science is there possible for me further than I acquire in acquainting myself with the order I may perceive in the phenomena of my consciousness? It is true, I may thereby learn in some degree to modify the fluctuations of pleasure and pain to which I am subject. But if I imagine that I have been sometimes awake, and at other times dreaming, how do I know that the distinction is more than a difference in my own sensations? If I am to succumb to the awful suspicion that I am being mocked by the expectation of a life beyond the grave, what meaning shall I assign to this life to which I now cling-this moment of consciousness that is to be swallowed up by an eternity in which its significance will have ceased for ever to be of any account? Perchance it is but a dream-a very short dream occurring once for all in the course of an endless sleep. If, however, as regards the present world, I refuse to entertain the suspicion that my consciousness is thus abused, I have come to a conclusion for which, although it accords with principles of reasoning tacitly admitted even by those philosophers whose wisdom knows nothing of the Infinite and Eternal, I see no warrant in the principles they avow, and upon which systems are constructed incompatible with any sure and certain hope.

9. But let me suppose that, being a purely empirical philosopher, I have nevertheless, like the rest, been so bold as to take for granted what no mere sorting of the furniture of my imagination can render evident, and have accordingly assumed the existence of an external world. If I am now at liberty to hold it credible that what I represent to my imagination as Matter is the author of Mind-that the non-sentient has originated sensation, the unconscious consciousness, and the unintelligent intellect-what necessity can I allege to myself for the former assumption? Why

may I not just as well credit myself with everything of which I am conscious? Why should I advance in my reasonings beyond the Ego sum? Why must I go outside this in quest of any cause or antecedent whatsoever? I know that I can in some measure control the phenomena of my consciousness; but, if my intellect is to be denied its native liberty and thrust into the prison of a pure Empiricism, the utmost I can further know concerning them is what I am aware of in certain impressions of the fainter kind, namely, a sequence and order, in one direction preterite and assured, in the opposite future and probable; the former ever adjusting the latter to the focus of expectations more or less defined and strong. The experience of manifold sensations, both the intellectual and the nonintellectual, and the probability of such and such of the former being supplemented by corresponding sensations of the latter description-this, on the supposition I am now contemplating, sums up all my knowledge. If experience1 is to justify me in distinguishing scientifically anything

f

Experience is a word which may be used in so large a sense as to include the apprehension of every truth that enters the mind. A student of the Pure Mathematics may be regarded as gaining, with successive additions to his knowledge, accessions of experience. And indeed it may be allowed that even for him discovery proceeds in the way of experiment; clearly this view is permissible in the case in which the result of a tentative hypothesis is found to be a reductio ad absurdum. Experiments, however, in cases of this kind, do but help to the apprehension or the demonstration of that which is, when discovered, recognized as absolutely necessary truth. The truth once made apparent, further experiment is superfluous: nothing is gained by accumulation of instances; conviction admits of no degrees; the judgment never waits in suspense for fuller information; nor does it ever, as in the Mixed Sciences, consent provisionally to accept a theory. Our perception of the truth that the sum of the interior angles of every rectilineal triangle equals two right angles, and our belief that there are no white crows, common sense at once and without reflection refuses to admit into the same category of convic

whatever from the affections of my own consciousness, it must evidently include more than the associations and distions. On what scientific principle, then, can it be maintained that, in respect to certainty, they differ only in degree?

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It will be observed that in the Pure Mathematics all concepts are of a purely subjective character; however suggested by attributes of substance external to the mind, it cannot be affirmed that their respective names connote any, or that these concepts, considered by themselves, presuppose any. In these, therefore, and in the trains of reasoning by which their relations to one another are determined, all that we are entitled to demand is pertinence and consistency. Accordingly, in this branch of science it will be found that, except on the score of irrelevancy, or superfluity, or absence of meaning, no assertion is open to objection, unless it can be ultimately shown that it involves some contradiction. There can be no error but what may be regarded as logical. Now, if it were once for all settled that the attributes connoted by the name crow" should include blackness of feathers, it would be logically certain that there neither have been nor ever can be any white crows. But no logical objection whatever lies against the supposition that the other attributes are compatible with whiteness. A plan prearranged from all eternity, determined, without doubt, unalterably all the details of phenomenal associations that were ever to find place in the universe; but it is one thing to improve our acquaintance with the progressive execution of that plan, and it is another thing to recognize and formulate conditions of logical coherence and consistency, namely, between concepts in which nothing is represented that ever has had or can have existence in the phenomenal world. From the attempt to stretch the meaning of the word induction, so that it shall cover these two distinct kinds of mental process, nothing can accrue but confusion of thought, and the necessity for trying to persuade us, for example, that the ideal geometrical figures of our reasonings are no other than the diagrams which our imagination sketches, and whose lines are inseparable from width and colour.

