PHILOSOPHY BEFORE FERRIER'S DAY
In attempting to give some idea of philosophy as it was in Scotland in
the earlier portion of the present century, we shall have to go back
two hundred years or thereabout, in order to find a satisfactory basis
from which to start. For philosophy, as no one realised more than
Ferrier, is no arbitrary succession of systems following one upon
another as their propounders might decree; it is a development in the
truest and highest significance of that word. It means the gradual
working out of the questions which reason sets to be answered; and
though it seems as if we had sometimes to turn our faces backwards, and
to revert to systems of bygone days, we always find, when we look more
closely, that in our onward course we have merely dropped some thread
in our web, the recovery of which is requisite in order that it may be
duly taken up and woven with the rest.
At the time of which we write the so-called 'Scottish School' of Reid,
Stewart, and Beattie reigned supreme in orthodox Scotland; it had
undisputed power in the Universities, and besides this obtained a very
reputable place in the estimation of Europe, and more especially of
France. As it was this school more especially that Ferrier spent much
of his time in combating, it is its history and place that we wish
shortly to describe. To do so, however, it is needful to go back to its
real founder, Locke, in order that its point of view may fairly be set
forth.
In applying his mind to the views of Locke, the ordinary man finds
himself arriving at very commonplace and well-accustomed conceptions.
Locke, indeed, may reasonably be said to represent the ideas of common,
everyday life. The ordinary man does not question the reality of
things, he accepts it without asking any questions, and bases his
theories--scientific or otherwise--upon this implied reality. Locke
worked out the theory which had been propounded by Lord Bacon, that
knowledge is obtained by the observation of facts which are implicitly
accepted as realities; and what, it was asked, could be more
self-evident and sane? It is easy to conceive a number of perceiving
minds upon the one hand, ready to take up perceptions of an outside
material substance upon the other. The mind may be considered as a
piece of white paper--a _tabula rasa_, as it was called--on which
external things may make what impression they will, and knowledge is
apparently explained at once. But though Locke certainly succeeded in
making these terms the common coin of ordinary life, difficulties crop
up when we come to examine them more closely. After all, it is evident,
the only knowledge our mind can have is a knowledge of its own
ideas--ideas which are, of course, caused by something which is
outside, or at least, as Locke would say, by its _quality_. Now, from
this it would appear that these 'ideas' after all come between the mind
and the 'thing,' whatever it is, that causes them--that is to say, we
can perhaps maintain that we only know our 'ideas,' and not things as
in themselves. Locke passes into elaborate distinctions between primary
qualities of things, of which he holds exact representations are given,
and secondary qualities, which are not in the same position; but the
whole difficulty we meet with is summed up in the question whether we
really _know_ substance, or whether it is that we can only hope to know
ideas, and 'suppose' some substratum of reality outside. Then another
difficulty is that we can hardly really know our _selves_. How can we
know that the self exists; and if, like Malebranche, we speak of God
revealing substance to us, how do we know about God? We cannot form any
'general' impressions, have any 'general' knowledge; only a sort of
conglomeration of unrelated or detached bits of knowledge can possibly
come home to us. The fact is, that modern philosophy starts with two
separate and self-existent substances; that it does not see how they
can be combined, and that the 'white-paper' theory is so abstract that
we can never arrive at self-consciousness by its means.
Berkeley followed out the logical consequences of Locke, though perhaps
he hardly knew where these would carry him. He acknowledged that we
know nothing but ideas--nothing outside of our mind. But he adds the
conception of self, and by analogy the conception of God, who acts as a
principle of causation. Whether there is necessary connection in his
sensations or not, he does not say. Hume followed with criticism,
scathing and merciless. He states that all we know of is the experience
we have; and by experience he signifies perceptions. Ideas to him are
nothing more than perceptions, and whether they are ideas simply of the
mind, or ideas of some object, is to him the same. If we begin to
imagine such conceptions as those of universality or necessity, of God
or the self, beyond a complex of successive ideas, we are going farther
than experience permits. We cannot connect our perceptions with an
object, nor can we get beyond what experience allows. Custom merely
brings about certain conclusions which are often enough misleading. It
connects effect and cause, really different events: it brings about
ideas of morality very often deceptive. We have our custom of regarding
things, another has his--who can say which is correct? All we can do
is, what seems a hopeless task enough--we can try to show how these
unrelated particulars seem by repetition to produce an illusionary
connection in our minds.
