McCOSH ON INTUITIONS From The Nation, Nov. 16, 1865. ⁴⁴

The philosophical and religious writings of Dr. McCosh have already secured for him a prominent position among living thinkers, and considerable influence both in Great Britain and America. The present work “The Intuitions of the Mind Inductively Investigated. By the Rev. James Mc- Cosh, LL.D., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Queen’s College, Belfast.” New and revised edition. 8vo. pp. 444. ⁴⁵ exhibits so much ability, good sense, and philosophical acumen that it will doubtless increase his reputation and prove him a worthy successor of the distinguished metaphysicians who have rendered his native land famous in the contests of philosophy. Though in many respects original, professing to follow no school, and in reality independent in its spirit of all authority but that of the religious truths in behalf of which it is written, this work is nevertheless substantially a development from the Scottish school. The author regards in the same light with this school the range and province of metaphysical inquiry, and treats the doctrines of all other schools in the same spirit. He finds in the writings of Reid and Stewart, it is true, statements which would logically “land us in very serious consequences,” but with the essence of their doctrines, and especially with the natural realism of Sir William Hamilton, he strongly sympathizes, though he goes somewhat beyond Hamilton in his theory of immediate consciousness.

His principal problem appears to have been to discover a theory of consciousness which shall assure us of as much as possible without carrying our assent on to the extremes to which the statements of philosophers too often logically tend. He seeks, that is, for a theory which shall assure us of the

reality and permanence of the external world without leading us into materialism, or into a belief of the absolute permanence of matter; which shall assure us of the reality of cause and effect and the existence of power in the world without bringing us to the “dismal consequences” to which Kant’s analysis of causation appears to lead; a theory which shall guarantee us a knowledge of substance or substantive reality, without upsetting our personality and landing us in pantheism; and which, at the same time, shall be free from the psychological objections that, since the time of Locke, have been urged against certain forms of the doctrine of intuitive universal truths.

A fundamental principle of Dr. McCosh’s system is that the mind always begins with the concrete, the singular, and the individual in its acquisition of knowledge, and arrives at universal truths—not, indeed, as the results of a process, but in the course of a process, in which the elements of universal judgments must be produced by particular experiences and special judgments. These particulars are, however, of such a nature that they warrant the universal judgment, not by the cumulative force of experience, but by the inherent force of each particular conviction, which comes from a power in the mind, and only awaits the formation of the proper formula by generalization in order to pronounce a decision of a universal character.

The author thus avoids the objections which have been so often urged against the doctrine of innate ideas. Universal judgments exist, he thinks, in the mind originally only as laws of our mental faculties, determining them to “look for” certain facts which are really universal, but are only discovered in individual cases; and the individual decisions carry in them the truth of the universal.

Having thus defined intuitive knowledge, our author proceeds to show how such knowledge can be distinguished from other kinds, and he lays down the tests which the philosophy of common sense has prescribed in the writings of the Scottish school, the tests, namely, of self-evidence, necessity, and catholicity or universality in human beliefs. He divides the cognitive

acts of the mind into three species, and adopts as the generic name for them the theological term “convictions.” There are the cognitive convictions, which decide immediately that an object exists, not only in relation to our faculties, but independently of them. By our cognitions we know, through sense-perception and self-consciousness, that something in particular exists, has existed, and will continue to exist. In other words, that something has present existence and present permanence. Such cognitions also decide immediately that the thing exists in space or is extended; also that it has power, or is a cause and will produce an effect. All this the intuitive powers of cognition anticipate by their innate nature, and they “look for” and discover all this in special experiences.

Such intuitions precede, both logically and chronologically, all other “convictions.” In this the author dissents from Hamilton’s doctrine, which supposes a faculty of faith to underlie all our cognitive acts. “Intuitive beliefs” form with him a derived class of “convictions”—not derived from our cognitions logically, but from them as furnishing the materials on which a new class of intuitive powers are brought to bear. Our faith-intuitions have no real objects presented to them. “I hold,” says the author, “that knowledge, psychologically considered, appears first, and then faith. But around our original cognitions there grows and clusters a body of primitive beliefs, which goes far beyond our personal knowledge.” Again he says: “Faith collects round our observational knowledge and even around the conclusions reached by inference.” His examples of primitive faiths are our beliefs in the infinity of time and space, and in infinity as an attribute of the nature of the Deity. They are “beliefs gathering round space, time, and the infinite.”

