APPENDIX.
(From “An
Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy.”)
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF THE BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL
WORLD.
WE have seen Sir. W. Hamilton at work on the question
of the reality of Matter, by the introspective method, and, as it seems, with
little result. Let us now approach the same subject by the psychological. I
proceed, therefore, to state the case of those who hold that the belief in an
external world is not intuitive, but an acquired product.
This theory postulates the following psychological
truths, all of which are proved by experience, and are not contested, though
their force is seldom adequately felt, by Sir W. Hamilton and the other
thinkers of the introspective school.
It postulates, first, that the human mind is capable
of Expectation. In other words, that after having had actual sensations, we are
capable of forming the conception of Possible sensations; sensations which we
are not feeling at the present moment, but which we might feel, and should feel
if certain conditions were present, the nature of which conditions we have, in
many cases, learnt by experience.
It postulates, secondly, the laws of the Association
of Ideas. So far as we are here concerned, these laws are the following: 1st.
Similar phenomena tend to be thought of together. 2nd. Phenomena which have
either been experienced or conceived in close contiguity to one another, tend
to be thought of together. The contiguity is of two kinds; simultaneity, and
immediate succession. Facts which have been experienced or thought of
simultaneously, recall the thought of one another. Of facts which have been experienced
or thought of in immediate succession, the antecedent, or the thought of it,
recalls the thought of the consequent, but not conversely. 3rd. Associations
produced by contiguity become more certain and rapid by repetition. When two
phaenomena have been very often experienced in conjunction, and have not, in
any single instance, occurred separately either in experience or in thought,
there is produced between them what has been called Inseparable, or less
correctly, Indissoluble Association: by which is not meant that the association
must inevitably last to the end of life that no subsequent experience or
process of thought can possibly avail to dissolve it; but only that as long as
no such experience or process of thought has taken place, the association is
irresistible; it is impossible for us to think the one thing disjoined from the
other. 4th. When an association has acquired this character of inseparability
when the bond between the two ideas has been thus firmly riveted, not only does
the idea called up by association become, in our consciousness, inseparable
from the idea which suggested it, but the facts or phaenomena answering to
those ideas come at last to seem inseparable in existence: things which we are
unable to conceive apart, appear incapable of existing apart; and the belief we
have in their coexistence, though really a product of experience, seems
intuitive. Innumerable examples might be given of this law. One of the most
familiar, as well as the most striking, is that of our acquired perceptions of
sight. Even those who, with Mr. Bailey, consider the perception of distance by
the eye as not acquired, but intuitive, admit that there are many perceptions
of sight which, though instantaneous and unhesitating, are not intuitive. What
we see is a very minute fragment of what we think we see. We see artificially
that one thing is hard, another soft. We see artificially that one thing is
hot, another cold. We see artificially that what we see is a book, or a stone,
each of these being not merely an inference, but a heap of inferences, from the
signs which we see, to things not visible. We see, and cannot help seeing, what
we have learnt to infer, even when we know that the inference is erroneous, and
that the apparent perception is deceptive. We cannot help seeing the moon
larger when near the horizon, though we know that she is of precisely her usual
size. We cannot help seeing a mountain as nearer to us and of less height, when
we see it through a more than ordinarily transparent atmosphere.
Setting out from these premises, the Psychological
Theory maintains, that there are associations naturally and even necessarily
generated by the order of our sensations and of our reminiscences of sensation,
which, supposing no intuition of an external world to have existed in
consciousness, would inevitably generate the belief, and would cause it to be
regarded as an intuition.
What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to
say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own
thoughts? We mean, that there is concerned in our perceptions something which
exists when we are not thinking of it; which existed before we had ever thought
of it, and would exist if we were annihilated; and further, that there exist
things which we never saw, touched, or otherwise perceived, and things which
never have been perceived by man. This idea of something which is distinguished
from our fleeting impressions by what, in Kantian language, is called
Perdurability; something which is fixed and the same, while our impressions
vary; something which exists whether we are aware of it or not, and which is
always square (or of some other given figure) whether it appears to us square
or round constitutes altogether our idea of external substance. Whoever can
assign an origin to this complex conception, has accounted or what we mean by
the belief in matter. Now all this, according to the Psychological Theory, is but
the form impressed by the known laws of association, upon the conception or
notion, obtained by experience, of Contingent Sensations; by which are meant,
sensations that are not in our present consciousness, and individually never
were in our consciousness at all, but which in virtue of the laws to which we
have learnt by experience that our sensations are subject, we know that we
should have felt under given supposable circumstances, and under these same
circumstances, might still feel.
