SECT. I. On the Origin of our Knowledge and Ideas ..... SECT. I. Limits to our Knowledge, Ideas, and Beliefs.... SECT. IV. Relation of Intuition and Experience....... SECT. V. On the Necessity attached to our Primary Convictions SECT. VL (Supplementary.)—On the Distinction between the Understanding and the Reason; between à priori and à posteriori Princi- ples; between Form and Matter; between Subjective and Objective; between the Logical and Chronological Order of Ideas; between the Cause and Occasion of Innate Ideas....... 310 VI. (Supplementary.)—On the Relativity of Knowledge...... SECT. VII. (Supplementary.)—Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill's Metaphy- INTUITIONS OF THE MIND. INTRODUCTION. AIM OF THE WORK AND METHOD OF INQUIRY. ACCORDING to one class of speculators, the mind derives all its knowledge, judgments, maxims, from observation and experience. According to another school, there are ideas, truths, principles, which originate in the native power, or are seen in the inward light of the mind. These mental principles have been called by a great number of names, such as innate ideas, intuitions, necessary judgments, fundamental laws of belief, principles of common sense, first or primitive truths; and very diverse have been the accounts given of them, and the uses to which they have been turned. This is a controversy which has been from the beginning, and which is ever being renewed in one form or other. It appears to me that this contest is now, and has ever been, characterized by an immense complication of confusion; and confusion, as Bacon has remarked, is more difficult to rectify than open error. I am not, in this treatise, to plunge at once into a thicket, in which so many have lost themselves as they sought to find or cut a way through it. But my aim throughout is to ascertain what are the actual perceptions or laws in the mind pointed at by these various phrases, what is their mode of operation, what the rulo which they follow, and what the purposes which they are competent to serve. As the result, it will appear that there are in the mind such existences and powers as primary perceptions and fundamental laws of belief, but that they are very different in their nature from the 1 (1) picture which is frequently given of them, and that they are by no means fitted to accomplish the ends to which they have often been turned in metaphysical and theological speculation. I would as soon believe that there are no such agents as heat, chemical affinity, and electricity in physical nature, as that there are no immediate perceptions and native-born convictions in this mind of ours. 1 consider the one kind of agents, like the other, to be among the deepest and most potent at work in this world, mental and material; and yet the one class, like the other, while operating every instant in soul or body, are apt to hide themselves from the view. Indeed they discover themselves only by their effects, and their law can be detected only by a careful observation of its actings; and it should be added, that both are capable of evil as well as good, and are to be carefully watched and guarded in the application which is made of them. The prejudice against native and necessary principles has arisen to a great extent from the extravagant account which has been rendered of them, and from the vain, the ambitious, and often pernicious purposes which they have been made to serve. It is to be hoped, that by a clear determination of their exact nature, and of the rules of their operation, and by a judicious exposition of the method by which alone they can be discovered, and of the restrictions which should be laid on their employment, the feeling against them on the part of so many, philosophers and non-philosophers, may be dispelled; while at the same time rash speculators may be prevented from using them for the furtherance of pretentious ends to which they have no legitimate reference. In inquiring into the evidence of their existence, into the place which they hold in the constitution of the mind, into the laws by which they are guided, and the way in which they manifest themselves, I am to proceed throughout in the Method of Induction. I profess to prosecute the investigation in the way of the observation of facts--with an accompanying analysis and coördination, but still of facts, which have been carefully collected. It has often been shown that the method of induction admits, mutatis mutandis, of an application to the study of the human mind, as well as to that of the material universe. The difference in the application lies mainly in this, that in the one case we use self-consciousness or the internal sense, whereas in the other we employ the external sense, as the organ or instrument. I certainly do not propose to find out the intuitions of the mind by the bodily eye, aided or unaided by the microscope, nor discover their mode of operation by the blowpipe. They are in their nature spiritual, and so sense cannot see them, or hear them, or handle them, nor can the telescope in its widest range detect them. Still they are there in our mental nature; there is an eye of wider sweep than the telescope, and more searching than the microscope, ready to be directed towards them. By introspection we may look on them in operation; by abstraction or analysis we may separate the essential peculiarity from the rough concrete presentations; and by generalization, we may rise to the law which they follow. But let me not be misunderstood. The method pursued, as it is not on the one hand to be confounded with an ambitious transcendentalism which declines to ask help from observation, so it is as little on the other hand to be identified with a miserable sensational empiricism. I do not expect to discover what are the native principles of the mind by a priori speculation, but neither do I profess by observation to lay or construct a foundation on which to rear fundamental truth. I am not, therefore, to be lightly charged with a contradiction, as if I resorted to experience for a basis or ground of principles which I represent as original and independent. I employ induction simply as a mean or method of finding laws which are prior to induction, otherwise induction could not find them. Experience is not supposed by me to furnish the ground of necessary truth; all that it can do is to supply the facts which enable us to discover the truth, and that the truth is necessary. I allude to this objection, not with the view of formally meeting it here, but in order to show that it has not been overlooked, and then adjourn the discussion of it to its appropriate place. It will come out, in the course of our survey, that while there are regulative principles in In professing to follow the Method of Induction, I use the phrase as Bacon did, in a large sense, as standing for that whole mode of procedure which begins with the observation of facts, and makes its final appeal to facts as establishing the law. But in this process there may be a deductive element; as when we suppose that the law is so and so, that is, devise an hypothesis, and inquire what consequences would follow, always with the design of trying these results by facts, and adopting the alleged law only when it can stand the test. |