The Scottish Philosophy [171]
account given of those who have contributed by their literary works to diffuse a taste for metaphysical studies, such as Montaigne, Bayle, Fontenelle, and Addison. It should be admitted that the author has scarcely done justice to Grotius, and failed to fathom the depth of such minds as Leibnitz and Jonathan Edwards. I agree, moreover, with those who regret that he should ever have been tempted to enter on a criticism of Kant, whose works he knew only from translations and imperfect compends.
The next three volumes contain the" Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind," and are introduced by a portion of the " Outlines of Moral Philosophy." In the first volume of the "Elements" and in the opening of the second, he spreads out before us a classification of the intellectual powers, -- as perception, attention, conception, abstraction, association of ideas, memory, imagination, and reason. The list is at once defective and redundant. Stewart acknowledges self-consciousness, {288} which is an inseparable concomitant of all the present operations of the mind, to be a separate attribute; and in this he seems to be right, inasmuch as it looks at a special object, namely, self in the existing state, and gives us a distinct class of ideas, namely, the qualities of self, such as thinking and feeling. Yet it is curious that, while he gives it half a page in his " Outlines," it has no separate place in the "Elements." It is also a singular circumstance that Reid dismisses it in the same summary way. An inductive observation, with an analysis of the precise knowledge given us by self-consciousness, would give a solid foundation for the doctrine of human personality, and clear away the greater part of the confusion and error lingering in the metaphysics of our day. Nor is there any proper account given in the " Elements " of that important group of faculties which discover relations among the objects known by sense-perception and consciousness. The omission of this class of attributes has led him into a meagre nominalism, very unlike the general spirit 'of his philosophy. He restricts the word conception to the mere imaging power of the mind, and even to the picturing of bodily objects, as if we could not represent mental objects as well, as, for example, ourselves or others in joy or sorrow. In a later age, Hamilton has confined the term in an opposite direction to the logical or general notion. Stewart's classification is also redundant. Attention is not a separate faculty, but is an exercise of will, roused, it may be, by feeling, and fixing the mind on a present object. He does not seem to know what to make of reason as a distinct faculty; and, as defined by him, it ought to include abstraction, which is certainly a rational exercise. But, if the work is defective in logical grasp, it excels in its descriptions of concrete operations, and in its explanations and elucidations of phenomena presenting themselves in real life. All his works are replete with those "intermediate axioms " which Bacon commends as most useful of all, as being removed equally from the lowest axioms, which differ but little from particulars, and from the highest and most general, which are notional, abstract, and of no weight; whereas the " intermediate are true, solid, full of life, and upon them depend the business and fortune of mankind." The fine reflection and lofty eloquence of Stewart come out most pleasingly and instructively {289} in all those passages in which he treats of association and imagination.
On one important point, discussed frequently in the " Elements," the school of Reid and Stewart was led into error by their excessive caution, and by being awed so much by the authority of Locke. Reid maintained in a loose way, that we do not know substance, but qualities; and Stewart wrought this view into a system. We are not, he says, properly speaking, conscious of self or the existence of self: we are conscious merely of a sensation or some other quality, which, by a, leads to a belief
The next three volumes contain the" Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind," and are introduced by a portion of the " Outlines of Moral Philosophy." In the first volume of the "Elements" and in the opening of the second, he spreads out before us a classification of the intellectual powers, -- as perception, attention, conception, abstraction, association of ideas, memory, imagination, and reason. The list is at once defective and redundant. Stewart acknowledges self-consciousness, {288} which is an inseparable concomitant of all the present operations of the mind, to be a separate attribute; and in this he seems to be right, inasmuch as it looks at a special object, namely, self in the existing state, and gives us a distinct class of ideas, namely, the qualities of self, such as thinking and feeling. Yet it is curious that, while he gives it half a page in his " Outlines," it has no separate place in the "Elements." It is also a singular circumstance that Reid dismisses it in the same summary way. An inductive observation, with an analysis of the precise knowledge given us by self-consciousness, would give a solid foundation for the doctrine of human personality, and clear away the greater part of the confusion and error lingering in the metaphysics of our day. Nor is there any proper account given in the " Elements " of that important group of faculties which discover relations among the objects known by sense-perception and consciousness. The omission of this class of attributes has led him into a meagre nominalism, very unlike the general spirit 'of his philosophy. He restricts the word conception to the mere imaging power of the mind, and even to the picturing of bodily objects, as if we could not represent mental objects as well, as, for example, ourselves or others in joy or sorrow. In a later age, Hamilton has confined the term in an opposite direction to the logical or general notion. Stewart's classification is also redundant. Attention is not a separate faculty, but is an exercise of will, roused, it may be, by feeling, and fixing the mind on a present object. He does not seem to know what to make of reason as a distinct faculty; and, as defined by him, it ought to include abstraction, which is certainly a rational exercise. But, if the work is defective in logical grasp, it excels in its descriptions of concrete operations, and in its explanations and elucidations of phenomena presenting themselves in real life. All his works are replete with those "intermediate axioms " which Bacon commends as most useful of all, as being removed equally from the lowest axioms, which differ but little from particulars, and from the highest and most general, which are notional, abstract, and of no weight; whereas the " intermediate are true, solid, full of life, and upon them depend the business and fortune of mankind." The fine reflection and lofty eloquence of Stewart come out most pleasingly and instructively {289} in all those passages in which he treats of association and imagination.
On one important point, discussed frequently in the " Elements," the school of Reid and Stewart was led into error by their excessive caution, and by being awed so much by the authority of Locke. Reid maintained in a loose way, that we do not know substance, but qualities; and Stewart wrought this view into a system. We are not, he says, properly speaking, conscious of self or the existence of self: we are conscious merely of a sensation or some other quality, which, by a