out to be a condition without which perceptions would not exist, but whose nature is known only as a complex of perceptions. Finally, according to him, having inferred matter as the condition of our perceptions, we are entitled to infer that the condition of the existence of matter is God, whose nature, however, can be inferred only by practical reason from conscience. He avers that this “metaphysic of experience” is not idealism, or the tenet that consciousness is the only reality. It is realism—but inconsequent and inadequate realism, something like that of Spencer; according, indeed, more knowledge of the distinction between Nature as condition of sensations and God as condition of Nature; but very like in holding that all we know of natural forces is our perceptions. We know more, however, about a body, such as a bell, than either Spencer or Hodgson allows. We know, from the concomitant variations between its vibrations and our perceptions, that its vibrations are not mere conditions but real causes of our perceptions; and that those vibrations are not our perceptions, because we cannot perceive them, but are real attributes of the bell. It will be objected that they are merely possible perceptions. But as they really produce our real perceptions, they are themselves not merely possible, but real or actual. A possible cause could not actually produce an actual effect.
James Martineau (q.v.) in A Study of Religion (1888), like Shadworth Hodgson, started from Kant, and tried to found on transcendental idealism “a return to dualism.” If there is one thing certain in the Kantian philosophy, it is its author’s perception that what is contributed by mind must not be extended to things beyond mind. Hegel only extended Martineau. a priori forms to things by resolving things into thoughts. Mill also protested “against adducing, as evidence of the truth of a fact in external nature, the disposition, however strong or however general, of the human mind to believe it.” Yet Martineau adopted, as his view of the limits of human intelligence, that Kant was right in making space and time a priori forms of sense, but wrong in limiting them to sensations. But in order to make space a form of external things, Martineau had to take the external in space, by which Kant meant one sensation out of another, in the very different meaning of the self here and the not-self there. He facilitated this awkward transition by adding to Kant’s a priori forms of space and time an “a priori form of alternative causality,” or, as he also called it, “an intuition of causality involved in the elementary exercise of perception,” which is the key to his whole philosophy. He supposed that this intuition of causality arises when will is resisted, and, further supposing that causality requires decision between alternatives, concluded that the intuition of will resisted is an intuition of will against will, mine against other (i. 65). To pass over its confusion of a priori and intuitive, there are two fatal objections to this view. In the first place, the intuition of causality does not require will at all, because we often perceive one bodily member pressing another involuntarily; a man suffering from lockjaw neither wills nor can avoid feeling the pressure of his upper and lower jaws against one another. Secondly, though causality requires alternatives in the material cause, e.g. wax may or may not be melted, the determination between them is not always a decision of will, but in physical causation depends on the efficient cause, e.g. the fire: as Aristotle says, when the active and passive powers approach, the one must act and the other suffer, and it is only in rational powers that will decides (Met. Θ 5).
A. J. Balfour, in The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology (1895), begins by maintaining that the evidence of the senses is not a foundation of belief, and then expects us to believe in Nature and in God. He revives the “Acatalepsia” of the New Academy. In Part II., ch i., he makes three assumptions A. J. Balfour. about the senses, and, without stopping to prove them, or even to make them consistent, deduces from them his thesis that the evidence of the senses is not a foundation of belief in Nature. He first assumes an immediate experience of a body, e.g. a green tree; and then deduces that the evidence of the senses proves now and then to be fallacious, because we may have an experience indistinguishable from that of a tree but incorrect; and further, that our perceptions are habitually mendacious, because all visual experiences are erroneous, as colour is a sensation while the thing consists of uncoloured particles. This argument from a pure assumption is a confusion of sense and inference. In no case is the evidence of the senses fallacious or mendacious; the fallacy is in the inference.
He next assumes that we have no immediate experience of independent things—that sense perceives sensations, feelings, or ideas; while all else, e.g. a tree, is a matter of inference. On this quite new assumption of a sense of sensations he deduces that, from a perception of these mental facts, we could not infer material facts, e.g. a tree; so that again the evidence of the senses does not afford trustworthy knowledge of the material universe. His deduction is logical; but he has forgotten to prove the assumption, and now confuses sensory operation with sensible object. Vision does not perceive a sensation of colour; it perceives a visible picture, e.g. green, which is in the organism, but has never been proved to be a mental fact, or not to be a material fact. So touch perceives not a sensation of pressure, but a pressure which is a material fact in the organism. From a material pressure within we logically infer a material pressure outside. He thirdly assumes an appendix to the second assumption: he assumes that sense perceives mental sensations with succession but without causality, because no kind of cause is open to observation. On this assumption of a sense of sensations, but not of causality, he deduces that we could not from such data infer any particular kind of cause, or a bodily cause, e.g. a tree, or indeed any cause at all, or any event beyond perception, without assuming the principle of causation that Nature is uniform in cause and effect over great intervals of time and space. Nevertheless he gives absolutely no proof of the assumption that there is no sense of causality. There is none in the subsidiary senses, because none of them perceives the pressures exerted on them. But the primary sense of touch perceives one bodily member causing pressure on another, reciprocally, within the organism, from which we infer similar particular pressures caused between the organism and the external world; but without needing the supposed stupendous belief and assumption of the uniformity of Nature, which is altogether ignored in the inferences of the ordinary man. Finally, as touch perceives reciprocal pressure within, and tactile inference infers it without, touch is the primary evidence of the senses which is the foundation and logical ground of our belief in Nature as a system of pressing bodies. Balfour, however, having from unproved assumptions denied the evidence of the senses, and the rational power of using them to infer things beyond oneself, has to look out for other, and non-rational, foundations of belief. He finds them in the needs of man. According to him, we believe in Nature because it satisfies our material needs, and in God because he satisfies our spiritual needs. But bare need, e.g. a pang of hunger, is no cause of belief beyond itself; and desire, or need of something prospective, e.g. a desire of food, is effect, not cause, of a previous belief that there is such a thing, and of a present inference that it may again be realized. Moreover, when the belief or inference is uncertain, need even in the shape of desire is not in itself a foundation of belief in the thing desired: to need a dinner is not to believe in getting it; and, as Aristotle said, “there is a wish for impossibilities.” It is fair, however, to add that Balfour has a further foundation for the belief in Nature, the survival of the fittest, by which those only would survive who possessed and could transmit the belief. But here he fails exactly as Darwin himself failed. Darwin said, given that organisms are fit, they will tend to survive; but he failed to show how they become fit. Balfour says, given that men believe in Nature, they will survive; but he fails to show how they come to believe in it. Inference from sense is the one condition of all belief in anything beyond oneself, whether it be Nature, or Authority, or God; and it is the one condition of all needs, which are not mere feelings, but desires of things. The result of undermining this sure foundation emerges in Balfour’s attitude to the beliefs themselves. He holds that space, time, matter, motion, force, are all full of the insoluble contradictions supposed by Spencer; and that all our beliefs, in Nature and in God, stand on the same footing of approximations. Hence his really valuable arguments from Nature to God sink to the problematic form—there may be Nature; if so, there is God.