Both mind and matter appear, then, to be wanting, and experience alone
is suggested as the means of solving the difficulty in which we are
placed--a point in the argument which left an opportunity open to Kant
to suggest a new development, to ask whether things being found
inadequate in producing knowledge, we might not ask if knowledge could
not be more successful with things. But it is the Scottish lines of
attempted solution that we wish to follow out, and not the German.
Perhaps they are not so very different.
Philosophy, as Reid found it, was in a bad way enough, as far as the
orthodox mind of Scotland was concerned. All justification for belief
in God, in immortality, in all that was held sacred in a century of
much orthodoxy if little zeal, was gone. Such things might be believed
in by those who found any comfort in so believing, but to the educated
man who had seriously reflected on them, they were anachronisms. The
very desperateness of the case, however, seemed to promise a remedy.
Men could not rest in a state of permanent scepticism, in a world
utterly incapable of being rationally explained. Even the propounder of
the theories allowed this to be true; and as for others, they felt that
they were rational beings, and this signified that there was system in
the world.
A champion arose when things were at their worst in Thomas Reid, the
founder, or at least the chiefest ornament, of the so-called Scottish
School of Philosophy. He it was who set himself to add the principle of
the coherence of the Universe, and the consequent possibility of
establishing Faith once more in the world. Reid, to begin with, instead
of looking at Hume's results as serious, regarded them as necessarily
absurd. He started a new theory of his own, the theory of Immediate
Perception, which signified that we are able immediately to
apprehend--not ideas only, but the Truth. And how, we may ask, can this
be done?
It had been pointed out first of all that sensations as understood by
Locke--that is, the relations so called by Locke--might be separated
from sensation in itself; in fact, that these first pertained to mind.
Hence we have a dualistic system given us to start with, and the
question is how the two sides are to be connected? What does this
theory of Immediate Perception, which Reid puts forward as the
solution, mean? Is it just a mechanical union of two antitheses, or is
it something more?
As to this last, perhaps the real answer would be that it both is, and
is not. That is, the philosophy of Reid would seem still dualistic in
its nature; it certainly implies the mechanical contact of two
confronting substances whose independence is vigorously maintained, in
opposition to the idealistic system which it superseded; but in
reference to Reid we must recollect that his theory of Immediate
Perception was also something more. As regards sensation, for example,
he says that we do not begin with unrelated sensations, but with
judgment--that is, we refer our sensations to a permanent subject, 'I.'
Sensations 'suggest' the nature of a mind and the belief in its
existence. And this signifies that we have the power of making
inferences--how we do not exactly know, but we believe it to be, not by
any special reasoning process, but by the 'common-sense' innately born
within us. Common-sense is responsible for a good deal more--for the
conceptions of existence and of cause, for instance; for Reid
acknowledges that sensations alone must fail to account for ideas such
as those of extension, space, and motion. This standpoint seems indeed
as if it did not differ widely from the Kantian, but at the same time
Reid appears to think that it is not an essential that feelings should
be perceptively referred to an external object; the first part of the
process of perception is carried on without our consciousness--the
mental sensation merely follows--and sensation simply supposes a
sentient being and a certain manner in which that being is affected,
which leaves us much where we were, as far as the subjectivity of our
ideas is concerned. He does not hold that all sensation is a percept
involving extension and much else--involving, indeed, existence.
