London.
_Objective and Subjective_ (Vol. v., p. 11.)--From the tone of X.'s
inquiry into the meaning of this antithesis, it is tolerably plain that
no answer will make _him_ confess that it is intelligible; yet it was
familiar in the best times of our philosophical literature, and the
words, according to this, their philosophical opposition, occur in
Johnson's _Dictionary_. I think it is desirable to avoid this
phraseology, but the meaning of it may be made clear enough to any one
who wishes to understand it. The _object_ on which man employs his
senses or his thoughts, are distinct enough from the man himself, the
_subject_ in which the senses and the thoughts exist. Several years ago
an Edinburgh Reviewer complained that Germans, and Germanized
Englishmen, were beginning to use _objective_ and _subjective_ for
_external_ and _internal_. This is a sort of rough approximation to the
meaning of the terms. But perhaps the distinction is better illustrated
by examples. We call Homer an objective, Lucan a subjective, poet,
because the former tells his story about external objects and wants,
interposing little which belongs to himself. Lucan, on the other hand,
is perpetually introducing reflections arising from the internal
character of his own mind. Objective truth is language which agrees with
the facts, correctness. Subjective truth is language which agrees with
the convictions of the speaker, veracity.
Perhaps X. will allow me to ask in turn, what is "a physical ignoramus,"
the character in which he begs some of your intelligent readers to
enlighten him.
I have said above that I think this mode of expressing the antithesis
better avoided; I will state why. It puts the man who thinks, and the
objects about which he thinks, side by side, as if they were alike and
co-ordinate. It implies the view of some one who can look at both of
them; whereas, the thing to be implied is the opposition between being
looked at and looking. Hence _subjective_ is a bad word; a man is not,
in ordinary language, the _subject_ of his own senses or of his own
thoughts, merely because they are in him. The antithesis would be better
expressed in many cases, by the words _objective_ and _mental_, or
_objective_ and _cogitative_. But different words would be eligible in
different cases.