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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 know,"
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 the
" 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 logician
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 their
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 which 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