MASSON’S RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY From The Nation, November 15, 1866. ⁴⁶

With the true metaphysician the real motive of his pursuit is, of course, his belief in its success and in the value of the truths, as such, which he aims to establish. But, in addition to this motive, many minds discover a certain dignity and absolute worth in the pursuit itself—in the exercise of powers which, though they should fail of their end, are regarded as the noblest and the most distinctive of the tendencies native to the human mind. To this somewhat sentimental view of the value of metaphysical studies, Sir William Hamilton gave his powerful support, and his disciple, Mr. Masson, urges it in apology for his Review. “Recent British Philosophy: A Review, with criticisms: including some comments on Mr. Mill's answer to Sir William Hamilton. By David Masson.” New York: 1866. ⁴⁷ The “greatest and most characteristic merit of Sir William Hamilton among his contemporaries consisted,” according to Mr. Masson, “in his having been, while he lived, the most ardent and impassioned devotee of the useless within Great Britain.” Mr. Masson does not tell us whether Hamilton has since his death been surpassed in this excellence; but on no point in metaphysics does Mr. Masson himself take a more decided stand than on this its claim to be a very ennobling pursuit. Of a nation which should cease to care for metaphysics, he says that it “has the mark of the beast upon it, and is going the way of all brutality.”

On more specific points of metaphysical doctrine, Mr. Masson’s opinions are not so distinctly set forth. He manifests, however, a certain affection for transcendentalism, and a confidence that there is something in it. But his aim in this volume is not so much to set forth his own opinions as to sketch the relations of the different philosophical systems that have been

most influential in Great Britain during the past thirty years, with reference chiefly to the writings of Sir William Hamilton, Mr. Mill, and Mr. Carlyle.

For this purpose he lays down, first, a scheme for the classification of possible metaphysical opinions, following Sir William Hamilton’s method, and, for the most part, adopting Hamilton’s divisions and nomenclature. An admiring imitator of Hamilton’s emphatic style, he divides and defines with a firmness, rather than a fineness, of discrimination. Starting with an a priori scheme of possible metaphysical opinions, he tries the doctrines of his three philosophers by it, and assigns them to their appropriate classes. A convenient original feature in his scheme enables him to accomplish this with considerable success. He distinguishes three forms of metaphysical belief, or three generic grounds of difference in philosophical opinion. A philosopher’s opinions may belong to his “psychological theory,” to his “cosmological conception,” or to his “ontological faith.” If his opinion is given in answer to the question, “Is any portion of our knowledge of a different origin from the rest, and of a different degree of validity in consequence of that different origin?” or “Are there any notions, principles, or elements in our minds which could never have been fabricated out of any amount of experience, but must have been bedded in the very structure of the mind itself?”—then his opinion will be the philosopher’s “psychological theory,” and he will be an “empiricist” or a “transcendentalism” according as he answers these questions in the negative or affirmative.

The most curious and original part of Mr. Masson’s scheme is the doctrine that the philosopher’s “cosmological conception” may be quite independent of his psychological theory;” that, in fact, any one may have a very distinct “cosmological conception” without any “psychological theory” at all. “A psychological theory” is a learned luxury, but every one has some sort of “cosmological conception” which is bodied forth in his sensuous image of the universe as a whole, and made, up of his ideas of religion and history and the eternal verities of the world.

Philosophers are fundamentally divided, as to their “cosmological

conceptions,” into realists and idealists, and subdivided into “materialistic realists” and “dualistic realists;” or “natural realists,” on one hand, and into “constructive idealists” and “pure idealists,” on the other. These four subdivisions are flanked by two extreme classes of opinion: nihilism or non-substantialism, on one hand, and pantheism or the “absolute identity” doctrine, on the other. These extreme classes involve, however, ontological considerations, and depend on the third generic ground of difference in philosophical opinion —on the philosopher’s “ontological faith.”