I see a piece of white paper on a table. I go into
another room. If the phænomenon always followed me, or if, when it did not
follow me, I believed it to disappear è rerum
naturâ, I should not believe it to be an external object. I should consider
it as a phantom a mere affection of my senses: I should not believe that there
had been any Body there. But, though I have ceased to see it, I am persuaded
that the paper is still there. I no longer have the sensations which it gave
me; but I believe that when I again place myself in the circumstances in which
I had those sensations, that is, when I go again into the room, I shall again
have them; and further, that there has been no intervening moment at which this
would not have been the case. Owing to this property of my mind, my conception
of the world at any given instant consists, in only a small proportion, of
present sensations. Of these I may at the time have none at all, and they are
in any case a most insignificant portion of the whole which I apprehend. The
conception I form of the world existing at any moment, comprises, along with
the sensations I am feeling, a countless variety of possibilities of sensation:
namely, the whole of those which past observation tells me that I could, under
any supposable circumstances, experience at this moment, together with an
indefinite and illimitable multitude of others which though I do not know that
I could, yet it is possible that I might, experience in circumstances not known
to me. These various possibilities are the important thing to me in the world.
My present sensations are generally of little importance, and are moreover
fugitive: the possibilities, on the contrary, are permanent, which is the
character that mainly distinguishes our idea of Substance or Matter from our
notion of sensation. These possibilities, which are conditional certainties,
need a special name to distinguish them from mere vague possibilities, which
experience gives no warrant for reckoning upon. Now, as soon as a
distinguishing name is given, though it be only to the same thing regarded in a
different aspect, one of the most familiar experiences of our mental nature
teaches us, that the different name comes to be considered as the name of a
different thing.
There is another important peculiarity of these certified
or guaranteed possibilities of sensation; namely, that they have reference, not
to single sensations, but to sensations joined together in groups. When we
think of anything as a material substance, or body, we either have had, or we
think that on some given supposition we should have, not some one sensation, but a great and even an
indefinite number and variety of sensations, generally belonging to different
senses, but so linked together, that the presence of one announces the possible
presence at the very same instant of any or all of the rest. In our mind,
therefore, not only is this particular Possibility of sensation invested with
the quality of permanence when we are not actually feeling any of the
sensations at all; but when we are feeling some of them, the remaining
sensations of the group are conceived by us in the form of Present
Possibilities, which might be realized at the very moment. And as this happens
in turn to all of them, the group as a whole presents itself to the mind as
permanent, in contrast not solely with the temporariness of my bodily presence,
but also with the temporary character of each of the sensations composing the
group; in other words, as a kind of permanent substratum, under a set of
passing experiences or manifestations: which is another leading character of
our idea of substance or matter, as distinguished from sensation.
Let us now take into consideration another of the
general characters of our experience, namely, that in addition to fixed groups,
we also recognise a fixed Order in our sensations; an Order of succession,
which, when ascertained by observation, gives rise to the ideas of Cause and
Effect, according to what I hold to be the true theory of that relation, and is
on any theory the source of all our knowledge what causes produce what effects.
Now, of what nature is this fixed order among our sensations? It is a constancy
of antecedence and sequence. But the constant antecedence and sequence do not
generally exist between one actual sensation and another. Very few such
sequences are presented to us by experience. In almost all the constant
sequences which occur in Nature, the antecedence and consequence do not obtain
between sensations, but between the groups we have been speaking about, of
which a very small portion is actual sensation, the greater part being
permanent possibilities of sensation, evidenced to us by a small and variable
number of sensations actually present. Hence, our ideas of causation, power,
activity, do not become connected in thought with our sensations as actual at all, save in the few
physiological cases where these figure by themselves as the antecedents in some
uniform sequence. Those ideas become connected, not with sensations, but with
groups of possibilities of sensation. The sensations conceived do not, to our
habitual thoughts, present themselves as sensations actually experienced,
inasmuch as not only any one or any number of them may be supposed absent, but
none of them need be present. We find that the modifications which are taking
place more or less regularly in our possibilities of sensation, are mostly
quite independent of our consciousness, and of our presence or absence. Whether
we are asleep or awake the fire goes out, and puts an end to one particular
possibility of warmth and light. Whether we are present or absent the corn
ripens, and brings a new possibility of food. Hence we speedily learn to think
of Nature as made up solely of these groups of possibilities, and the active
force in Nature as manifested in the modification of some of these by others.