Following upon Reid, Dugald Stewart obtained a very considerable
reputation, and he was living and writing at the time Ferrier was a
young man. His main idea would, however, seem to have been to guard his
utterances carefully, and enter upon no keen discussions or
contentions: when a bold assertion is made, it is always under shelter
of some good authority. But his rounded phrases gained him considerable
admiration, as such writing often does. He carried--perhaps
inadvertently--Reid's views farther than he would probably have held as
justifiable. He says we are not, properly speaking, conscious of self
or the existence of self, but merely of a sensation or some other
quality, which, by a _subsequent suggestion_ of the understanding,
leads to a belief in that which exercises the quality. This is the
doctrine of Reid put very crudely, and in a manner calculated to bring
us back to unrelated sensation in earnest. Stewart adopted a new
expression for Reid's 'common-sense,' _i.e._ the 'fundamental laws of
belief,' which might be less ambiguous, but never took popular hold as
did the first.
There were many others belonging to this school besides Reid and
Stewart, whom it would be impossible to speak of here. The Scottish
Philosophy had its work to do, and no doubt understood that work--the
first essential in a criticism: it endeavoured to vindicate perception
as against sensational idealism, and it only partially succeeded in its
task. But we must be careful not to forget that it opened up the way
for a more comprehensive and satisfactory point of view. It was with
Kant that the distinction arose between sensation and the forms
necessary to its perception, the form of space and time, and so on. As
to this part of the theory of knowledge, Reid and his school were not
clear; they only made an effort to express the fact that something was
required to verify our knowledge, but they were far from satisfactorily
attaining to their goal. The very name of 'common-sense' was
misleading--making people imagine, as it did, that there was nothing in
philosophy after all that the man in the street could not know by
applying the smallest modicum of reflection to the subject. Philosophy
thus came to be considered as superfluous, and it was thought that the
sooner we got rid of it and were content to observe the mandates of our
hearts, the better for all concerned.
What, then, was the work which Ferrier placed before himself when he
commenced to write upon and teach philosophy? He was thoroughly and
entirely dissatisfied with the old point of view, the point of view of
the 'common-sense' school of metaphysicians, to begin with. Sometimes
it seems as though we could not judge a system altogether from the best
exponent of it, although theoretically we are always bound to turn to
him. In a national philosophy, at least, we want something that will
wear, that will bear to be put in ordinary language, something which
can be understood of the people, which can be assimilated with the
popular religion and politics--in fact, which can really be _lived_ as
well as thought; and it is only after many years of use that we can
really tell whether these conditions have been fulfilled. For this
reason we are in some measure justified in taking the popular estimate
of a system, and in considering its practical results as well as the
value of its theory. Now, the commonly accepted view of the
eighteenth-century philosophers in Scotland is that there is nothing
very wonderful about the subject--like the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ of
Molière, we are shown that we have been philosophising all our lives,
only we never knew it. 'Common-sense'--an attribute with which we all
believe we are in some small measure endowed--explains everything if we
simply exercise it, and that is open to us all: there has been much
talk, it would seem, about nothing; secrets hidden to wise men are
revealed to babes, and we have but to keep our minds open in order to
receive them.
We are all acquainted with this talk in speculative regions of
knowledge, but we most of us also know how disastrous it is to any true
advancement in such directions. What happens now is just what happened
in the eighteenth century. Men relapse into a self-satisfied indolence
of mind: in religion they are content with believing in a sort of
general divine Beneficence which will somehow make matters straight,
however crooked they may seem to be; and in philosophy they are guided
by their instincts, which teach them that what they wish to believe is
true.
Now, all this is what Ferrier and the modern movement, largely
influenced by German modes of thought, wish to protest against with all
their might. The scepticism of Hume and Gibbon was logical, if utterly
impossible as a working creed and necessarily ending in absurdity; but
this irrational kind of optimism was altogether repugnant to those who
demanded a reasonable explanation of themselves and of their place in
nature. The question had become summed up in one of superlative
importance, namely, the distinction that existed between the natural
and supernatural sides of our existence. The materialistic school had
practically done away with the latter in its entirety, had said that
nature is capable of being explained by mechanical means, and that
these must necessarily suffice for us. But the orthodox section adopted
other lines; it accepted all the ordinarily received ideas of God,
immortality, and the like, but it maintained the existence of an
Absolute which can only be inferred, but not presented to the mind,
and, strangest of all, declared that the 'last and highest consecration
of all true religion must be an altar "To the unknown and unknowable
God."'[6] This so-called 'pious' philosophy declares that 'To think
that God is, as we can think Him to be, is blasphemy,' and 'A God
understood would be no God at all.' The German philosophy saw that if
once we are to renounce our reason, or trust to it only within a
certain sphere, all hope for us is lost, as far as withstanding the
attack of outside enemies is concerned. We are liable to sceptical
attacks from every side, and all we can maintain against them is a
personal conviction which is not proof. How, then, was the difficulty
met?
