The Scottish Philosophy [296]
charge "Mr. David Home, brother to Ninewells, as being the father of her child." But this woman had previously had three illegitimate children; she had refused to say who was the father of her child when David Hume was in the country, though it was known he was leaving, and she brought the charge after he was gone. The Presbytery of Chirnside, when the case was brought before them, rebuked the woman for her conduct, and there is no other record of the matter. It is a curious circumstance that this incident should have happened at the time when the youth was leaving his home in so singular a frame of mind. [35]"Memoirs of R. and J. A. Haldane," chap. xxv. [36]J.S. Mill labors to derive all our ideas and convictions from sensations. He is to be met by showing that we never have a sensation without knowing a self as sentient. [37]Mr. Mill is in difficulties at this point, and avows it in a foot-note, P. 174: Our belief in the veracity of memory is evidently ultimate; no reason can be given for it which does not presuppose the belief, and assume it to be Well grounded." The full facts of the recognitive power of memory are not embraced in this brief enunciation, but there is much stated, and more implied; he should have inquired how much is involved, and he would have seen that there is truth admitted fatal to his system. He should also have shown on what ground he proclaims this belief to be "evidently ultimate," and then we might have shown that on the same ground, that is self-evidence, we are entitled to call in the other ultimate beliefs. [38]J.S. Mill's treatment of space and time is superficial. He brings in time quietly without noticing it, or giving any account of it. He does not see that the idea of it in the concrete is involved in memory; we remember the event as happening . He derives our idea of space from that of the time occupied by our muscular sensations: " When we say that there is a space between A and B, we mean that some amount of these muscular sensations must intervene." " Resisting points " are said to be " at different distances from one another, because the series of intervening muscular sensations is longer in some cases than in others " (pp. 228, 229). He thus avowedly makes, p. 227, an "identification" of length in time and length in space " as one; " whereas our consciousness declares them to be as different as it is possible for ideas to be. The hypothesis on which he and Professor Bain build their whole theory of the origin of our idea of extension, viz., the sensations of our muscles, is doubted by some. The conclusion of F.H. Weber, from numerous and careful observations, is: "Of the Voluntary motion of our limbs, we know originally nothing. We do not perceive the motion of our muscles by their own sensations, but attain a knowledge Of them only when perceived by another sense " (see Abbot on " Sight and Touch," P-- 71). [39]J. S. Mill has made a most unwarrantable application of the laws of association, in accounting for the formation of our higher ideas. He labors to derive all our ideas from sensation through association. But sensations -- say of sounds, smells, colors, and forms, or of pleasure and pain - - can never be any thing else than sensations, -- that is sounds, smells, colors, forms, pleasures or pains, -- and never can of themselves yield such ideas as those of space and time, cause and effect, moral good and moral obligation. But then he gives to association a sort of chemical power, bv which it changes a series of successive or contemporaneous ideas into something different from any of the ideas, just as oxygen and hydrogen by their union form a third substance, water. He is to be met here by showing that the laws of the association are merely the laws of the succession of our ideas, and they do not generate a new idea. Repeated association may quicken the flow of our ideas, and make several, as it were, coalesce into one, or it may weaken some and intensify others, but it cannot yield a new element. Even on the supposition that there is (which there is not) a