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PART SECOND.

PARTICULAR EXAMINATION OF THE INTUITIONS.

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BOOK I.

PRIMITIVE COGNITIONS.

CHAPTER I.

BODY AND SPIRIT.

SECT. I.-THE MIND BEGINS ITS INTELLIGENT ACTS WITH KNOWLEDGE THE SIMPLE COGNITIVE POWERS.

Ir is a favourite position in the views expounded in this treatise, that the mind begins its acts of intelligence with knowledge. This is not the common representation. According to a very ancient doctrine the mind has, prior to the acquisition of knowledge, a stock of ideas out of itself, or in itself, at which it looks, and its primary exercises consist in contemplating or in forming these ideas. 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

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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 undermine 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 on 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.

In this Book it is my aim to seek out, to analyze, and expose to the view the convictions that are involved in the exercise of these two powers. I shall begin with our cognitions in their more concrete form, and then dwell specially on the cognitions discovered by abstraction to be involved in these.

SECT. II.-OUR INTUITIVE COGNITIONS OF BODY.

We are following the plainest dictates of consciousness, we avoid a thousand difficulties, and we get a solid ground on which to rest and to build, when we maintain that the mind in its first exercises acquires knowledge; not indeed scientific or arranged, not of qualities of objects and classes of objects, but still knowledge—the knowledge of things presenting themselves, and as they present themselves; which knowledge, individual and concrete, is the foundation of all other knowledge, abstract, general, and deductive. In particular, the mind is so constituted as to attain a knowledge of body or of material objects.

It is through the bodily organism that the intelligence of man attains its knowledge of all material objects beyond. This is true of the infant mind; it is true also of the mature mind. We may assert something more than this regarding the organism. It is not only the medium through which we know all bodily objects beyond itself, it is itself an object primarily known; nay, I am

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