To Mr. Abbot.

Cambridge, July 9, 1867.

. . . The long intervals in our debate add to it a certain dignity, let us believe. The discussion is one which reaches across the centuries, and rises above the conditions of time, space, and circumstance, by at least having these for its objects.

I was much interested to learn from you, also, that your views have undergone considerable modifications in the form of concessions to empiricism. My interest in the questions between us has always been much less practical than yours. It has been almost entirely speculative, because I have always believed that the really essential positions of morals and religion could be sustained on the “lower” ground of common-sense, — on what men generally understand and believe independently of their philosophical theories; and I have always felt that philosophy was concerned with matters of theoretical interpretation rather than with practical matters of fact. Indeed, the history of philosophy hardly ever exhibits any divergence in opinion as to simple questions of practice, as to what should be done next in any given state of social circumstances, — though it is one of the weapons of the orthodox to deduce the direst practical consequences from their opponents’ theories. It is upon the causes of the admitted state of facts, or upon the grounds of the allowed desirable changes in them, that thinkers differ practically. The

distinction between “conservative” and “progressive” in practical matters, has hardly ever been coincident with fundamental differences in philosophical opinions; and in proportion as men become absorbed in practical questions do the old party lines of philosophical thought disappear. Witness the entirely distinct personalities which Mr. Mill presents as a speculative thinker and as a practical statesman. Few who have come to know and respect him in his later public capacity know or care about his theory of cognition.

I accordingly regard the duty of liberality in speculative matters as a disagreeable and compulsory one, only towards those thinkers, of whatever school, who maintain that their theories involve exclusively the welfare of mankind, — who accuse their opponents of denying some admitted and obvious facts in practical matters. Any one whom we are bound to respect is bound to know such facts, and to know how to act accordingly. If he does not, we put him in an asylum, —out of respect for the humanity which he has, nevertheless. Men conclude in matters affecting their own welfare so much better than they can justify rationally, — they are led by their instincts of reverence so surely to the safest known authority, that theory becomes in such matters an insignificant affair. How weak theory is in general, can be judged by the slow progress men have made in knowledge foreign to their immediate wants, — in scientific knowledge. And the explanations which they have hitherto given of their beliefs in practical rules of conduct afford the best possible evidence of the practical weakness of theory even in the most important matters. To stake any serious human concern on the truth of this or that philosophical theory seems to me, therefore, in the highest degree arrogant and absurd, as coming from a confused begging of some philosophical question, — from taking for granted that something is important practically which is in theory problematical; from taking for granted, for example, that our duties would

be different, or be more or less binding on us according as our faith in a future life should be well or ill founded.

My interest in philosophical and disputed matters is, therefore, almost entirely speculative. It is not quite so, because clear, scientific knowledge has important practical consequences. The truths of astronomy and chemistry, for example, have conferred great and unforeseen benefits, and so may the truths of philosophy when fully ascertained; but, so long as there is room for dispute and enlightened doubt, there are no practical applications which can rightly prejudge theory, though it is common enough in philosophical disputes to make an illogical reductio ad injuriam of an opponent’s views. When errors are really exploded, as in the case of the false religious philosophy of the “inquisition,” we see clearly what enormous practical consequences are involved in philosophical theories. And it is an interesting question, how much injury may be done by the influence of false views of philosophy, in the aims and methods of education now-a-days,—whether many poor bodies are not tortured to their deaths by a tax put upon them through an over-stimulation of the mind and conscience, by a tax which is philosophically credited to the supposed inexhaustible powers and undying nature of the soul. But to accuse a creed of such consequences, until scientifically proved, would be to commit the error in speculation which above all others I reprobate.

Your movement toward empiricism interests me the more, because I suspect that no genuine thinker can remain long in the position of an eclectic, such as M. Cousin held so many years. Eclectic systems have rarely outlived the vanity of their authors, who would be priests and philosophers at the same time. If, then, your conscience does not deceive you with illusive evidence, I am almost confident that you will come out in what you call “empiricism,” — in what Mill calls the experiential philosophy, or what Comte called positivism.

This philosophy denies nothing of orthodoxy except its confidence; but it discriminates between the desirableness of a belief and the evidence thereof. Faith is in this philosophy what it was with St. Paul, a sentiment, not a faculty of knowledge. A man who has invested all his goods in a mine believes the more readily in its hidden wealth, and is not so likely to suspend his judgment on the question, as he would be on the question of the habitableness of the planet Saturn. He will, nevertheless, if he remain of sane mind, admit that the judgment of an unprejudiced geologist, who can so suspend his judgment, is better than his own, and that the geologist’s report is a better guide than his own hope. So it is with the positivist. So far are his positions from leading to heterodox conclusions in religion, as they are constantly accused of doing, that it is only by a hitherto unrecognized formula of logic that they can possibly be conceived to do so; namely, “that sublating the reason sublates the consequence, and posits its contradictory,”— that to reject the authority of revelation and the validity of the arguments of natural theology is to prove atheism! A positivist in the pulpit would thus be no anomaly. He would only be a preacher who knows how much better the dignity of the highest moral character is than any excellence in a life common with that of the beasts, — whether it endure longer or not; who knows that duty is as real and as binding on all men, in subserving the real ends, which God is supposed to care for especially, as it would be if the evidence of God’s existence were a hundred-fold more cogent, and duty were really known to be his commandment.