[6] _Philosophy of the Unconditioned_ (Sir William
Hamilton), p. 15.
Kant, as we have said, made an important development upon the position
of Hume. Hume had arrived at the point of declaring the particular mind
and matter equally incompetent to afford an ultimate explanation of
things, and he suggested experience in their place. This is the first
note of the new philosophy: experience, not a process of the
interaction of two separate things, mind on the one hand, matter on the
other, but something comprehending both. This, however, was scarcely
realised either by Hume or Kant, though the latter came very near the
formulation of it. Kant saw, at least, that things could not produce
knowledge, and he therefore changed his front and suggested starting
with the knowledge that was before regarded as result--a change in
point of view that caused a revolution in thought similar to that
caused in our ideas of the natural world by the introduction of the
system of Copernicus. Still, while following out his Copernican theory,
Kant did not go far enough. His methods were still somewhat
psychological in nature. He still regarded thought as something which
can be separated from the thinker; he still maintained the existence of
things in themselves independent and outside of thought. He gives us a
'theory' of knowledge, when what we want to reach is knowledge itself,
and not a subjective conception of it.
Here it is that the Absolute Idealism comes in--the Idealism most
associated with the name of Hegel. Hegel takes experience, knowledge,
or thought, in another and much more comprehensive fashion than did his
predecessors. Knowledge, in fact, is all-comprehending; it embraces
both sides in itself, and explains them as 'moments,' _i.e._
complementary factors in the one Reality. To make this clearer: we have
been all along taking knowledge as a dualistic process, as having two
sides involved in it, a subject and an object. Now, Hegel says our
mistake is this: we cannot make a separation of such a kind except by a
process of abstraction: the one really implies the other, and could not
possibly exist without it. We may in our ordinary pursuits do so,
without doubt; we may concentrate our attention on one side or the
other, as the case may be; we may look at the world as if it could be
explained by mechanical means, as, indeed, to a certain point it can.
But, Hegel says, these explanations are not sufficient; they can easily
be shown to be untrue, when driven far enough: the world is something
larger; it has the ideal side as well as the real, and, as we are
placed, they are both necessarily there, and must both be recognised,
if we are to attain to true conceptions.
Without saying that Ferrier wholly assimilated the modern German
view,--for of course he did not,--he was clearly largely influenced by
it, more largely perhaps than he was even himself aware. It
particularly met the present difficulties with which he was confronted.
The negative attitude was felt to be impossible, and the other, the
Belief which then, as now, was so strongly advocated, the Belief which
meant a more or less blind acceptance of a spiritual power beyond our
own, the Belief in the God we cannot know and glory in not being able
so to know, he felt to be an equal impossibility. Ferrier, and many
others, asked the question, Are these alternatives exhaustive? Can we
not have a rational explanation of the world and of ourselves? Can we
not, that is, attain to freedom? The new point of view seemed in some
measure to meet the difficulty, and therefore it was looked to with
hope and anticipation even although its bearing was not at first
entirely comprehended. Ferrier was one of those who perceived the
momentous consequences which such a change of front would cause, and he
set himself to work it out as best he could. In an interesting paper
which he writes on 'The Philosophy of Common-Sense,' with special
reference to Sir William Hamilton's edition of the works of Dr. Reid,
we see in what way his opinions had developed.