The sensations, though the original foundation of the whole, come to be looked
upon as a sort of accident depending on us, and the possibilities as much more
real than the actual sensations, nay, as the very realities of which these are
only the representations, appearances, or effects. When this state of mind has
been arrived at, then, and from that time forward, we are never conscious of a
present sensation without instantaneously referring it to some one of the
groups of possibilities into which a sensation of that particular description
enters; and if we do not yet know to what group to refer it, we at least feel
an irresistible conviction that it must belong to some group or other; i.e.
that its presence proves the existence, here and now, of a great number and
variety of possibilities of sensation, without which it would not have been.
The whole set of sensations as possible, form a permanent background to any one
or more of them that are, at a given moment, actual; and the possibilities are
conceived as standing to the actual sensations in the relation of a cause to
its effects, or of canvas to the figures painted on it, or of a root to the
trunk, leaves, and flowers, or of a substratum to that which is spread over it,
or, in transcendental language, of Matter to Form.
When this point has been reached, the Permanent
Possibilities in question have assumed such unlikeness of aspect, and such
difference of apparent relation to us, from any sensations, that it would be
contrary to all we know of the constitution of human nature that they should
not be conceived as, and believed to be, at least as different from sensations
as sensations are from one another. Their groundwork in sensation is forgotten,
and they are supposed to be something intrinsically distinct from it. We can
withdraw ourselves from any of our (external) sensations, or we can be
withdrawn from them by some other agency. But though the sensations cease, the
possibilities remain in existence; they are independent of our will, our
presence, and everything which belongs to us. We find, too, that they belong as
much to other human or sentient beings as to ourselves. We find other people
grounding their expectations and conduct upon the same permanent possibilities
on which we ground ours. But we do not find them experiencing the same actual
sensations. Other people do not have our sensations exactly when and as we have
them: but they have our possibilities of sensation; whatever indicates a
present possibility of sensations to ourselves, indicates a pre sent
possibility of similar sensations to them, except so far as their organs of
sensation may vary from the type of ours. This puts the final seal to our
conception of the groups of possibilities as the fundamental reality in Nature.
The permanent possibilities are common to us and to our fellowcreatures; the
actual sensations are not. That which other people become aware of when, and on
the same grounds, as I do, seems more real to me than that which they do not
know of unless I tell them. The world of Possible Sensations succeeding one
another according to laws, is as much in other beings as it is in me; it has
therefore an existence outside me; it is an External World.
If this explanation of the origin and growth of the
idea of Matter, or External Nature, contains nothing at variance with natural
laws, it is at least an admissible supposition, that the element of Non-ego
which Sir W. Hamilton regards as an original datum of consciousness, and which
we certainly do find in our present consciousness, may not be one of its primitive
elements may not have existed at all in its first manifestations. But if this
supposition be admissible, it ought, on Sir W. Hamilton’s principles, to be
received as true. The first of the laws laid down by him for the interpretation
of Consciousness, the law (as he terms it) of Parcimony, forbids to suppose an
original principle of our nature in order to account for phenomena which admit
of possible explanation from known causes. If the supposed ingredient of
consciousness be one which might grow up (though we cannot prove that it did
grow up) through later experience; and if, when it had so grown up, it would,
by known laws of our nature, appear as completely intuitive as our sensations
themselves; we are bound, according to Sir W. Hamilton’s and all sound philosophy,
to assign to it that origin. Where there is a known cause adequate to account
for a phenomenon, there is no justification for ascribing it to an unknown one.
And what evidence does Consciousness furnish of the intuitiveness of an impression,
except instantaneousness, apparent simplicity, and unconciousness on our part
of how the impression came into our minds? These features can only prove the
impression to be intuitive, on the hypothesis that there are no means of
accounting for them otherwise. If they not only might, but naturally would,
exist, even on the supposition that it is not intuitive, we must accept the
conclusion to which we are led by the Psychological Method, and which the
Introspective Method furnishes absolutely nothing to contradict.
