HAMILTON 417 advanced so far as to Lave planned and partly carried out the arrangement of the work; but it did not go farther, anc still remains in MS. In 1852-53 appeared the first anc second editions of his Discussions in Philosophy, Literature, and Education, a reprint, with large additions, of his contri butions to the Edinburgh Review. Soon after, his genera health began to fail. Still, however, aided now as ever by his courageous and devoted wife (he had married in 1829) he persevered in literary labour ; and during 1854-55 he brought out nine volumes of a new edition ot Stewart s works. The only remaining volume was to have contained a memoir of Mr Stewart from his pen ; but this he did not live to write. He taught his class for the last time in the winter of 1855-56. Shortly after the close of the session he was taken ill, and. on the 6th May 1856 died at his house in Edinburgh. Sir W. H imilton s philosophy is presented in writings either more or less fragmentary in form and occasional in purpose, or else, in whole or in part, prepared for publication by others, not by himself. Henc^, not only do some points receive what seems almost a super fluity of attention, while others of equal importance are treated with barely enough of detail, but there is no complete statement of the latest results of his thinking in their mutual relation?. It may be that this imperfection of the outward form has tended to obscure the real harmony of his system, and in part led to its being pronounced as it has too_ often been an assemblage of contradictory doctrines. How far this is from being the case, and how closely the various parts are connected, becomes apparent when it is seen how they are all developed from the central conception of consciousness. In the following sketch that conception will be used as a point from which briefly to view the system as a whole, and to trace the bearin^ on on? another of its leading doctrines. Consciousness is regarded by Hamilton under three chief aspects : -(1) as it is in itself ; (2) as realized under actual conditions; (3) as a source of truth. 1. Consciousness in itself is to Hamilton but another name for immediate or intuitive knowledge. For such knowledge is a relation between a subject (knowing) and an object (known), which, as it is viewed from the sido of the one or the other term, is properly called consciousness or knowledge : there are two aspects, but the thing itself is 0:10. Immediate knowledge or consciousness involves th3 existence of both subject and object, it is the affirmation by the subject implicitly of its own existence, explicitly of that of the object. In this relation as realized in the primary judgment, that which knows is conceive! as the ego or self, that which is known, either as a mole of the ego or self, or as a mode of the non-eo-o or not-self. Thus we have, in the terms of the relation, a division of csistenx into the noumenon self and the contrasted phenomena of minil and of matter ; while the relation itself yields a division of kiioivkdja into philosophy, corresponding to its subjective, and science, corresponding to its objective, phase, the latter being further subdivided hit j tin sciences of mental and those of material phenomena. 1 2. Hamilton adopted the division of mental phenomena (not as states but as elements) into the three groups or classes of cognition, fesling, and condition. Cognitions he classified according to the dif ferent relations between subject and object, calling these relations, as subjective, powers or faculties, as objective, forms or stages, of knowlo Ig3. Under these, cognition is either immediate or mediate, i.e., either consciousness itself or the datum of consciousness. The first of the faculties, therefore, is of immediate knowledge, the acquisitive or presentative power, which yields perception (external an I internal). Tho second is of that form of mediate knowledge which is representative of an individual object. Here Hamilton dis tinguished three moments or phases, which he termed the retentive, ths reproductive, and tho representative powers, distinguished them perhap-, too widely, but at the same time indicated their esssntial unity. The third is of that form of mediate knowledge m which a number of objects receive a factitious unity from beino- longht under a common relation. This he named the elaborative discursive faculty. Here, where he had to deal with conscious- in the torni of experience, realized under actual conditions and omprehentling every variety of mental life, Hamilton showed, in e nrst place how the mutual action and reaction of the several elements produces the complexity which the phenomena present. nmiscence, imagination, and judgment are all, as acts of which we are conscious and which imply a prior immediate knowledge, contamad in self-perception. But, on the other hand, our know ledge or perception even of self could not be what it is, did pro- ,* 878> 929 2 Lectures, i. 18J-189, ii. 1-17. cesses of reminiscence, imagination, and judgment not enter into its composition. Consciousness includes all the particular forms of knowledge ; yet its development into a whole is the effect of the agencies which make up its content. 