to the understanding? But as remembrance is only possible under the conditions of the understanding, it is consequently impossible to remember anything anterior to the moment when we awaken into consciousness; and the clairvoyance of the Absolute, even granting its reality, is thus, after the crisis, as if it had never been. We defy all solution of this objection.-But it may be put in another form: To know the Absolute and to be the Absolute, are, ex hypothesi, one and the same. Therefore, in the Intellectual Intuition, the individual speculator, the conscious Schelling, Steffens, Oken, is annihilated; and, e contra, the Intellectual Intuition is impossible for the philosopher in a state of personal individuality and consciousness. But it is in this state of personality, and non-intuition of the Absolute, that the philosopher writes; in writing therefore about the Absolute, he writes of what is to him as zero. His system is thus a mere scheme of words. 4. What has now been stated may in some degree enable the reader to apprehend the relations in which our author stands, both to those who deny and to those who admit a knowledge of the Absolute. If we compare the philosophy of COUSIN with the philosophy of Schelling, we at once perceive that the former is a disciple, though by no means a servile disciple of the latter. The scholar, though enamoured with his master's system as a whole, is sufficiently aware of the two insuperable difficulties of that theory. He saw that if he pitched the Absolute so high, it was impossible to deduce from it the relative; and he felt, probably, that the Intellectual Intuition-a stumbling-block to himselfwould be arrant foolishness in the eyes of his countrymen.Cousin and Schelling agree, that as philosophy is the science of the Unconditioned, the Unconditioned must be within the compass of science. They agree that the Unconditioned is known, and immediately known: and they agree that intelligence, as competent to the Unconditioned, is impersonal, infinite, divine.— But while they coincide in the fact of the Absolute, as known, they are diametrically opposed as to the mode in which they attempt to realise this knowledge; each regarding, as the climax of contradiction, the manner in which the other endeavours to bring human reason and the Absolute into proportion. According to Schelling, Cousin's Absolute is only a relative; according to Cousin, Schelling's knowledge of the Absolute is a negation of thought itself. Cousin declares the condition of all knowledge to be plurality and difference; and Schelling, that the condition under which alone a knowledge of the Absolute becomes possible, is indifference and unity. The one thus denies a notion of the Absolute to consciousness; whilst the other affirms that consciousness is implied in every act of intelligence. Truly, we must view each as triumphant over the other; and the result of this mutual neutralisation is,-that the Absolute, the Infinite, the Unconditioned, of which both assert a knowledge, is for us incognisable.* In these circumstances, we might expect our author to have stated the difficulties to which his theory was exposed on the one side and on the other; and to have endeavoured to obviate the objections, both of his brother Absolutists, and of those who altogether deny a philosophy of the Unconditioned. This he has not done. The possibility of reducing the notion of the Absolute to a negative conception is never once contemplated; and if one or two allusions (not always, perhaps, correct) are made to his doctrine, the name of Schelling does not occur, as we recollect, in the whole compass of these lectures. Difficulties, by which either the doctrine of the Absolute in general, or his own parti *["Quod genus hoc pugnæ, qua victor victus uterque ! is still further exhibited in the mutual refutation of the two great apostles of the Absolute, in Germany, Schelling and Hegel. They were early friends,-contemporaries at the same university, occupiers of the same bursal room (college chums), -Hegel, somewhat the elder man, was somewhat the younger philosopher, and they were joint editors of the journal in which their then common doctrine was at first promulgated. So far all was in unison; but now they separated, locally and in opinion. Both, indeed, stuck to the Absolute, but each regarded the way in which the other professed to reach it, as absurd. Hegel derided the Intellectual Intuition of Schelling as a poetical play of fancy; Schelling derided the Dialectic of Hegel as a logical play with words. Both, I conceive, were right; but neither fully right. If Schelling's Intellectual Intuition were poetical, it was a poetry transcending, in fact abolishing, human imagination. If Hegel's Dialectic were logical, it was a logic outraging that science and the conditions of thought itself. Hegel's whole philosophy is indeed founded on two errors ;-on a mistake in logic, and on a violation of logic. In his dream of disproving the law of Excluded Middle (between two Contradictories), he inconceivably mistakes Contraries for Contradictories; and in positing pure or absolute existence as a mental datum, immediate, intuitive, and above proof, (though, in truth, this be palpably a mere relative gained by a process of abstraction,) he not only mistakes the fact, but violates the logical law which prohibits us to assume the principle which it behoves us to prove. On these two fundamental errors rests Hegel's Dialectic; and Hegel's Dialectic is the ladder by which he attempts to scale the Absolute.-The peculiar doctrine of these two illustrious thinkers is thus to me only another manifestation of an occur. rence of the commonest in human speculation; it is only a sophism of relative self-love, victorious over the absolute love of truth :-"Quod volunt sapiunt, et nolunt sapere quæ vera sunt."] cular modification of that doctrine, may be assailed, are, if not avoided, solved only by still greater. Assertion is substituted for proof; facts of consciousness are alleged, which consciousness never knew; and paradoxes, that baffle argument, are promulgated as intuitive truths, above the necessity of confirmation. With every feeling of respect for M. Cousin as a man of learning and genius, we must regard the grounds on which he endeavours to establish his doctrine as assumptive, inconsequent, and erroneous. In vindicating the truth of this statement, we shall attempt to show:-in the first place, that M. Cousin is at fault in all the authorities he quotes in favour of the opinion that the Absolute, Infinite, Unconditioned, is a primitive notion, cognisable by our intellect; in the second, that his argument to prove the correality of his three Ideas proves directly the reverse; in the third, that the conditions under which alone he allows intelligence to be possible, necessarily exclude the possibility of a knowledge, not