But I have run a great way off the track in following the reflections which your apostasy from the orthodox philosophy has suggested. I meant, in writing to you, only to acknowledge your letter, and to resume, then, the thread of our debate.

You infer from my exposition of the empiricist’s doctrine of

space and time that I “deny them all independent objective existence.” I would modify a little this deduction. I regard them as objects, — phenomenal objects, — and not merely as forms of sensibility. As to their “independent objective” (if you mean by this, noumenal) existence, I can deny or affirm nothing,—only that space and time, as we know them, and, consequently, as they are, to us, are relations among phenomena; and, as we know, they depend, or “are conditioned on the existence of phenomena themselves.” Your conclusion, that “could we conceive the annihilation of phenomena, the relations subsisting between them would also be annihilated,” is, therefore, in substance, correctly deduced, though it should be more explicitly stated that the phenomena and the relations here spoken of are also “conditioned on the existence” of a knowing mind; and that the annihilation supposed is the annihilation of thought as well as of its object. What would remain we know nothing about. Things in themselves and their relations to one another, whether real or not, are not real to us, — are not objects of our knowledge; though, if they exist, they may be the causes of our knowledge.

I assent also to your inference that, in my opinion, “relations are objective realities;” but I would not be understood as allowing by this that I regard them as noumenal realities. Whether the latter exist, and whatever they may be, the relations of which we are treating are relations of objects, which are only known as objects to us, and as conditioned on our cognizance of them. I believe that the relations between such objects belong to them, — are objective, — and are not moulds or forms in us into which objects fit.

When I spoke of the relations of time and space as “intuitions of sense,” I ought, perhaps, to have explained that I did not hold the abstract cognizance of them as possible in sensuous, or, indeed, in any other intuition. Such cognizance implies, it seems to me, the abstractive action of the attention

in understanding, — not any intuitive power at all. More correctly, I should have said that the grounds of relations (fundamenta relationum) are intuitions of sense; the relations themselves, as distinct from their concrete terms, being cognizable, not intuitively, but only by abstraction, and being representable only by the reproduction of such and so many sensuous data as are implied in them. The cognizance of relations is, indeed, an abstractive grouping of phenomena. The twoness of two hats (to take your example) is as much in the hats as their color, texture, or form; but the cognizance of it in the abstract is not an intuitive process at all. It adds no content to the concrete cognizance of the group. It subtracts rather the texture, form, use, and all other attributes of the manifold object, — leaving to our attention only difference in space and a species of plurality, which, by similar acts, we have generalized under the name of “two.” I, “who admit the objectivity of relations, and hold them to be immediately known [in the concrete], can deny that here is logically necessitated a higher intuitive faculty than sense,” because to me intuition signifies a concrete addition to the content of our cognitions. I admit that space, time, and number are peculiar, — unlike most other apparently simple notions which we generalize from the manifold of sensuous intuitions. They are not referable to simple and unanalyzable sensations, such as give us the color and texture of the hats; nor are they analyzable into a plurality of simpler relations, such as is implied in the use of the hats. They resemble the latter notion in being distinctly cognizable only by abstraction. They resemble sensations in being apparently simple. It may be admitted, until an analysis has been proposed, that number, and perhaps also time, are simple, unanalyzable properties of things in general as objects of knowledge. That they appear only in acts of abstraction and understanding does not prove, however, that they are intuitions of a supersensuous faculty, unless it can be shown that the understanding adds as well as subtracts in its discursions.

With space, the case is different. Our apprehension of it may in one way be analyzed. Introspective analysis cannot, it is true, resolve it into simpler elements; but we can easily conceive of it as an idea of sensation (as Locke called it), as consisting of an unanalyzable group of sensations cemented by insoluble associations. On this hypothesis, the universality of space in our cognitions comes from its invariable association with other and really simpler sensations, and its simplicity comes from the limit in our powers of introspective analysis.

It appears to me that Kant’s division of our knowledges into the data of experience and the conditions of experience (the one being the intuitions of sense, and the other being the forms of sensibility and understanding) came from a mistaken deference to the philosophical prejudice that that must belong intrinsically to the mind which we cannot by abstraction extrude from thought. It doubtless does belong to the reflective and developed mind, and belongs to it as contrasted with further acquisition, or as contrasted with additional experience; but this does not prove or imply that the forms of sense and thought were not determined by experience in the first instance, or were not then, as ever afterwards, as much the data of experience as what is called “contingent knowledge.” I cannot therefore subscribe to Kant’s distinction of the “conditions” and the “data” of experience as fundamental ones; nor can I admit that there is any better ground for your distinction in similar terms. By intuition, I understand, not what we cannot analyze into simpler elements by introspection, but, generally, what cannot be supposed to be composed of simpler elements even in the infancy of the mind. Mr. Mill’s psychological method is supplementary to the introspective method of the thinkers of your school; and, until

its resources are exhausted, I cannot believe that the questions of philosophy are definitively settled.