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"differentia" is the better, and is more frequently employed. It is in metaphysics that the word "essence" is supposed to have a place. Thus the question is often put, What is the essence of mind? or, What is the essence of body? or, What is the essence of this individual mind, or of this piece of clay or chalk? Now we can answer such a question as this, only when we are allowed to draw distinctions and offer explanations. First, we may allowably conceive that every one object, and every class of objects, has an aggregate of things which go to constitute it, and we may with perfect propriety refer to such an essence as possibly or probably existing,' but always on the distinct condition forthwith to be specified more formally, that we do not speak of the essence as something which can be known by us in all its totality. Secondly, there are some things which we know to belong to the essence of certain objects; thus we know that being, power, and permanence, are essential to all substance, and that certain qualities, such as consciousness and thought, belong to mind, and certain qualities, such as extension and incompressibility, to body. But we must ever guard against the idea that there may not be other qualities also essential to these objects. For, thirdly, the essence of a thing, at least in its totality, must always be unknown to man. How many things are united in body or mind, or in any individual mind or material object, this can never be ascertained by human observation or ingenuity. In this sense it is proper in us to speak of the essence of things as being unknown to man; meaning thereby, not that we cannot know the substance, which I maintain we do know, or that we cannot know some of the qualities which go to make up the essence, but merely that we cannot know what precisely constitutes the essence, in its entireness. But, fourthly, we are not warranted to maintain that there must be something lying further in than the qualities we know, and that this one thing is entitled to be regarded as the essence of the object. We have no ground whatever for believing that there must be, or that there is, something more internal or central than the substance

1 Locke, Letter to Stillingfleet, takes Essences "to be in everything that internal constitution, or frame, or modification of the Substance, which God, in his wisdom and good pleasure, thinks fit to give to every particular creature when he gives it a being; and such essences I grant there are in all things that exist."

and quality which we know. True, there are probably occult qualities, even in those objects with which we are most intimately acquainted, but we are not therefore warranted to conclude that what is concealed must differ in nature or in kind from what is revealed, or that it is in any way more necessary to the existence or the continuance of the object. I have a shrewd suspicion that there is a vast amount of unmeaning talk in the language which is employed on this special subject by metaphysicians, who would see something which the vulgar cannot discern, whereas they should be contented with unfolding the nature of what all men perceive. It is quite conceivable, and perfectly possible, that though we should know all about any given material or spiritual object, we should after all not fall in with anything more mysterious or deep than those wonders which come every day under our notice in the world without, or the world within us.

SECT. V.-ON PERSONALITY.

Our perception of personality is closely connected with our knowledge of being, but there is more in personality than in being. We know material objects as having existence, but we have a special apprehension in regard to self beyond what we have in regard to material objects. Like every other simple perception, it cannot be defined, but it may be brought out to separate view by abstraction; and consciousness (with memory) will recognize it as one of the cognitions which it had seen before in company with others. We express this conviction when we say we are persons. The abstract idea is one not likely to be spontaneously formed. The infant, the child, the savage, are not in the habit of making

"This self-personality, like all other simple and immediate presentations, is indefinable; but it is so, because it is superior to definition. It can be analysed into no simpler elements, for it is itself the simplest of all; it can be made no clearer by description or comparison, for it is revealed to us in all the clearness of an original intuition, of which description and comparison can furnish only faint and partial resemblances" (Mansel, Prolegomena Logica, p. 129; see also Metaphysics). It was the greatest of all the oversights of Kant that he did not give personality a place among the intuitions of the mind, to which it is entitled quite as much as space and time. Held in by no primary belief in personality, those who came after, such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, wandered out into a wide waste of Pantheism. Taking with them no belief in the personality of self, they never could reach personality in God.

any such analysis of consciousness, nor are the great body of mankind at the trouble of asserting their own existence. Such a proposition, with its subject and predicate, will be formed only after philosophy has taken a shape, probably only after sophistry

and scepticism have been attacking our original convictions. It is only the metaphysician who will ever take the trouble of affirming that he exists, and the wise metaphysician will refrain from going further and trying to prove that he exists.

Yet it is a conviction which the mind ever carries with it; it is one of the high characteristics of humanity. Inanimate matter is without it. The brute shows that he is tending towards it, yet can have it only in an incipient degree. It is an essential characteristic of the man's individuality, and is one of the main elements in his sense of independence, in his sense of freedom, in his sense of responsibility. As possessing it, man feels that he is independent of physical nature; independent of all creature intelligences; independent, in a sense, of God, against whom, alas! he may rebel, and to whom he must for certain give an account. It is a conviction to be used and not abused. It would certainly be perverted were it to seduce man to isolate himself from the objects around him, to try to become independent of the provisions made in physical nature to aid his weakness, or to separate himself from his brothers or sisters of humanity; and still more were it to tempt him to rebel against God. It is properly used when, under the guidance of moral law, it is leading him, not to be ever floating on with the stream, but at times to be standing up in the midst of it and acting as a breakwater in its current, or as a martyr seeking to stem the tide of corruption, or Prometheus-like, rising up, not against the true God, but against the false gods who rule in Olympus. Powers hostile to the progress of humanity have sought to subdue this principle. Absolutism would crush it, and make man live for some slavish end, political or ecclesiastical. Pantheism would dissipate it till man loses all individuality, and becomes relaxed, as he moves listlessly, in a hot and hazy atmosphere. It is this conviction which makes man feel that he is not a mere bubble on the surface of being, blown up in one chance agitation, and about to be absorbed in another. It keeps man from being

lost,-lost in physical nature, lost in the crowd of human beings, or lost in the ocean of being; he is, after all, and amidst all, a person As such he has a part to perform, an end to serve, a work to do, a destiny to work out, and an account to render.