to say a conception, of the Absolute; and in the fourth, that the Absolute, as defined by him, is only a relative and a conditioned. In the first place, then, M. Cousin supposes that Aristotle and Kant, in their several categories, equally proposed an analysis of the constituent elements of intelligence; and he also supposes that each, like himself, recognised among these elements the notion of the Infinite, Absolute, Unconditioned. In both these suppositions we think him wrong. It is a serious error in a historian of philosophy to imagine that, in his scheme of Categories, Aristotle proposed, like Kant, “an analysis of the elements of human reason." It is just, however, to mention, that in this mistake M. Cousin has been preceded by Kant himself. But the ends proposed by the two philosophers were different, even opposed. In their several tables :-Aristotle attempted a synthesis of things in their multiplicity,-a classification of objects real, but in relation to thought;-Kant, an analysis of mind in its unity,—a dissection of thought, pure, but in relation to its objects. The Predicaments of Aristotle are thus objective, of things as understood; those of Kant subjective, of the mind as understanding. The former are results a posteriori-the creations of abstraction and generalisation; the latter, anticipations a priori -the conditions of those acts themselves. It is true, that as the one scheme exhibits the unity of thought diverging into plurality, in appliance to its objects, and the other exhibits the multiplicity of these objects converging towards unity by a collective deter mination of the mind; while, at the same time, language usua confounds the subjective and objective under a common term; it is certainly true that some elements in the one table coinci in name with some elements in the other. This coincidence however, only equivocal. In reality, the whole Kantian Categor would be generally excluded from those of Aristotle, as en rationis, as notiones secunda-in short, as determinations thought, and not genera of real things; while the several eleme would be also specially excluded, as partial, privative, transc dent, &c. But if it would be unjust to criticise the Categories Kant in whole or in part, by the Aristotelic canons, what m we think of Kant, who, after magnifying the idea of investigati the forms of pure intellect as worthy of the mighty genius of t Stagirite, proceeds, on this false hypothesis, to blame the executi as a kind of patchwork, as incomplete, as confounding derivat with simple notions; nay, even on the narrow principles of own Critique, as mixing the forms of pure Sense with the for of pure Understanding? *-If M. Cousin also were correct in supposition, that Aristotle and his followers had viewed Categories as an analysis of the fundamental forms of thoug he would find his own reduction of the elements of reason to double principle anticipated in the scholastic division of exister into ens per se and ens per accidens. Nor is our author correct in thinking that the Categories Aristotle and Kant are complete, inasmuch as they are co-exte sive with his own.-As to the former, if the Infinite were excluded, on what would rest the scholastic distinction of categoricum and ens transcendens? The logicians require th predicamental matter shall be of a limited and finite nature God, as infinite, is thus excluded: and while it is evident fro the whole context of his book of Categories, that Aristotle the only contemplated a distribution of the finite, so, in other of 1 works, he more than once emphatically denies the Infinite as an ject not only of knowledge, but of thought; "Tò ameipov ayvo τον ᾗ ἄπειρον,” and “Τὸ ἄπειρον, οὔτε νοητὸν, οὔτε απ * See the Critik d. r. V. and the Prologomena. + [M. Peisse, in a note here, quotes the common logical law of categorical e ties, well and briefly expressed in the following verse: He likewise justly notices, that nothing is included in the Aristotelic categor but what is susceptible of definition, consequently of analysis.] Ontóv."*-But if Aristotle thus regards the Infinite as beyond the θητόν.”. compass of thought, Kant views it as, at least, beyond the sphere of knowledge. If M. Cousin indeed employed the term Category in relation to the Kantian philosophy in the Kantian acceptation, he would be as erroneous in regard to Kant as he is in regard to Aristotle; but we presume that he wishes, under that term, to include not only the "Categories of Understanding," but the "Ideas of Reason."+ But Kant limits knowledge to experience, and experience to the Categories of the understanding, which, in reality, are only so many forms of the Conditioned; and allows to the notion of the Unconditioned, (corresponding to the Ideas of Reason) no objective reality, regarding it merely as a regulative principle in the arrangement of our thoughts.-As M. Cousin, however, holds that the Unconditioned is not only subjectively conceived, but objectively known; he is totally wrong in regard to the one philosopher, and wrong in part in relation to the other. In the second place, our author maintains that the idea of the Infinite, or Absolute, and the idea of the Finite or Relative, are equally real, because the notion of the one necessarily suggests the notion of the other. Correlatives certainly suggest each other, but correlatives may, or may not, be equally real and positive. In thought contradictories necessarily imply each other, for the knowledge of contradictories is one. But the reality of one contradictory, so far from guaranteeing the reality of the other, is nothing else than its negation. Thus every positive notion (the concept of a thing by what it is), suggests a negative notion (the concept of a thing by what it is not), and the highest positive notion, the notion of the 66 Phys. L. i. c. 4, text. 35; L. iii. c. 10, text. 66, c. 7, text. 40. See also Metaph. L. ii. c. 2, text. 11. Analyt. Post. L. i. c. 20, text. 39-et alibi.-[Aristotle's definition of the Infinite, (of the repov in contrast to the àópiσTov)" that of which there is always something beyond," may be said to be a definition only of the Indefinite. This I shall not gainsay. But it was the only Infinite which he contemplated; and it is the only Infinite of which we can form a notion.] +["The Categories of Kant are simple forms or frames (schemata) of the Understanding (Verstand) under which an object to be known, must be necessarily thought.-Kant's Ideas, a word which he expressly borrowed from Plato, are concepts of the Reason (Vernunft); whose objects transcending the sphere of all experience actual or possible, consequently do not fall under the categories, in other words, are positively unknowable. These ideas are God, Matter, Soul, objects which, considered out of relation, or in their transcendent reality, are so many phases of the Absolute."-M. Peisse.] |