The empirical inquirer cannot advance one step, except in subjection to logical conditions: consciously or unconsciously he must comply with them, and, indeed, even if he is to do no more than justify the position he has taken up. If we see that two propositions contradict one another, we perceive at once that we are not at liberty to accept one of them without rejecting the other. If we had any doubt as to what we ought to do, we should be quite incapable of perceiving the drift of any experiments, could such be conceived, that might solve the doubt. Of course, examples without number may

criminations which are proper to the Physical Sciences; it must involve a more liberal use of the prerogatives of the intellectual faculty; it must allow larger scope for the exercise of Noetic intuition.

10. Supposing, however, it be now admitted that the phenomenal chain must have limits, it is immaterial whether the links are successive or coexistent-in other words, successive in themselves, or only in the impressions that make up the cognition under which they fall: either way the manifold must still be the finite; nor indeed in our imagination can we make it coextensive either with Space or with Time. The two important words which this remark has introduced into my argument might seem to call for more than a be imagined, in which the contradiction is merely verbal and on the surface; as it would be, if one were to say first, “The world has lasted long," and afterwards, "The world has not lasted long," intending the word "long" to be understood in the former assertion relatively to man's impression of duration; in the latter, to be interpreted by a reference to eternity. But grant a real contradiction, and then follows the logical obligation to which I allude. Nothing in this case is brought in from without, nothing is added to our knowledge in the way of induction; a bare statement carries with it all the evidence that can be required or given, is in effect a convincing demonstration.

Mr. J. S. Mill's admirably luminous exposition of the criteria of probability (vid. "A System of Logic," etc.) would surely have lost nothing of its value had he seen his way to distinguish, conformably to the requirements of a thoroughly stable philosophy, the information which the mind receives through sensuous channels from without, from its perception of the conditions under which its thoughts are coherent and consistent, and had he not confounded with Induction processes which are purely logical. My contention in this chapter is that these conditions necessitate a recognition of the Infinite, and that the logical result of all attempts to ignore it in the investigation of the principles of the Fundamental Science, or to confuse it with the finite, is sooner or later a reductio ad absurdum.

I follow Sir W. Hamilton in thus designating "all those cognitions that originate in the mind itself" ("Lectures on Metaphysics," vol. ii. p. 350).

passing comment, seeing that in the progress of a metaphysical inquiry even simple words, unless their meanings are carefully investigated, are apt to prove treacherous rocks and shoals, and thought is liable to run aground. But there is no necessity for lingering here, and taking soundings, to the full extent of metaphysical requirements, in the concepts which these elementary terms represent. My immediate purpose merely requires that I should generalize Time and Space under the notion that they are two distinct species of possibility, jointly presupposed in all cases of originated and phenomenal existence. These, it will be observed, comprise all the possibilities we are able to conceive as being undetermined by, and absolutely independent of, Potentiality. We may in imagination annihilate all

Having found it convenient to distinguish Potentiality from mere Possibility, I have here used the latter term in the sense of admissibility, leaving it to be understood that the former relates simply to the adequacy of the Originating Power. Thus Possibility will be conditioned by scope, room, and the absence of immovable obstructions, Potentiality by the existence of a sufficing cause. Philosophy, I am inclined to think, would have been in possession of a language more truly scientific than it now employs, if those seekers of wisdom who first busied themselves in cutting out the grooves in which our reasonings and speculations almost inevitably run, had known "that power belongeth unto God” (Ps. lxii. 11). A single term of such significance as dúvaμis cannot with propriety be used alike in reference to the objective cause of change and the subject of change considered severally as such. For that which as yet is non-existent there may be room, but it is an abuse of language to credit it with power.

The truth that "Power belongeth unto God" appears to me to dispose effectually of the theory of a Pre-established Harmony, showing it at once to be gratuitous. For all the operations of a created spirit are manifestations of the power of that Creator Spirit in which it lives and moves and has its being; and to credit Him with the ability to pre-establish a harmony between the motions of non-sentient or material atoms and the phases of His own volitional action is of course equivalent to acknowledging that He can exercise an immediate influence upon Matter.