3 In the next place, he showed the laws of mental action in the conditions under which conscious ness is exercised. From the variety and the limitation of con sciousness, under the relation of time, arises the successive vari ation of its units, in other words, the train of thought. By the limitation of consciousness is meant the limited number of objects to which it can at one time be directed, but this issues in a farther limitation, consisting in the disproportion between consciousness and the whole sum of mental modifications. Sir W. Hamilton held that consciousness is the mental modes or "movements, rising above a certain degree of intensity," and that "the movements beyond the conscious range are still properties and effective properties of the mental ego." This doctrine he used to explain not only the phenomena of ordinarily latent knowledge and of forgetfulness but also those of the abnormal recovery of apparently lost knowledge and of the formation of habits and dexterities. 4 The units (or rather groups of units) of the train partly former thoughts again present, partly thoughts for the first time present to the mind follow one another according to what Hamilton called the law of integration, i.e., "only as they stand together as relative parts of the same common whole." Of this supreme law subor dinate phases determine more special consecutions of thought. The reappearance of former thoughts (reminiscence voluntary or in voluntary) is governed by the laws of (1) redintegration and (2) repetition. "Thoughts tend to suggest one another which are co- identical (1) in time or (2) in mode." New wholes of thought are framed by successive analyses and syntheses. Under the law of integration these analyses are effected by means of attention and abstraction, i.e., by consciousness being continuously and repeatedly concentrated on certain parts or aspects of objects and withdrawn from others. The syntheses of thought are infinitely diverse in character, yet possess in common an invariable form. This process of forming new wholes, by discrimination and comparison, out of the materials supplied by perception and recollection, is the one kind of mental activity recognized by Hamilton in the various pro ducts of thought, from the simplest to the most complex. In other words, he regards judgment as the fundamental act of mind, the proposition, or expressed judgment, as its primary product, 5 3. Hamilton s theory of consciousness in its third aspect, i.e., as a source of principles, is embodied in his doctrines of the conditioned and of common sense. The former is so called because it professes to be a demonstration that "the conditionally limited (what we may briefly call the conditioned) is the only possible object of know ledge and of positive thought." The name of the latter was adopted by Hamilton, not as in itself a good one, but as sanctioned by the usage of philosophers in general and of Scottish philosophers in particular. The doctrine itself is that the primary data of con sciousness are, as such, i.e., as facts, and solely on the authority of consciousness, to be accepted as true. The two doctrines are com plements of each other, as severally explications of the principle of the relativity of human knowledge, which, common to both, is manifested in the one through that which we cannot know, in the other through the inexplicable character of our fundamental cognitions. The primary data of consciousness Hamilton held to Le of two orders, otherwise diverse, but in this the same, that they are known merely as facts. These are (1) truths of percep tionthe conviction of the reality as modes of self of our own thoughts and feelings, and the allied conviction that in sense-perception we come into contact with a reality external to the mind ; and (2) truths of reason the fundamental laws of logic, the necessary forms of thought or relations of existence (i.e., quality, and quantity in its threefold aspect as time, space, degree), the causal judgment, the principle of substance and phenomenon, &c. 6 Now here it was Hamilton s peculiar contribution to philosophy that he placed.the data of perception along with the data of thought, and affirmed that both classes alike are inexplicable, yet as facts clear ; that both rest on the same authority ; and that, if the one be accepted as true, so also should be the other. He was a realist, because he held realism to be the dictate of consciousness. Evi dently here the ground of the view is of even more importance than
- he view itself, and so to Hamilton the question of realism versus
idealism was momentous chiefly from its connexion with that of the authority of consciousness. He was fully aware that, since he claimed so high an authority for the primary data of consciousness, it wasjnecessaryto supply the means of deciding whether any given cognition is or is not entitled to be placed among such ; and to this md he laid down certain criteria of alleged primary facts of con sciousness. These criteria are (1) simplicity, (2) universality and subjective) necessity, (3) comparative evidence and certainty, (4) 3 Reid s ITorfo, 932; Letts., i. 205, ii. 523.
- Reid s Works, 910, 932, 938; Ltctx.. i. 338-371. ii. 209-218.
s Reid s Worts, 911-913; Letts., i. 225-263, ii. 227-295 iii. 117-140 75 6 Reid s Works, pp. xviii., 743. XI.
53