SECT. VI.-ON EXTENSION.

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The knowledge of extension is involved in every exercise of sense-perception, even as the knowledge of personality is implied in every exercise of self-consciousness. We certainly cannot employ the senses of sight and muscular energy, we cannot, I believe, perceive through any of the senses, without knowing the object, be it the organism or something affecting the organism, as possessing extension-always along with other qualities. This, then, is historically the origin of our idea of extension or space, that is, we have a perception of it in every cognition of body. But in this primitive knowledge we do not apprehend it as distinct from body. It is an extended and a coloured surface, which we know through the eye; it is an extended body capable of resisting us, which we know through the muscular sense and locomotive energy; it is a set of organs localized and out of each other, that we know by the other senses.' But by an easy intellectual act we can

1 Prof. Bain maintains (The Senses and Intellect, 2d ed. p. 397), that the localization of our bodily feelings is the result of experience. I admit that it is by the muscular sense and the eye that we know the external configuration of our frame, and that it is by a gathered experience we connect this with the internal feelings. But I hold that we give an externality and a direction to our bodily sensations. Mr. Bain acknowledges that the body is to us an external object (p. 397). If so, it must be known in space. But it has never yet been shown how we can know an object as external to us and in space except intuitively. "I do not see," says Mr. Bain, in criticising Hamilton (p. 376), "how one sensation can be felt out of another without already supposing that we have a feeling of space." What we suppose is that in thus regarding the body as external and localizing the sensations we get the idea of space. It is a law of this localizing that the sensation is felt at the part of the body to which the nerve reaches. And "when different parts of the thickness of the same nerves are severally subjected to irritation, the same sensations are produced as if the different terminal branches of these parts of the nerves had been irritated. If the ulnar nerve be irritated mechanically, particularly by pressing it from side to side with the finger, the sensation of pins and needles is produced in the palm and back of the hand, and in the fourth and fifth finger. But according as the pressure is varied the pricking sensation is felt by turns in the fourth finger, in the fifth, in the palm of the hand, on the back of the hand, and both in the palm and on the back of

separate the extension from the impenetrability and the associated sensations. We are greatly aided in our apprehensions of empty space by certain exercises of sense-perception. For we have experience ever presenting itself of two bodies seen or felt, with nothing between obvious to the senses. True, scientific research shows that the interval is not a pure vacuum, that there is air, or ether, between the bodies; still it is in our apprehension a void,— that is, a space, with no perceived body to fill it. We are thus led to an apprehension of space as different from body occupying space. We are not to look on the extension thus reached as an illusion, a nonentity, or as nothing. If we know, as I maintain we do, body in space, the space must have an existence (I do not say what sort of existence), just as much as the body has. When we separately contemplate the extension, we are contemplating a reality just as verily as when we perceive the body. It will not do to dismiss space summarily by describing it as a mere abstraction; in order to our apprehension of it there is need of abstraction, but it is an abstraction of a real part from a real whole.

This

To this cognition of space, and to every apprehension of it, there is attached a number of intuitive beliefs. It is the business of the metaphysician to unfold these in an inductive manner, and point out and determine their nature and laws as precisely as possible. falls to be done in another Book of this Treatise, to which therefore the hand the situation of the pricking sensation is different according as the pressure on the nerves is varied, that is to say, according as different fibres or fasciculi of fibres are more pressed upon than others" (Müller's Physiology, pp. 745-747). Surely all this is instinctive, not acquired. So deep is the disposition to localize that it cannot be eradicated. "When a limb has been removed by amputation, the remaining portion of the nerve which ramified in it may still be the seat of sensations which are referred to the lost part." sations are not of an undefined character, the pains and tingling are distinctly referred to single toes, to the sole of the feet, to the dorsum," etc. A case is quoted of a person whose arm had been amputated, and who declared twenty years after that " the sense of the integrity of the limb is never lost." There is appended a note by Baly: "Professor Valentin has observed, that individuals who are the subjects of congenital imperfection or absence of the extremities have nevertheless the internal sensations of such limbs in their perfect state. A girl aged nineteen years, in whom the metacarpal bones of the left hand were very short, and all the bones of the phalanges absent, a row of imperfectly organized wartlike projections representing the fingers, assured M. Valentin that she had constantly the internal sensation of the palm of the hand on the left side as perfect as in the right."

"These sen

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