The third class of primitive convictions are called “primitive judgments,” and have for their objects the relations of the things with which our cognitions are conversant; and they arise from a power in the mind to anticipate, to the extent of looking for, certain necessary relations among objects, such as their necessary relations in space and time, the facts, for example, that the straight line is the shortest distance between

two points, and that two straight lines cannot inclose a space, and the like.

Such are the author’s analysis and description of our primitive convictions, the tests of which are, first, their self- -evidence; secondly, and dependent on this, their necessity; and thirdly, their catholicity. Self-evidence is the fact that the conviction exists in our own minds and exists independently of any other facts. Necessity of belief or the irresistible character of the conviction follows, according to the author, from this self-evidence. “I would not,” he says, “ground the evidence on the necessity of belief, but I would ascribe the irresistible nature of the conviction to the self-evidence. As the necessity flows from the self-evidence, so it may become a test of it, and a test not difficult of application.” Catholicity is also a derivative test, and, “when conjoined with necessity, may determine very readily and precisely whether a conviction be intuitive;” but all these tests “apply directly only to individual convictions. To the generalized expression of them the tests apply only mediately, and on the supposition and condition that the formulae are the proper expression of the spontaneous perceptions.” Originally these convictions are laws of the perceptive faculties guiding their action, though not determining their objects. Their objects are really discovered, and the conviction is primarily held, only in respect to particular perceptions or judgments. Generalizations are then made, but they are generalizations “of convictions in our own minds, each of which carries necessity in it.” There are, therefore, according to the author, two fundamentally distinct kinds of generalization, and in this respect his doctrine is quite original. Laws or general facts may be derived from an experience, necessarily limited, of facts which are either inferences more or less perfectly drawn from intuitive perceptions, or else facts at which no power of the mind “looks” intuitively, but which find their way into the mind by the force of repeated experiences. These are laws which say nothing about the possible; they only testify of the actual. But the laws which are immediate generalizations from intuitive perceptions and judgments “are of a higher and deeper nature; they are generalizations

of convictions carrying necessity with them, and a consequent universality in their very nature.”

This is briefly our author’s system, which he proceeds to apply to the various problems of metaphysics, such as the reality of cause and substance, and the self, and the external world. In ingenuity this theory appears to us to exceed anything which has come from the Scottish school, and in pliancy it exceeds, we think, any system which has ever been propounded. The extremes of philosophy are avoided by it with surprising agility. If any proposition be laid down as universally true from which logical consequences of a heterodox character are deducible, this system affords the means of modifying the proposition without impairing in any measure the evidence of its universality, since the infallible powers do not testify to the truth of any formula immediately, but only in so far as the formula represents the particular decisions of the mind. If, on the other hand, the “sceptic” calls in question the universality of any truth on the ground that the mind is cognizant only of the particular, or doubts the necessity of a belief on the ground that all experience is of the contingent, our author admits his grounds but denies that his conclusions follow, since universality and necessity do not come from the particulars of contingent experience as such, but from the powers of the mind looking through these into reality, and deciding absolutely only in regard to the particulars.

It is to be regretted, however, that the author does not give us a more explicit account of what he means by such expressions as “primitive particular convictions carrying necessity with them, and a consequent universality in their very nature.” In all the definitions of necessity with which we are acquainted, we have nowhere found it extended beyond the facts and the logical consequences of the facts in which it is supposed to exist primitively. That the universal does not follow logically from the particular or from any number of particulars, is what the author strenuously maintains. How, then, do the particulars carry in them the necessity of the universal? for this is what we understand the author’s expressions to mean. How unless it be that the particulars are known simply as

instances of the universal, the truth of which we possess as an independent knowledge? But such an independent knowledge of the universal the author as strenuously denies. The universal comes to consciousness, he thinks, only through the particulars, yet not by the way of suggestion or an awakening of a dormant truth, but rather as a fact which the particular contains in itself. It is not, according to the author, from the objects of intuition on one hand, nor from the powers of intuition on the other, that the truth of a universal proposition becomes known. This is obtained by the generalization of particular decisions of the mind. In the general maxim the mind re-cognizes what it has previously cognized in each and every one of the particular cases. The underived necessity of the particular conviction is somehow translated into the universal truth of the general maxim.