The point which Ferrier made the real crux of the whole question of
philosophy was the distinction which exists between the ordinary
psychological doctrine of perception and the metaphysical. The former
drew a distinction between the perceiving mind and matter, and based
its reasonings on the assumed modification of our minds brought about
by matter regarded as self-existent, _i.e._ existent in itself and
without regard to any perceiving mind. Now, Ferrier points out that
this system of 'representationalism,' of representative ideas,
necessarily leads to scepticism; for who can tell us more, than that we
have certain ideas--that is, how can it be known that the real matter
supposed to cause them has any part at all in the process? Scepticism,
as we saw before, has the way opened up for it, and it doubts the
existence of matter, seeing that it has been given no reasonable
grounds for belief in it, while Idealism boldly denies its
instrumentality and existence. What then, he asks, of Dr. Reid and his
School of Common-Sense? Reid cannot say that matter is known in
consciousness, but what he does say is that something innately born
within us forces us to believe in its existence. But then, as Ferrier
pertinently points out, scepticism and idealism do not merely doubt and
deny the existence of a self-existent matter as an object of
consciousness, but also because it is no object of belief. And what has
Reid to show for his beliefs? Nothing but his word. We must all,
Ferrier says, be sceptics or idealists; we are all forced on to deny
that matter in any form exists, for it is only self-existent matter
that we recognise as psychologists. Stewart tries to reinstate it by an
appeal to 'direct observation,' an appeal which, Ferrier truly says, is
manifestly absurd; reasoning is useless, and we must, it would appear,
allow any efforts we might make towards rectifying our position to be
recognised as futile.
But now, Ferrier says, the metaphysical solution of the problem comes
in. We are in an _impasse_, it would appear; the analysis of the given
fact is found impossible. But the failure of psychology opens up the
way to metaphysic. 'The turning-round of thought from psychology to
metaphysic is the true interpretation of the Platonic conversion of the
soul from ignorance to knowledge, from mere opinion to certainty and
satisfaction; in other words, from a discipline in which the thinking
is only _apparent_, to a discipline in which the thinking is _real_.'
'The difference is as great between "the science of the human mind" and
metaphysic, as it is between the Ptolemaic and the Copernican
astronomy, and it is very much of the same kind.' It is not that
metaphysic proposes to do _more_ than psychology; it aims at nothing
but what it can fully overtake, and does not propose to carry a man
farther than his tether extends, or the surroundings in which he finds
himself. Metaphysic in the hands of all true astronomers of thought,
from Plato to Hegel, if it accomplishes more, attempts less.
Metaphysic, Ferrier says, demands the whole given fact, and that fact
is summed up in this: 'We apprehend the perception of an object,' and
nothing short of this suffices--that is, not the perception of matter,
but our apprehension of that perception, or what we before called
knowledge, ultimate knowledge in its widest sense. And this given fact
is unlike the mere perception of matter, for it is capable of analysis
and is not simply subjective and egoistic. Psychology recognises
perception on the one hand (subjective), and matter on the other
(objective), but metaphysic says the distinction ought to be drawn
between 'our apprehension' and 'the perception-of-matter,' the latter
being one fact and indivisible, and on no account to be taken as two
separate facts or thoughts. The whole point is, that by no possible
means can the perception-of-matter be divided into two facts or
existences, as was done by psychology. And Ferrier goes on to point out
that this is not a subjective idealism, it is not a condition of the
human soul alone, but it 'dwells apart, a mighty and independent
system, a city fitted up and upheld by the living God.' And in
authenticating this last belief Ferrier calls in internal convictions,
'common-sense,' to assist the evidence of speculative reason, where,
had he followed more upon the lines of the great German Idealists, he
might have done without it.
Now, Ferrier continues, we are safe against the cavils of scepticism;
the metaphysical theory of perception steers clear of all the
perplexities of representationalism; for it gives us in perception one
only object, the perception of matter; the objectivity of this _datum_
keeps us clear from subjective idealism.
From the perception of matter, a fact in which man merely participates,
Ferrier infers a Divine mind, of which perceptions are the property:
they are states of the everlasting intellect. The exercise of the
senses is the condition upon which we are permitted to apprehend or
participate in the objective perception of material things. This,
shortly, is the position from which he starts.