which is extended and solid, which may be measured and weighed, is the immediate object of my touch and sight. And this object I take to be matter, and not an idea. And, Reid. though I have been taught by philosophers that what I immediately touch is an idea, and not matter, yet I have never been able to discover this by the most accurate attention to my own perceptions.” No opposition to idealism could be more distinct. Reid, however, did not always express himself so distinctly. Moreover, he and his successors mixed up so many accidents with the essence of their realism that the whole system broke down under its own weight. Their psychology contained valuable points. It also contained much that was doubtful, and much that was ill-adapted to the metaphysics of realism. Yet they thought it the only avenue to metaphysics. It is full of appeals to common sense, and of principles of common sense, which Reid also called intuitive first principles, and self-evident truths. It is spoilt by Locke’s hypothesis that we do not perceive things but qualities implying things. While it asserted a realism of individuals, it admitted a conceptualism of universals. Stewart also said that our knowledge of matter and mind is merely relative. Hamilton went still further; he tried to combine the oil of Reid with the water of Kant; and converting Hamilton. the intuitive into the a priori, he found a further reason for the relativity of knowledge. “Our knowledge is relative,” said he, “first, because existence is not cognizable absolutely and in itself, but only in special modes; second, because these modes thus relative to our faculties are presented to and known by the mind, only under modification, determined by these faculties themselves.” Not only so, but in his review of Cousin (“Philosophy of the Unconditioned,” in Discussions, pp. 12–15), he made conception the test of knowledge, argued that “the mind can conceive, and consequently can know, only the limited, and the conditionally limited,” that “to think is to condition,” that all we know either of mind or matter is “the phenomenal,” that “we can never in our highest generalizations rise above the finite,” and concluded that we cannot conceive or know the unconditioned, yet must believe in its existence. Nevertheless, in spite of all this Kantism, he adhered to his natural realism. He vacillated a great deal about our mode of perceiving the external world; but his final view (edition of Reid’s works, note D*) consisted in supposing that (1) sensation is an apprehension of secondary qualities purely as affections of the organism viewed as ego; (2) perception in general is an apprehension of primary qualities as relations of sensations in the organism viewed as non-ego; while (3) a special perception of a so-called “secundo-primary” quality consists in “the consciousness of a resisting something external to our organism.” Hamilton’s views both on the absolute and on perception affected Mansel and Spencer. They were not, however, received without question even by his followers. H. Calderwood, in his Philosophy of the Infinite (1854), Calderwood. made the pertinent objection that, though thought, conception and knowledge are finite, the object of thought may be infinite. Hamilton, in fact, made the double mistake of limiting knowledge to what we can conceive, and confusing the determinate with the finite or limited. We never know anything except as determined by its attributes; but that would not prevent us from inferring something determined as unconditioned, whether infinite or absolute. J. M‘Cosh again, in The Prevailing Types of Philosophy: Can they logically reach reality? (1891), rightly protests against Hamilton’s combination of Scottish and German schools M‘Cosh. which will not coalesce, and exhorts the former “to throw away its crutches of impressions, instincts, suggestions, and common sense, and give the mind a power of seeing things directly.” He has the merit of presenting natural or intuitive realism in its purity.
The common tenet of the whole school is that without inference we immediately perceive the external world, at all events as a resisting something external to our organism. But is it true? There are three reasons against it, and for the view that we perceive a sensible object within, and infer an external object without, the organism. In the first place, there are great differences between the sensible and the external object; they differ in secondary qualities in the case of all the senses; and even in the case of touch, heat felt within is different from the vibrating heat outside. Secondly, there are so-called “subjective sensations,” without any external object as stimulus, most commonly in vision, but also in touch, which is liable to formication, or the feeling of creeping in the skin, and to horripilation, or the feeling of bristling in the hair; yet, even in “subjective sensations,” we perceive something sensible, which, however, must be within, and not outside, the organism. Thirdly, the external world and the senses always act on one another by cause and effect and by pressure, although we only feel pressure by touch. Now, when the thing with which touch is in a state of reciprocal pressure is external, e.g. a table, we feel our organism pressed and pressing; we do not feel the table pressing and pressed, but infer it. The Scottish School never realized that every sensation of the five senses is a perception of a sensible object in the bodily organism; and that touch is a perception, not only of single sensible pressure, but also of double sensible pressure, a perception of our bodily members sensibly pressing and pressed by one another, from which, on the recurrence of a single sensible pressure, we infer the pressure of an external thing for the first time. Intuitive Realism is to be replaced by Physical Realism.