The author probably attaches to the word “necessity” a peculiar sense, as something more than mere cogency of belief, though he nowhere defines it in any other signification. There is a real and important logical distinction involved in this word, which renders the author’s theory intelligible enough, though quite a different doctrine from what he intends to set forth. There is a distinction in the logical use of the word necessity, as opposed to contingency, which relates not to the cogency of the belief with which a fact is held, but to the connection of the fact itself with other facts in our experience. When we say that “anything must be or must be so and so,” we mean to express something different from the statement that “this thing is or is so and so;” yet this difference does not refer to the originality, simplicity, or cogency of our belief in the statement. The copulas must be and cannot be involve in them universal propositions, though they connect only individual or particular terms. They mean that the truth they predicate is unconditional—is independent of any other facts; that there exists nothing to prevent the thing from being, or being so and so; or that the particular fact does not depend on any conditions which we can suppose from the evidence of experience to be variable. From the particular proposition, “These two straight lines cannot inclose a space,”

may be deduced, through the universality implied in the copula, the universal proposition, “No two straight lines can inclose a space.” For “cannot” here means that there are no conditions, or supposable variations of conditions, which will make a closed figure of these two lines. But the evidence on which such a fact rests will be equally good for any other two straight lines, since a change from these to another pair will not affect the conditions on which the truth of the particular case depends. Hence, “no pair of straight lines can inclose a space.” This follows from the unconditionalness of a particular fact—not from the cogency of our belief in it. This cogency is quite another affair.

By overlooking the universal, which is implied in an unconditional, particular proposition, our author has sought for the origin of the corresponding explicit universal in the character of our particular convictions as mental acts; whereas this character of universality really depends on the relations of particular facts to our experiences generally. We, therefore, come back to the difficulty, still unsolved, as to how we derive universality from a limited experience. Upon this Dr. McCosh lays down the usual dictum of his school. He says that “a very wide and uniform experience would justify a general expectation but not a necessary conviction; and this experience is liable to be disturbed at any time by a new occurrence inconsistent with what has been previously known to us.” But whence this liability? On what evidence is it supposed? Are we informed of it by an intuition or by experience? If by the former, then we have intuitions about other generalizations than universal ones, which is contrary to our author’s theory. If by the latter, then our experience is not uniform, which is contrary to his special hypothesis. As he, therefore, shuts himself off from both these sources of information on the subject, we are left no alternative but to conclude that his statement about the liability of our uniform experiences to be disturbed is wholly gratuitous and a begging of the question. Or perhaps he means that propositions which we do not feel obliged to believe, though not contradicted in our experience, should yet, from their analogy with