Matter, then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility
of Sensation. If I am asked, whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the
questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: and
so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I do not. But I affirm
with confidence, that this conception of Matter includes the whole meaning
attached to it by the common world, apart from philosophical, and sometimes
from theological, theories. The reliance of mankind on the real existence of
visible and tangible objects, means reliance on the reality and permanence of
Possibilities of visual and tactual sensations, when no such sensations are
actually experienced. We are warranted in believing that this is the meaning of
Matter in the minds of many of its most esteemed metaphysical champions, though
they themselves would not admit as much: for example, of Reid, Stewart, and
Brown. For these three philosophers alleged that all man kind, including
Berkeley and Hume, really believed in Matter, inasmuch as unless they did, they
would not have turned aside to save themselves from running against a post. Now
all which this manœuvre really proved is, that they believed in Permanent
Possibilities of Sensation. We have therefore the unintentional sanction of
these three eminent defenders of the existence of matter, for affirming, that
to believe in Permanent Possibilities of Sensation is believing in Matter. It
is hardly necessary, after such authorities, to mention Dr. Johnson, or any one
else who resorts to the argumentum
baculinum of knocking a stick against the ground. Sir W. Hamilton, a far
subtler thinker than any of these, never reasons in this manner. He never
supposes that a disbeliever in what he means by Matter, ought in consistency to
act in any different mode from those who believe in it. He knew that the belief
on which all the practical consequences depend, is the belief in Permanent
Possibilities of Sensation, and that if nobody believed in a material universe
in any other sense, life would go on exactly as it now does. He, however, did
believe in more than this, but, I think, only because it had never occurred to
him that mere Possibilities of Sensation could, to our artificialized
consciousness, present the character of objectivity which, as we have now
shown, they not only can, but unless the known laws of the human mind were suspended,
must necessarily, present.
Perhaps it may be objected, that the very possibility
of framing such a notion of Matter as Sir W. Hamilton’s the capacity in the
human mind of imagining an external world which is anything more than what the
Psychological Theory makes it amounts to a disproof of the theory. If (it may
be said) we had no revelation in consciousness, of a world which is not in some
way or other identified with sensation, we should be unable to have the notion
of such a world. If the only ideas we had of external objects were ideas of our
sensations, supplemented by an acquired notion of permanent possibilities of
sensation, we must (it is thought) be incapable of conceiving, and therefore
still more incapable of fancying that we perceive, things which are not
sensations at all. It being evident how ever that some philosophers believe
this, and it being maintainable that the mass of mankind do so, the existence
of a perdurable basis of sensations, distinct from sensations them selves, is
proved, it might be said, by the possibility of believing it.
Let me first restate what I apprehend the belief to
be. We believe that we perceive a something closely related to all our
sensations, but different from those which we are feeling at any particular
minute; and distinguished from sensations altogether, by being permanent and always
the same, while these are fugitive, variable, and alternately displace one
another. But these attributes of the object of perception are properties
belonging to all the possibilities of sensation which experience guarantees.
The belief in such permanent possibilities seems to me to include all that is
essential or characteristic in the belief in substance. I believe that Calcutta
exists, though I do not perceive it, and that it would still exist if every percipient
inhabitant were suddenly to leave the place, or be struck dead. But when I
analyse the belief, all I find in it is, that were these events to take place,
the Permanent Possibility of Sensation which I call Calcutta would still
remain; that if I were suddenly transported to the banks of the Hoogly, I
should still have the sensations which, if now present, would lead me to affirm
that Calcutta exists here and now. We may infer, therefore, that both
philosophers and the world at large, when they think of matter, conceive it
really as a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. But the majority of
philosophers fancy that it is something more; and the world at large, though
they have really, as I conceive, nothing in their minds but a Permanent
Possibility of Sensation, would, if asked the question, undoubtedly agree with
the philosophers: and though this is sufficiently explained by the tendency of
the human mind to infer difference of things from difference of names, I
acknowledge the obligation of showing how it can be possible to believe in an
existence transcending all possibilities of sensation, unless on the hypothesis
that such an existence actually is, and that we actually perceive it.
The explanation, however, is not difficult. It is an
admitted fact, that we are capable of all conceptions which can be formed by
generalizing from the observed laws of our sensations. Whatever relation we
find to exist between any one of our sensations and something different from it, that same relation we have no
difficulty in conceiving to exist between the sum of all our sensations and
something different from them. The
differences which our consciousness recognises between one sensation and
another, give us the general notion of difference, and inseparably associate
with every sensation we have, the feeling of its being different from other
things: and when once this association has been formed, we can no longer
conceive anything, without being able, and even being compelled, to form also
the conception of something different from it. This familiarity with the idea
of something different from each
thing we know, makes it natural and easy to form the notion of something
different from all things that we
know, collectively as well as individually. It is true we can form no
conception of what such a thing can be; our notion of it is merely negative;
but the idea of a substance, apart from its relation to the impressions which
we conceive it as making on our senses, is a merely negative one. There is thus
no psychological obstacle to our forming the notion of a something which is
neither a sensation nor a possibility of sensation, even if our consciousness
does not testify to it; and nothing is more likely than that the Permanent
Possibilities of sensation, to which our consciousness does testify, should be
confounded in our minds with this imaginary conception. All experience attests
the strength of the tendency to mistake mental abstractions, even negative
ones, for substantive realities; and the Permanent Possibilities of sensation
which experience guarantees, are so extremely unlike in many of their
properties to actual sensations, that since we are capable of imagining some
thing which transcends sensations, there is a great natural probability that we
should suppose these to be it.