3. Reaction to Hypothetical Realism.—The three evidences, which are fatal to intuitive realism, do not prove hypothetical realism, or the hypothesis that we perceive something mental, but infer something bodily. This illogical hypothesis, which consists of incautiously passing from the truth that the sensible object perceived is not external but within the organism to the non-sequitur that therefore it is within the mind, derived what little plausibility it ever possessed from three prejudices: the first, the scholastic dogma that the sensible object is a species sensibilis, or immaterial sensible form received from the external thing; the second, the Cartesian a priori argument that the soul as thinking thing can perceive nothing but its own ideas; the third, the common assumption of a sense of sensations. But notwithstanding its illogicality, its tendency to underrate Nature as inferred from such idealistic premises, and its certain transition into a consistent idealism, hypothetical realism has, with little excuse, revived among us in the writings of Shadworth Hodgson, James Martineau and A. J. Balfour. The cause of this anachronism has been the failure of intuitive realism and the domination of idealism, which makes short-sighted men suppose that at all events they must begin with the psychology and the psychological idealism of the day, in the false hope that on the sands of psychological idealism they may build a house of metaphysical realism.
Shadworth Holloway Hodgson (born 1832; hon. fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford), whose chief work is The Metaphysic of Experience (4 vols., 1898), believing that philosophy is an analysis of the contents of consciousness, or experience, and that this is metaphysics, begins, like Kant, with an analysis of experience. Like Kant, Hodgson. he supposes that experience is concerned with sensations, distinguishes matter and form in sense, identifies time and space, eternal time and infinite space, with the formal element, and substitutes synthesis of sensations of touch and sight for association and inference, as the origin of our knowing such a solid material object as a bell. Although he does not agree with Kant that either the formal element in sense or the synthesis of sensations is a priori, yet in very Kantian fashion, through not distinguishing between operation and object, he holds that, in synthetically combining sensations of touch and sight, we not only have a complex perception of a solid body, but also know this “object thought of” as itself the complex of these sensations objectified. Hence he concludes that “matter is the name for the sensation-elements derived from both senses, abstracting in thought, so far as possible, from the extension-elements of both” (i. 296).
Here you would expect him to stop, as the German Neo-Kantism of Lange stops, with the consistent conclusion that all we know of Nature from such data is these complexes of sensation-elements, or phenomena in the Kantian meaning. Not so; like Kant himself, Hodgson supposes something beyond; not, however, an unknown thing in itself causing sensations, but a condition, or sine qua non, of their existence, without being a cause of their nature. In order to make this leap he supposes that we have beyond perceptions a conception of condition. His account of the origin of this conception is puzzling, (i. 380). Whatever its origin may be, it could not, any more than a Kantian category of cause, justify us in concluding anything more than a relation of perceptions as conditions of one another, seeing that they were supposed to be the whole data, and matter itself to be “sensation-elements.” But what he proceeds to suppose is that, having the conception, and finding that the complex of perceptions needs accounting for, we infer a real condition, e.g. the solid interior of a bell. What we know, however, of this condition, according to him, has two limits: on the one hand, it is the condition only of the existence of our perceptions; on the other hand, all we know of its nature is our perceptions. Matter thus, which had at
first been defined as a complex of perceptions objectified, now turns