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In language often of terrible severity, he charges Brown, and nearly all philosophers, with disregarding consciousness: "But it is thus manifestly the common interest of every scheme of philosophy to preserve intact the integrity of consciousness. Almost every scheme of philosophy is only another mode in which this integrity has been violated" (Metaphysics, vol. i. p. 283). Mr. Mill shows successfully (as I think) that the question between Hamilton and his opponents is often not one of the testimony of consciousness, but of the interpretation of consciousness: We have it not in our power to ascertain, "by any direct process, what consciousness told us at the time when its revelations were in their primitive purity. It only offers itself to our inspection as it exists now, when these original revelations are overlaid and buried "under a mountainous heap of acquired notions and per"ceptions" (pp. 145, 146). Mr. Mill then goes on to explain his own method, which he calls the Psychological : "And here emerges the distinction between two different "methods of studying the problems of metaphysics, form"ing the radical difference between the two great schools into which metaphysicians are fundamentally divided. "One of these I shall call for distinction the Introspective method, the other the Psychological." He rejects the Introspective method: "Introspection can show us a present belief or conviction, attended with a greater or "less difficulty in accommodating the thoughts to a dif

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ferent view of the subject; but that this belief or con-"viction or knowledge, if we call it so, is intuitive, no mere introspection can ever show." He therefore re

sorts to the other method: "Being unable to examine "the actual contents of our consciousness until our

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earliest, which are necessarily our most firmly knit "associations, those which are most intimately interwoven with the original data of consciousness, are fully 'formed, we cannot study the original elements of mind "in the facts of our present consciousness. Those origi"nal elements can only come to light as residual phenomena, by a previous study of the modes of generation "of the mental facts which are confessedly not original, "-a study sufficiently thorough to enable us to apply "its results to the convictions, beliefs, or supposed in"tuitions which seem to be original, and determine "whether some of them may not have been generated " in the same modes, so early as to have become inseparable from our consciousness before the time at which memory commences. This mode of ascertaining the original elements of mind I call Psychological, as distinguished from the simply Introspective mode (pp. 147, 148). These quotations furnish a sufficiently clear view of his account of the two methods, and of his reasons for rejecting the one and adopting the other.

I have long been of opinion, and I have endeavoured to show elsewhere,1 that Sir William Hamilton's use of consciousness" is very unsatisfactory. He avows that he employs the phrase in two distinct senses or applications. First, he has a general consciousness, discussed largely in the first volume of his Metaphysics. This he

1 Particularly in a review of Hamilton's Metaphysics in the Dublin University Magazine for August 1859.

tells us cannot be defined (vol. i. p. 158); "but it comprehends all the modifications, all the phenomena of the thinking subject" (p. 183). "Knowledge and belief are both contained under consciousness" (p. 191). Again, "consciousness is co-extensive with our cognitive faculties;" "our special faculties of knowledge are only modifications of consciousness" (p. 207). He shows that consciousness implies discrimination, judgment, and memory (pp. 202-206). This is wide enough ; still he imposes a limit, for consciousness "is an immediate, not a mediate knowledge" (p. 202). Already, as it seems to me, inconsistencies are beginning to creep in; for whereas he had before told us that consciousness includes" all the phenomena of the thinking subject," now he so modifies it as to exclude “mediate knowledge," which is surely a modification of the thinking subject. Throughout these passages he uses the phrase in the wide, loose sense given to the German Bewusstsein by the school of Wolf. He stoutly maintains, what no one will deny, that this general consciousness is not a special faculty; but when he comes to draw out a list of mental powers, in the second volume of his Metaphysics, he turns to the Scottish use of the phrase, and he includes among them a special faculty which he calls consciousness, but to which, for distinction's sake, he prefixes self, and designates it selfconsciousness. It is the office of this special faculty to afford us a knowledge of the phenomena of our minds' (vol. ii. p. 192). It is an inevitable result of using the phrases in such ambiguous senses, that we are ever in

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danger of passing inadvertently from the one meaning to the other, and making affirmations in one sense which hold good only in another. Hamilton is ever appealing to consciousness, as Locke did to idea, as Brown did to suggestion, and as Mr. Mill does to association, but without our being always sure that the various affirmations are made in the same sense of the term. His appeal to consciousness, both in establishing some of his own positions and in summarily setting aside those of his opponents, is often far too rapid and dogmatic. He represents the principles of common sense as being emphatically "facts of consciousness,” whereas they are not so any more specially than our · acquired and derived beliefs, which are equally under consciousness. In fact, these principles are not before the consciousness as principles. The individual manifestations are of course before the consciousness (though not more so than any other mental exercise), but not the principles themselves, which are derived from the individual exercises by a reflex process of abstraction and generalization. Consciousness cannot decide directly which of our convictions are intuitive. Consciousness reveals only the present state of mind, and it cannot say whether it is original or derived. That state is probably a very complex one, and may embrace secondary beliefs mixed up with the primary ones; and if we are to separate these and fix on the true primitive convictions, we must subject the whole to a process of analysis. Again, consciousness can reveal to us only the singular, only the present state as an individual perception; but

in psychology, as in every other science, we are in search of the principle, and if we would gather the law out of the particulars we must generalize. In order, then, to the discovery even of an "intuitive principle," there must be what Bacon calls "the necessary rejections and exclusions," or what Dr. Whewell calls the "decomposition of facts," and then the co-ordination of the facts into a law by induction. In order, then, to the construction of metaphysics, more is required than a simple exercise of consciousness or introspection; there is need of discursive processes to work the facts into a science.1 It is of the utmost moment to remove these misapprehensions out of the way, as Mr. Mill, with his usual acuteness, has taken advantage of them; and after he has shown that introspection cannot do everything, he leaves upon us the impression that it can do nothing.

But consciousness, after all, is the main instrument in determining what are first principles. Let us endeavour to ascertain its precise province. The method followed by Mr. Mill in his psychology (and also in his political economy) is evidently what he calls the deductive, and which he represents in his Logic (B. iii. chap. xi. sect. i.) as consisting of three operations : "The first one of direct induction; the second of ratiocination; and the third of verification." Now, of these three steps the first and the third are, properly speaking, inductive; they depend entirely on observed facts. In physical science the agent of observation is the

1 I may be permitted to mention that I have fully wrought out these cautionary rules in The Intuitions of the Mind, Part First.