The Scottish Philosophy [270]
vanish if we but carefully inquire into the nature of these convictions. Both propositions, when rightly understood, are true, and there is no contradiction. They stand thus: -- "We cannot image space as without bounds:" "we cannot think that it has bounds or believe that it has bounds." The former may well be represented as a creature impotency; the latter is, most assuredly, a creature potency, is one of the most elevated and elevating convictions of which the mind is possessed, -- and is a conviction of which it can never be shorn.
It will be seen from these remarks that I refuse my adherence to his peculiar theory of relativity, and to his maxim that " positive thought lies in the limitation or conditioning of one or other of two opposite extremes, neither of which, as unconditioned, can be realized to the mind as possible, and yet {448} of which, as contradictions, one or other must, by the fundamental laws of thought, be recognized as necessary." (Reid's " Works," P. 743.) It fails as to causation and as to infinity, and he has left no formal application of it to substance and quality, where, as Kant showed, there is no such infinite, as in infinite time and space or cause. He would have found himself in still greater difficulties had he ventured elaborately to apply his theory to moral good. As I believe him to have been on the wrong track, I scarcely regret that he has not completed his system and given us a doctrine of rational psychology or ontology. Indeed I have no faith whatever in a metaphysics which pretends to do any more than determine, in an inductive manner, the laws and faculties of the mind, and, in doing so, to ascertain, formalize, and express the fundamental principles of cognition, belief, judgment, and moral good. The study of logic began to revive from the time that Archbishop Whately constrained it to keep to a defined province. The study of metaphysics would be greatly promoted if the science would only learn to be a little more humble and less pretending, and confine itself to that which is attainable.
. We may now look at his work on Logic, which is a very elaborate one, and contains very able discussions and learned notes. It proceeds upon a very thorough acquaintance with Aristotle and his commentators, with the schoolmen and the logical writers of the seventeenth century; but was directly suggested by the Kantian criticism and amendment of logic, and by the works of such men as Esser, Fries, Krug, and Drobisch, who carried out the principles of the great German metaphysician. just as the " Port Royal Logic " has all the excellencies and defects of the philosophy of Descartes, so the logic of Hamilton has the combined truth and error of the metaphysics of Kant. It should be added, that his analytic; so far drawn from German sources in some of its fundamental views, is, after all, Hamilton's own, in the way in which it is wrought out and applied. Logic is defined as "the science of the laws of thought as thought." It is represented to be an science. "It considers the laws of thought proper as contained in the nature of pure intelligence." He does not state, and evidently does not see, that these laws of thought, while not the laws of the objects of thought, {449} are laws of thought as employed about objects, and can be discovered not , but simply by an observation of the workings of thought.
He reviewed the not very philosophical but very shrewd and useful work of Whately, in the " Edinburgh Review " for 1833, criticising it with terrible severity, and giving indications of his own views. He was already cogitating his system, he expounded it to his class after he became professor, and he gave it to the public in "An Essay toward a new Analytic of Logical Forms," being that which gained the prize proposed by Sir William Hamilton, in the year 1846, for the best exposition of the new doctrine propounded in his lectures, with an historical appendix, by Thomas Spencer Baynes. It would require a treatise as elaborate as
It will be seen from these remarks that I refuse my adherence to his peculiar theory of relativity, and to his maxim that " positive thought lies in the limitation or conditioning of one or other of two opposite extremes, neither of which, as unconditioned, can be realized to the mind as possible, and yet {448} of which, as contradictions, one or other must, by the fundamental laws of thought, be recognized as necessary." (Reid's " Works," P. 743.) It fails as to causation and as to infinity, and he has left no formal application of it to substance and quality, where, as Kant showed, there is no such infinite
He reviewed the not very philosophical but very shrewd and useful work of Whately, in the " Edinburgh Review " for 1833, criticising it with terrible severity, and giving indications of his own views. He was already cogitating his system, he expounded it to his class after he became professor, and he gave it to the public in "An Essay toward a new Analytic of Logical Forms," being that which gained the prize proposed by Sir William Hamilton, in the year 1846, for the best exposition of the new doctrine propounded in his lectures, with an historical appendix, by Thomas Spencer Baynes. It would require a treatise as elaborate as