Ontology means the science of the supernatural, of the non-phenomenal. Can there be such a science? This question admits, according to Mr. Masson, of a division into two: “Is there a supernatural, and can the supernatural be known?” By the great majority of philosophers these questions are answered in the order in which Mr. Masson puts them: the first in the affirmative and the second in the negative; though it is a puzzle to the sceptic to understand how men can confess a belief in anything of which they profess themselves utterly ignorant. But Mr. Masson offers an ingenious explanation. “Ontological faith,” when it exists, depends not on evidence of any kind—the word faith connotes that—but on the existence in the philosopher of what Mr. Masson calls, euphemistically, “the ontological passion,” “the rage of ontology,” or “the sentiment of ontology.” “What has genius been,” he exclaims, “what has religious propagandism been, but a metaphysical drunkenness?” In its manifestation this passion appears to us very nearly akin to what, in the modern sense of the word, is expressed by “dogmatism.” A dogmatist is one who is fond of strong assertions, who concludes with his will, and reaches his conclusion by going to it when he finds no power, natural or supernatural, by which the mountain can be forced to come to him. But Mr. Masson appears innocently unconscious of this synonym.

By the help of the “ontological passion” and his scheme of classification he discovers the relations between the opinions of his three philosophers, especially between those of Hamilton and Mill, “one of whom may be described as a

transcendental natural realist, forswearing speculative ontology, but with much of the ontological passion in his temper; and the other as an empirical idealist, also repudiating ontology, but doing so with the ease of one in whom the ontological feeling was at any rate suppressed or languid.”

The earlier chapters of Mr. Masson’s book, which had gone to press before the publication of Mill’s “Examination of Hamilton,” anticipate two of Mr. Mill’s principal criticisms. The apparent discrepancy between Hamilton’s philosophy of the conditioned, or doctrine of relative knowledge, and his natural realism, or doctrine of the immediate perception of the primary qualities of matter, is explained by Mr. Masson by referring the former to Hamilton’s ontological doctrine, and the latter to his “cosmological conception;” and the apparent inconsistency of Hamilton’s philosophy of the conditioned with his theological positions is explained, as we have seen, by the degree to which he was possessed with the “ontological passion.”

“Transcendental natural realism in Hamilton, announcing itself as anti-ontological but with strong theological sympathies, and empirical, constructive idealism in Mill, also announcing itself as anti-ontological, but consenting to leave the main theological questions open on pretty strict conditions— such,” it seems to Mr. Masson, “were the two philosophical angels that began to contend formally for the soul of Britain about thirty years ago, and that are still contending for as much of it as has not in the mean time transported itself beyond the reach of either.” Whether any of it has done so, and how much, and where it has gone, are matters which Mr. Masson proceeds to discuss in his chapter on “the effects of recent scientific conceptions on philosophy.” Having in this chapter got off the scaffolding of his classification, he appears to us to have fallen into the most bewildering confusion. That part of the soul of Britain which appears to him to have got beyond the reach of traditional differences in philosophy, has done so, it seems to us, by confounding them with the vaguer scientific speculations which, according to Mr. Masson, have wrought this great change.

The idea that the world existed for innumerable ages without sentient life; that this life was gradually developed until it appeared in the full splendor of the human soul; that the earth and its history are but accidents in a grander cosmos, and that it and the cosmos are destined to an ultimate and universal collapse, to be refunded into a new homogeneous nebula, and to furnish elements to a new creation—this evolution from nebula, and this dissolution into nebula, repeated without end, making sentient life, the animal nature, and the human mind only phases of a continuous evolution—such ideas, our author thinks, make metaphysics stand aghast. What becomes of a priori and a posteriori, of transcendentalism and empiricism, when everything is a product and at the same time a factor; when nothing is primordial but nebula, and nebula neither matter nor mind, but the undifferentiated root of both? But Mr. Masson’s faith in transcendentalism, as he understands it, is proof against this new phase of thought. He thinks that under these new scientific conceptions transcendentalism and empiricism go a neck-and-neck race back through the ages, but that transcendentalism will get ahead at the nebula.