others which are occasionally contradicted, be regarded as liable to exception. But again we demand, Whence is the force of this analogy? What right have we to draw such a conclusion? Is it not also a virtual begging of the question? For, suppose it true, what the opposite school of philosophy teach, that there exist certain universal facts, not born into the mind either as innate ideas or as laws of its faculties, but existing as the universal circumstances into which the mind is born. There could be no exceptions to the uniformity of our experience of such facts, even if there were no necessity in our convictions of them; and although, as our author’s school believe, we always do have necessary convictions of such facts and of no others, the doctrine must rest, after all, on the evidence of induction—on the observation that the mark of necessity always does attend uncontradicted truths and no others. But the history of science as well as the discussions of philosophy contradict this induction. “There was a time,” says Mr. Mill, “when men of the most cultivated intellects and the most emancipated from the dominion of early prejudice, would not credit the existence of antipodes.” Our author, after quoting this example, observes: “I acknowledge that the tests of intuition have often been loosely stated, and that they have also been illegitimately applied, just as the laws of derivative logic have been. But they have seldom or never been put in the ambiguous form in which Mr. Mill understands them, and it is only in such a shape that they could ever be supposed to cover such beliefs as the rejection of the rotundity of the earth. . . . It is not the power of conception, in the sense either of phantasm or notion, that should be used as a test, but it is self-evidence with necessity.” He then proceeds to understate the facts of the case thus: “There was a time when even educated men felt a difficulty in conceiving the antipodes, because it seemed contrary not to intuition but to their limited experience; but surely no one knowing anything of philosophy or of what he was speaking would have maintained, at any time, that it was self-evident that the earth could not be round.” On this we have to observe, in the first place, that the difficulty of conceiving the antipodes was not, as the author appears to think, a difficulty of conceiving the rotundity of the earth, but a difficulty of conceiving men standing on the opposite side of the round earth, without having their feet stuck on, like flies to a ceiling, and this difficulty was such that these philosophers could not be made to credit its possibility; in other words, they had one of Dr. McCosh’s intuitions on the matter. Mr. Herbert Spencer, who follows the Scottish school in positing belief as a valid and ultimate test of the truths of universals, attempts to explain away this historical example by limiting the test to what is simple and “undecomposable,” and he supposes the conception of the antipodes to have been difficult or impossible to the ancients, and the fact to have been incredible, on account of the complexity of the conception. But we suspect the case to have been just the reverse of this. The antipodes were incredible to the ancients because they conceived the fact as a simple and unconditional one, and in contradiction of the equally simple and unconditional fact of their own standing on the earth. And it is because we in modern times are able to resolve both facts into the conditions on which they depend that they are seen not to be contradictory. So long as “down” was conceived as an absolute direction in the universe, dependent on nothing but its own nature, so long were the antipodes incredible and stood in contradiction of as simple, original, and necessary a belief as “that two straight lines cannot inclose a space.” In short, the ancients had in this case all the tests which the Scottish school apply as ultimate in the ascertainment of truth.

But what can be more ultimate? What other tests are there? this school demand. Perhaps there are no tests of a general character, or of simple and easy application; but, without awaiting an answer, this school describe all those who oppose them as “sceptics,” deniers of truth; whereas what the so-called “sceptics,” “idealists,” and “sensationalists” deny is only the validity of these tests as ultimate ones. What nobody doubts or calls in question, that, of course, nobody wants a test for, though it may be a useful and instructive

exercise in philosophy to generalize the conditions of ultimate credibility. But such conditions are illegitimately used as an appeal from the doubts or questions of philosophy. The Scottish school, half aware of this, commonly describe the opinions and doubts from which they appeal to intuition and common sense as either insincere or as positively wicked, and our author, in particular, regards all the errors and mistakes of philosophers as coming from a perverse will, from their not yielding to their intuitive, heaven-born convictions. He describes his opponents as “opponents of intuitive truth,” whereas they only oppose the theory which regards our simplest and most certain convictions as derived from a different source from that which assures us of all else that we know, namely, our experience of the world and of our own thoughts. The “sceptic” does not deny that our knowledges are produced according to laws which may be discovered in them by comparison and generalization, and his doubts and questions about metaphysical truths, such as the relation of cause and effect and the existence of the external world, are doubts and questions, not about the reality of these knowledges, but about the kind of reality they have, and this must be determined, he thinks, by the nature of the evidence on which they rest.

The “sceptic” does not deny that many of his beliefs are unconditional or necessary. He only denies that this quality is a proof of their simplicity or originality, and on this account he doubtless holds to them somewhat less willfully. By necessity he means unconditionalness, or that the fact is independent of all other known facts and conditions. Whatever the word necessity means more than this, comes, he thinks, from a rhetorical fervor of assertion; as if one should say, “This must be so,” meaning that he is determined that it shall be so. This sort of self-determination in their convictions the Scottish school doubtless have, and they are probably correct in not ascribing it to the evidence of experience; but then they are wrong in thinking that it comes from the reason since, in fact, its real origin is in the will.

