Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/100

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theory of perception, and demanded the homage of the speculative world to the other judgments of the violated principle, which he had noted and treasured up in the course of an experimental investigation of his own mind.

But the powerful tendency of the habit of self-observation to lose the way that conducts out of self-consciousness, has, notwithstanding Reid’s protest, retained its sway, and led its victims through paths of illusive idealism more retired and seductive than any of those against which he had warned them. The hypothesis of images numerically distinct from the percipient mind, which constitute the entire material world of Berkeley, has indeed been almost banished from philosophical literature by Reid, but only to leave all the room for a more refined hypothesis of representation, which is still very generally received by Continental and British metaphysicians. The exposition and criticism of this subtle species of the doctrine of representative knowledge is one of the principal novelties of the philosophical works of Sir William Hamilton, and his disquisition deserves study, were it only as the most elaborate specimen of purely speculative ingenuity that modern British philosophy has yet produced. We can afford only a few sentences to this subject, and must refer the reader to these Dissertations.

A quality or phenomenon of mind, e.g., a sensation, judgment, or desire, is evidently an object of knowledge to the mind itself not less than a quality or phenomenon of matter is. On the doctrine of the representationalist philosophers to whom we have referred, the observing