But this natural probability is converted into
certainty, when we take into consideration that universal law of our experience
which is termed the law of Causation, and which makes us mentally connect with
the beginning of everything, some antecedent condition, or Cause. The case of
Causation is one of the most marked of all the cases in which we extend to the
sum total of our consciousness, a notion derived from its parts. It is a
striking example of our power to conceive, and our tendency to believe, that a
relation which subsists between every individual item of our experience and
some other item, subsists also between our experience as a whole, and something
not within the sphere of experience. By this extension to the sum of all our
experiences, of the internal relations obtaining between its several parts, we
are led to consider sensation itself the aggregate whole of our sensations as
deriving its origin from antecedent existences transcending sensation. That we
should do this, is a consequence of the particular character of the uniform
sequences, which experience discloses to us among our sensations. As already
remarked, the constant antecedent of a sensation is seldom another sensation,
or set of sensations, actually felt. It is much oftener the existence of a
group of possibilities, not necessarily including any actual sensations, except
such as are required to show that the possibilities are really present. Nor are
actual sensations indispensable even for this purpose; for the presence of the
object (which is nothing more than the immediate presence of the possibilities)
may be made known to us by the very sensation which we refer to as its effect.
Thus, the real antecedent of an effect the only antecedent which, being
invariable and unconditional, we consider to be the cause may be, not any
sensation really felt, but solely the presence, at that or the immediately
preceding moment, of a group of possibilities of sensation. Hence it is not
with sensations as actually experienced, but with their Permanent
Possibilities, that the idea of Cause comes to be identified: and we, by one
and the same process, acquire the habit of regarding Sensation in general, like
all our individual sensations, as an Effect, and also that of conceiving as the
causes of most of our individual sensations, not other sensations, but general
possibilities of sensation. If all these considerations put together do not
completely explain and ac count for our conceiving these Possibilities as a
class of independent and substantive entities, I know not what psychological
analysis can be conclusive.
It may perhaps be said, that the preceding theory
gives, indeed, some account of the idea of Permanent Existence which forms part
of our conception of matter, but gives no explanation of our believing these
permanent objects to be external, or out of ourselves. I apprehend, on the
contrary, that the very idea of anything out of ourselves is derived solely
from the knowledge experience gives us of the Permanent Possibilities. Our
sensations we carry with us wherever we go, and they never exist where we are
not; but when we change our place we do not carry away with us the Permanent
Possibilities of Sensation: they remain until we return, or arise and cease
under conditions with which our presence has in general nothing to do. And more
than all they are, and will be after we have ceased to feel, Permanent
Possibilities of sensation to other beings than ourselves. Thus our actual
sensations, and the Permanent Possibilities of sensation, stand out in
obtrusive contrast to one another: and when the idea of Cause has been
acquired, and extended by generalization from the parts of our experience to
its aggregate whole, nothing can be more natural than that the Permanent
Possibilities should be classed by us as existences generically distinct from
our sensations, but of which our sensations are the effect.
The same theory which accounts for our ascribing to
an aggregate of possibilities of sensation, a permanent existence which our
sensations themselves do not possess, and consequently a greater reality than
belongs to our sensations, also explains our attributing greater objectivity to
the Primary Qualities of bodies than to the Secondary. For the sensations which
correspond to what are called the Primary Qualities (as soon at least as we come
to apprehend them by two senses, the eye as well as the touch) are always
present when any part of the group is so. But colours, tastes, smells, and the
like, being, in comparison, fugacious, are not, in the same degree, conceived
as being always there, even when nobody is present to perceive them. The
sensations answering to the Secondary Qualities are only occasional, those to
the Primary, constant. The Secondary, moreover, vary with different per sons,
and with the temporary sensibility of our organs; the Primary, when perceived
at all, are, as far as we know, the same to all persons and at all times.
END OF VOL. I.
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