Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/462

SCOTTISH METAPHYSICS RECONSTRUCTED. 449 having no relation (save perhaps one of opposition) to the Scottish. Treated as an independent philosophical treatise, its main feature is the attempt to attain by intuition to the knowledge of certain universals, some of which at least have been vainly sought for on the basis of discursive reason. These universals are Space, Time, Force, Intelligence, Goodness, Causation and, over all of these, Existence. Higher than all, in the opinion of the author, stands the personal God ; but His existence and attributes are, if not wholly dependent on revelation, at least known by intuition only to a select few the majority of mankind having been with- out this intuitive knowledge since the fall of Adam. It would have been better if the author had omitted this last portion of his theory and confined himself to what could or could not be established on philosophical grounds ; though, if the narrative of Adam can be relied on as an expression of literal truth, it would seem that the eating of the forbidden fruit had enlarged rather than contracted the sphere of human cognition. The author draws a wider distinction between the various human faculties (if "faculties" is the proper expression in his system) than had been done by the Scottish School, and attributes to each faculty the perception or intuition of its appropriate universal. Thus Space falls under the faculty of Cognition, Time under that of Emotion, and Force under that of Conation. But then he con- tends for a kind of twofold Mind or Soul (I really do not know what expression to use, for the author would confine most of the ordinary terms to one branch of it), the second of which intuites a second triad in Intelligence, Goodness and Causation, while above both triads stands Existence as already indicated. There is even a third branch of the Soul which, though killed at the Fall, is capable of being recalled to life, and this part (so far as I understand the author) intuites the Deity in the form, I presume, of a third Triad. All these objects of intuition are Universals, and all are hyperphysical or supersensuous. We may have a sensuous perception of the modes of some of them (and he contends, in opposition to the majority of philosophers since Hume, that we have a sensuous perception of the modes of force), but not of the Universals themselves. The latter are not perceived, but intuited ; but their universal and neces- sary laws are not to be found in the mind, but in the intuited Universals themselves. Necessity and Universality are thus objective, not subjective, but the objects in which they reside are not sensible but supersensible. Besides the objective physical sphere there is an objective hyperphysical sphere, with which the mind, or soul, or spirit, or self, or Ego (or whatever the author desires to call it, for he seems to draw distinctions between these terms which I do not comprehend) is in direct contact. Why our perceptions or intuitions of the one sphere should give rise to universal and necessary laws, while our perceptions or 29