and ignorance,” and as “an authoritative imposture.”[1] Later ethical empiricism is more refined. J. S. Mill recognizes an ultimate difference in quality between higher and lower pleasures. A. Bain finds that benevolence is one given element in man's original constitution. H. Sidgwick holds that intuition must justify the claims of the general happiness upon the individual, though everything subsequent is hedonistic calculus. Herbert Spencer tinds that the modern individual has intuitions of duty which represent the inherited experience of what has been good for the race in the past. Sir Leslie Stephen finds that moral laws are the conditions needful for the good of the social organism, and are imposed as such by society upon its individual members., The problem has altered its form. What the modern empiricist needs is a rational bond uniting the individual with the community or with the aggregate of individuals-a rational principle distinguishing high pleasures from low, sanctioning benevolence, and giving authority to moral generalizations drawn from conditions that are past and done with. The non-empirical moralist will not of course admit that duty to the community or to mankind is a final definition of the ethical ideal. He will accept it as a stage, of no small importance, in progressive definition; but he will seek to go further.
We have already remarked that the difficulties of empiricism constitute the strength of intuitionalism. A critic of intuitionalism might add that they are its whole strength; intuitionalism is sound upon the intellectual and moral interests of humanity, but it does little to justify them. It reasserts them, with resolute loyalty; but if philosophy ought to vindicate, to explain, perhaps incidentally to modify, even, it may be, to purify our primary beliefs, intuitionalism is hardly a philosophy at all. For good or for evil, so far as there is an accepted line of theistic doctrine, that doctrine is intuitionalist. Other schools of philosophy pay flying visits to theism; intuitionalism is at home there. Its leading argument is the cosmological, concluding to “ God as cause” (Martineau). When David Hume (Dialogues concerning Natural Religion) protests that the universe is a “ singular effect ” and that we have no right to affirm a cause for it, unless we have experience of the origin of many universes, and can generalize the conclusion, They all have causes-he may be unassailable upon empiricist grounds. But intuitionalism claims to allege a higher certainty; everything (or every change) must have a cause—this is not merely actual fact but necessary truth. The universe exists—or, as otherwise stated, the universe is “contingent”—therefore, even without detailed knowledge of different universes, we can affirm that it must be caused, and in its “Great First Cause” we recognize God.[2] It is generally stated that this argument was for the first time definitely formulated in Aristotle's philosophy. Of course the cosmological argument is rarely or never left to stand quite alone. The design argument is available for the slightly bolder philosophy of intuitionalism as well as for empiricist theism. But there is yet another argument which is even more important. Moral elements must enter into theism at some point: and, as against empiricism, intuitionalism is morally strong. Hence it naturally has a moral argument in reserve. Moral law implies a law-giver; “ we are conscious of moral dependence ” (Robert Flint). Still the main weight of intuitionalist theism rests upon the conception of God as First Cause.
As a philosophy, intuitionalism leaves the mind in all the embarrassment of an indefinite number of separate starting points. Every percept is such a starting-point; it is an immediate certainty, remaining with us unmodified as the basis of reliable inference. Every First Principle of the mind is a starting-point too. Reid-certainly a very unsystematic thinker-furnishes long and random lists of “first principles”; a later writer, J. M‘Cosh, in his Intuitions of the Mind, attempts a more systematic study. (For ethics we may also compare Miss F. P. Cobbe. Contemporary with Reid and even more popular in treatment was James Beattie; Dugald Stewart with trivial modifications followed Reid; but in Sir W. Hamilton and H. L. Mansel there were sweeping changes in the direction of agnosticism-changes due partly or primarily to the influence of Kant.) Memory is included among First Principles. Testimony is also a First Principle (this is aimed against Hume's Essay on M iracles). Inevitably the question forces itself upon the mind, is not some fuller synthesis possible? All these isolated starting-points of thought are said to be, one by one, necessary. Is there no higher or broader necessity? Can we not attain to some farther-reaching philosophy?
If we answer “Yes” to that question, we pass on from intuitionalism to idealism-an idealism not on the lines of Berkeley (matter does not exist) but of Plato (things obey an ascertainable rational necessity). This third possibility in philosophy does not enter at all into Lecky's grouping referred to above; in fact, it is very generally strange to older British thinking,[3] which, if it conceives any tertium quid besides empiricism and intuitionalism, is apt to think of scepticism. The fixed given points of intuitionalism furnish Hamilton with one of his arguments in his unexpected development towards a sceptical or “faith philosophy.” You cannot prove any first principle. You accept it by “ faith." So-for this among other reasons -we infer that knowledge has narrow limits, beyond which doubt, or faith, presently begins. But is it really a matter of faith that two and two make four? Do we “ believe where we cannot prove ” that the whole is greater than its part? A less sophisticated intuitionalism would rejoin with great force, “ These are matters of sight; it could not be otherwise, and you see that it could not!" Hamilton's line of thought may, however, impress on us the conviction that it is extremely natural for philosophy to pass beyond the limitations of a purely intuitionalist programme. It does so notably in Kant. He is a most difficult writer; different readers understand him differently; and he uses in the earlier parts his Critique of Pure Reason much of the language of intuitionalism. But nothing is more certain than that his thought is a strong solvent of the intuitionalist way of thinking; and he has had an immense influence in many directions. We may state his chief results in our own words. First he breaks up the percept. It is no ultimate given point of departure; it is due to the reaction of thought upon sensation. Sense alone will never create orderly experience, as empiricism supposed; but a group of sensations reacted on by thought does so; it becomes, it is, a percept. Secondly: the “ forms ” of time and space, not referable to any sensation, and presupposed in every experience, come from the mind (“Transcendental Aesthetic”). Thirdly: we cannot explain how these three elements—sensation; time and space; thought work together. True, Kant refers often to the ideal of a “perceptive” or “intuitive understanding,” whose thought would produce the whole of knowledge out of its native contents. But our understanding, he is convinced, is of a different and inferior type. Incomprehensibly, we are dependent upon sensation; and incomprehensibly, we place our sensations in time and space. Fourthly: if we try to think of objects not built up out of sensations and not in time and space, we are
- ↑ Deontology, p. 42. F. H. Bradley (Ethical Studies, p. 2) quotes an even plainer attack on the conceptions as well as the terminology of ethics in a Westminster Review article (Oct. 1873, p. 311) which describes" responsibility” or (sic) “moral desert in the vulgar sense as “ horrid figments of the imagination.”
- ↑ “Any attempt to treat “cause” asdpointrng to a truth here, but inadequately, would lead us beyon intuitionalism into some phase of idealism. To revise one's first principles is to be an intuitionalist no longer.
- ↑ Austin’s Jurisprudence explicitly assumes that the dilemma of “intuitive” and “utilitarian” is exhaustive. Hence F. H. Bradley's characteristic protest (Ethical Studies, pp. 82, 83): “If we wished to cross an unknown bog, and two men came to us of whom the one said ‘Some one must know the way over this bog, for there must be a way, and you see there is no one here beside us two, and therefore one of us two must be able to guide you. And the other man does not know the way, as you can soon see: therefore I must’—should we answer, ‘Lead on, I follow’?”