Now, in all this Mr. Masson has confused the philosophical dogma of an a priori determination of knowledge with the doctrine of heredity, the doctrine, to wit, that dispositions, tendencies to action, and perhaps, also, certain elements of knowledge, are derived by birth from the characters and mental powers of progenitors. He explicitly identifies the two by affirming that the doctrine of heredity is inconsistent with empiricism in philosophy. For this confusion he is probably indebted to Mr. Spencer, to whom the world owes the introduction in philosophy of these confounding scientific conceptions. Mr. Spencer and Mr. Masson do not appear to be aware that, by “an a priori ground of knowledge,” no reference is meant in philosophy to physical or physiological antecedency or causation, but only to the logical grounds of belief, or to the evidence of certain general propositions. The principal question of philosophy is, whether any general truth is known by any mind except in consequence—the

evidential consequence—of particular experiences, or else deductively. If it could be made out that certain general elements of knowledge are born in any mind in consequence of particular experiences in its progenitors, this would still be empiricism, and Mr. Spencer therefore professes empiricism, though he does not appear to know it. For transcendentalism maintains that certain so-called a priori elements of knowledge or general truths could not be vouched for by any amount of particular experience; and it is non-essential whether this experience be in the offspring or in its progenitors, even back to the nebula. Mr. Spencer and Mr. Masson have, therefore, got beyond the reach of “the two philosophical angels” only by getting confused by their scientific conceptions.

These nebulous conceptions have also dimmed Mr. Masson’s vision of another metaphysical doctrine, that of the cosmothetic idealists, as Hamilton called them, or, as Mr. Masson prefers to call them, the constructive idealists. Either he was misled by his own terminology, or for some other reason, he has assumed that the idealism of the majority of philosophers, including Mr. Mill, presupposed the existence of a perceiving mind to constitute a cosmos. To constitute a conceived cosmos, or the cosmos as known, it is undoubtedly necessary that a mind should exist to know it, or to be aware of its effects upon mind; but that the contemplation of such a mind is necessary to the absolute existence of a cosmos can be inferred from nothing in the doctrine of idealism; and it is only inferable, so far as we can see, from the connotation of the name which Mr. Masson gives to the more common form of the doctrine—from the name constructive idealism. He is puzzled to conceive how, on the idealist’s theory, the world could have had a progress and a history prior to its development of a perceiving mind, except, perhaps, in the mind of its Creator, who might be supposed to “have continued the necessary contemplation.”

We had before supposed that the scientific conceptions, which appear to have befogged our author, had not attained to such a degree of nebulosity as to represent the universe at

any time as of a nature incompatible with the existence of a perceiving mind, however unfit it may have been for the sustenance of the animal body with its perceptive organs; and we imagined that the history of the progress contemplated in these conceptions was one which was conceived as it would have appeared had it really existed and had minds existed to perceive it. But if the regress towards the nebula carry us back towards a state of things which would have been not only inhospitable but also incompatible with a distinct mental existence, then we confess that either idealism or else these scientific conceptions are much at fault. But, inasmuch as these are still conceptions, however indistinct, we cannot hesitate to give credit to idealism rather than to such self-annihilating thoughts. Thoughts of a state of things in which thought was impossible must be very transcendental indeed.

Independently of the perturbing influence of modern scientific conceptions, Mr. Masson’s account of recent British philosophy is not free from confusion. In revising in his last chapter his classification of Mill’s opinions as set forth in the “Examination” of Hamilton’s doctrines, Mr. Masson ventures to maintain that Mr. Mill’s empiricism is inconsistent with the position of the positivists, that the main theological questions should be open questions in the most advanced school of philosophy. He “can see no interpretation of Mr. Mill’s fundamental principle of empiricism, according to which those questions of a supernatural, which he would keep open, ought not to be, at once and forever, closed questions.”

A question is closed when we have a knowledge precluding the possibility of evidence to the contrary, or where we are ignorant beyond the possibility of enlightenment. An ontological knowledge of the supernatural, or even of the natural—that is, a knowledge of anything existing by itself and independently of its effects on us—is, according to the experiential philosophy, a closed question. But a phenomenal knowledge of the supernatural is nevertheless a question still open until it be shown, beyond the possibility of rational or well-founded doubt, that the law of causation is, or is not,

universal, and that absolute personal agency or free undetermined voluntary actions have, or have not, determined at any time the order or constitution of nature—difficult questions, it is true, but still open ones. Mr. Masson implicitly identifies theology with ontology—the supernatural with the non-phenomenal—and thus implicitly denies that anything can be known of the supernatural, unless it be known absolutely, or in itself. This is to stake all religious inquiry on the truth of transcendental ontology, a position which Mr. Masson, as a liberal historian of philosophy, cannot affirm as the final conclusion of his inquiry, or as warranted by any reasons he has advanced.