The appeal from the “sceptic’s” questions to common sense

is inept in two important particulars. In the first place, the appeal is an ignoratio elenchi, for the questions are not questions of facts but questions of their philosophical explanations; questions of the origin and nature of the facts as knowledges. These have nothing to do with the cogency or simplicity of our beliefs, except to explain them. When the “sceptic” asks why some beliefs are so much more cogent than others, he is accused by this school of doubting whether they really are so, and he is referred for an explanation to the very facts which he seeks to explain. But, in the second place, no discussion is legitimate which appeals to an oracle not acknowledged by both parties. The proper appeal in all disputes is to common principles explicitly announced and understood in the same sense by both disputants. It is common, indeed, in physical investigations to speak of an appeal to experiment or to observation; still, by this is meant, not an appeal from anybody’s decision or opinion, but from everybody’s ignorance of the facts of the case. The facts in philosophy are so notorious that this sort of appeal is not required. What is sought by the so-called “sceptic” is the nature of the fact, its explanation; and he is not deterred from the inquiry by the seeming simplicity of the fact, but proceeds, like the astronomer, and the physicist, and the naturalist, by framing and verifying hypotheses to reduce the simple seeming to its simpler reality. In this the idealist does not deny that there is an existence properly enough called the external world, but he wishes to ascertain the nature of this reality by studying what the notion of externality really implies; what are the circumstances attending its rise in our thoughts, and its probable growth in our experience. In this research he does not forget that all explanation ultimately rests on the inexplicable; that “there is no appeal from our faculties generally;” he only denies that the present simplicity of a fact in our thoughts is a test of its primitive simplicity in the growth of the mind. For such a test would have deterred the astronomer from questioning the Ptolemaic system and the stability of the earth, or the physicist from calling in question nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum.

The oracular deliverances of consciousness, even when consulted by the most approved maxims of interrogation, cannot present a fact in the isolated, untheoretical form which criticism and scientific investigation demand. Philosophers are not the only theorizers. The vulgar, and the philosopher himself as one of them, have certain theoretical prepossessions, natural explanations and classifications of the phenomena which are habitually brought to their notice—such as the apparent movements of the heavens, and the axioms of hourly experience. How are these natural theories to be eliminated? How unless by criticism—by just such criticisms as those of the great “sceptic” Hume? But while the criticisms of Hume awoke the philosopher of Königsberg from his “dogmatic slumber,” and gave rise to the greatest philosophical movement of modern times, it appeared to affect the “sceptic’s” own countrymen only to plunge them into a profound dogmatic coma. The “sceptic” seemed to these philosophers to deny truth itself, and to demand a proof for everything. “There are truths,” says our author, “above probation, but there are none above examination, and the truths above proof are those which bear inspection the best.” This is the key to the whole Scottish method. The inspection of truths as to their credibility seems to these thinkers to be the chief business of philosophy. As if truths were on trial for their lives! As if the “sceptic” desired worse of them than their better acquaintance!

An appeal to an oracle silences but does not settle disputes. Principles to start from must be those for which no explanation is supposable. The existence of undisputed and indisputable facts is denied by no philosopher, and every true philosopher seeks for such facts; the “idealists” and the “sensationalists” as well as the rest. But idealism was ever a stumbling-block to the Scottish school, so much so that their intuitions seem to spring directly from an innate inability in the thinkers of that nation to understand this doctrine. They appear unable to distinguish between questions concerning the origin of an idea and a doubt of its reality. It is much as if a Ptolemaic astronomer should accuse a Copernican

of denying or ignoring the visible changes in the aspects of the heavens.

The “sceptic” does not doubt peremptorily, but always for cause. He does not profess to doubt realities or principles, but only whether certain truths are principles or simple cognitions, and whether they are cognitions having the kind of reality they are vulgarly supposed to have. There would be a sort of grim humor in our author’s discussion of “what are we to do to the sceptic?” and what we should and what we should not do for him, were it not that the discussion is too obviously a serious one. The author does not see that what we ought to do is to try to understand the “sceptic,” and what we ought not to do is to misrepresent him.

“Precipitate and incorrect as Hume’s conclusion was” concerning the possibility of a science of metaphysics, “yet,” says Kant, “it was at least founded on investigation, and this investigation was well worthy that all the best intellects of his time should have united successfully to solve the problem, and, if possible, in the temper in which he proposed it, for from this a total reform of the science must soon have arisen. Only the unpropitious fate of his metaphysic would have it that it should be understood by none. One cannot without a certain feeling of pain see how utterly his adversaries, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and later Priestly also, missed the point of his problem. By continually taking for granted just what he doubted, but on the other hand proving with vehemence, and, what is more, with great indecorum, what it never came into his head to doubt, they so mistook his hint towards improvement that everything remained in the old state, as though nothing had happened.”—[Prolegomena to every Future Meta- physic which can be put forth as a science. Introduction.]

We will only add that our author has not improved upon his predecessors.