tion to possess the highest rank - is the criterion by which its unsurpassable validity is known." "If its negation is inconceivable, the discovery of this is the discovery that we are obliged to accept it. And a cognition which we are thus obliged to accept is one which we class as having the highest possible certainty" (Psychology, Vol. 11. p. 407). This is a very mutilated and partial version of the test of necessity. Mr. Spencer holds that all our cognitions and judgments are determined by our nervous structure, which has been fashioned by heredity. In this evolution man has no more freedom of will than the spoke has in the revolution of a wheel. We can conceive only what we are compelled to do by our inherited nervous frame, and we cannot conceive, certainly cannot believe, otherwise. Liberty of choice would be an evil in our world, as it might interfere with the evolution of nature. This cognition which we are obliged to accept is not a cognition of things, as is maintained in this work, but is a necessity imposed on us by our descent. To us it is "the highest possible certainty, and unsurpassable," but it is not pretended that it is a certainty in the nature of things. In other worlds, with a different evolutionary process, it might not be certainty, but uncertainty and error. We who feel as if we were free feel oppressed under this load.

PART SECOND.

PARTICULAR EXAMINATION OF PRIMITIVE TRUTHS.

BOOK I.

PRIMITIVE COGNITIONS.

CHAPTER I.

THE MIND BEGINS ITS INTELLIGENT ACTS WITH

KNOWLEDGE.

It is impossible to determine directly and certainly what are the first exercises of the soul, as the memory of the infant does not go so far back. It is supposed by many that it begins with some sort of sensations or feelings. This may or may not be. But it should be carefully noted that these are not acts of intelligence, and that we cannot argue from them the existence of things without having more in the conclusion than we have in the premises.

I think it can be shown that the mind must begin its intelligent acts with knowledge, which means that we know things. It is upon the things thus known that our thinking powers proceed.

This is not the account usually given. From an early date the common opinion in philosophy was that the mind does not look at things, but on some idea, image, or representation of things. This view, with no pretensions to precision in the statement of it, was a prevalent one

in ancient Greece, in the scholastic ages, and in the earlier stages of modern philosophy. It seems to me to be the view which was habitually entertained by Descartes and Locke. In later times, the mind was supposed to commence with "impressions" of some kind. This view may be regarded as introduced formally into philosophy by Hume, who opens his Treatise of Human Nature by declaring that all the perceptions of the mind are impressions and ideas; that impressions come first, and that ideas are the faint images of them. This view has evidently a materialistic tendency. Literally, an impression can be produced only on a material substance, and it is not easy to determine precisely what is meant by the phrase when it is applied to a state of the conscious mind. This impression theory is the one adopted by the French Sensational School and by the physiologists of this country. In Germany the influence exercised by Kant's Kritik of Pure Reason has made the general account to be that the mind starts with presentations, and not with things, with phenomena in the sense of appearances, which "phenomena" are but modifications of Hume's "impressions" and of the "ideas" of the ancients. Now it appears to me that all these accounts, consciousness being witness, are imperfect, and by their defects erroneous. The mind is not conscious of these impressions preceding the knowledge which it has immediately of self, and the objects falling under the notice of the senses. Nor can it be legitimately shown how the mind can ever rise from ideas, impressions, phenomena, to the knowledge of things. The followers of Locke have always felt the difficulty of showing how the mind from mere ideas could reach external realities. Hume designedly represented the original exercises of the mind as being mere impressions, in order to under

mine the very foundations of knowledge. Though Kant acknowledged a reality beneath the presentations, beyond the phenomena, those who followed out his views found the reality disappearing more and more, till at length it vanished altogether, leaving only a concatenated series of mental forms.

There is no effectual or consistent way of avoiding these consequences but by falling back on the natural system, and maintaining that the mind in its intelligent acts starts with knowledge. But let not the statement be misunderstood. I do not mean that the mind commences with abstract knowledge, or general knowledge, or indeed with systematized knowledge of any description. It acquires first a knowledge of individual things, as they are presented to it and to its knowing faculties, and it is out of this that all its arranged knowledge is formed by a subsequent exercise of the understanding. From the concrete the mind fashions the abstract, by separating in thought a part from the whole, a quality from the object. Starting with the particular, the mind reaches the general by observing the points of agreement. From premises involving knowledge, it can arrive at other propositions also containing knowledge. It seems clear to me that if the mind had not knowledge in the foundation, it never could have knowledge in the superstructure reared; but finding knowledge in its first intelligent exercises, it can thence, by the processes of abstraction, generalization, and reasoning, reach further and higher knowledge.

The mind is endowed with at least two simple cognitive powers, — sense-perception and self-consciousness. Both are cognitive in their nature, and look on and reveal to us existing things: the one, material objects presented to us in our bodily frame and beyond it; and

the other, self in a particular state or exercise. It is altogether inadequate language to represent these faculties as giving us an idea, or an impression, or an apprehension, or a notion, or a conception, or a belief, or looking to unknown appearances: they give us knowledge of objects under aspects presented to us. No other language is equal to express the full mental action of which we are conscious.

If this view be correct, the unit of thought is not, as is commonly represented, judgment, but cognition of things, on which judgments may be formed.