de s'egarer avec " inothode " would be, to us, strong a priori evidence of its truth. We much fear that psychological research, as Comte has said, is little more than a delusion and a snare. Their method of " inward observation " has been compared by some of the logical writers of the day to the operation of looking down one's own throat with a candle in one's hand. It is a more hopeless operation still : it is looking into the back of one's own eye without a mirror, investigating one's auditory nerve by means of one's ear ; it is the fruitless attempt of a maniac to lift himself up in his own arms. But have metaphysicians, the investigators of the science of existence, met with more brilliant success in their researches than their peculiar aversion, the " empirical psycholo gists," and the " mere logicians"? We think not. To us the problems of metaphysics appear more thoroughly incapable of solution than the commoner questions of mental facul ties and principles of evidence ; and it seems to us that all the evidence afforded by history tends to confirm the common conviction of plain men that metaphysics are an impossible science. Metaphysicians are impervious to such proof as this : tell them that while the simple geometry of the Greeks and the rude physical experiments of the Florentines have been expanding into the great theory of uni versal gravitation, and the beautiful hypo thesis of luminous undulations—while the inmost mechanical constitution of bodies has been slowly revealing itself to the searching light of the higher analysis—while their very essence and composition has been yielding to the torturing queries of the chemist—while the properties of pure space have been un folded and registered in the marvellous uni versal language of modern algebra—when even chance itself is made matter of computation — while all these sciences, astronomy, mechanics, chemistry, analysis, are ministering in a thou sand ways to the welfare of mankind, the great " vexatie questiones " of philosophy as stubbornly defy all attempts at a solution in which all philosophers agree as they did two thousand years ago ; they will reply, with a lofty contempt of the intelligible and the useful, " Science has been triumphant over " the husk ; philosophy is still militant for the " kernel." Not so; but rather, " Science has " been winning victories on terra firma, while " philosophy has dreamed of conquests in the " clouds." Perhaps it will be said, as it has been said before now, that science herself de pends for her acceptance on the overt or secret operation of principles which " borrow " their authority from philosophy." Un doubtedly, science rests in all minds on cer tain principles of evidence, which, while they themselves are uncontested, receive in some minds one explanation, in some another ; while in some (and those sometimes the highest) they are received without any ex planation at all. The simplest physical expe riment assumes certain general principles of evidence ; the metaphysician or logi cian attempts their explanation. While Mr. Mill and Dr. Whewell are battling about the " ground of induction," Dr. Faraday employs the inductive process to demolish table-turn ing, and day by day carries on a series of brilliant experimental researches with a some what greater prospect of success than either of the eminent logicians possesses iu his own investigations. The principles of evidence are like the facts of gravitation--every man believes them and employs them ; the meta physical hypotheses which account for t heir and mark out the limits of their quite clear, on a peruhal of Mr. Ferrier 's trea- tne proposition, I.lliti. at, so a aaa a tise, that the system is not founded solely upon an object without knowing some self," which is are like the facts of gravitation—every man the proposition whic h stands at the head of absurd; or that, in the demonstration of Prop. believes them and employs them ; the meta his list. In two or three of the later proposi XIII., it must be assumed that, "It is impos- physical hypotheses which account for their tions of the First Section new axioms are em- " sible to think an object as existing indepen• cogency and mark out the limits of their ployed in the demonstrations which are quite " dently of some mind," which is the founds. application arelike the theories of the physical