subject in regard to which the predication is made; and the denial of the proposition would be destructive of the notion with which we start. We cannot conceive of an island that it should not be surrounded by water, for were it not so enclosed, it would not be an island.

It should be noticed that the conviction of necessity follows conviction wherever it is found. In what is technically called demonstrative or apodictic reasoning, all the new steps are seen to be true intuitively, and the necessity goes through the whole process step by step. Thus the necessity adheres not only to the axioms of Euclid, but goes on to the last proposition of the last book. It is the same in all other sciences which are demonstrative, as Ethics and Logic are to a limited extent; the necessity adheres to whatever is drawn from first truths by intuitive principles. It is needful to add, that in mixed processes, in which there is both intuition and experience in the results reached, the necessity sticks merely to the intuitive part, and does not guarantee the whole. I suppose there is no doubt of the accuracy of the mathematical demonstrations employed by Fourier in his disquisitions about heat, but there are disputes as to some of the assumptions on which his calculations proceed. We have here a source of error. In processes into which intuition enters, but is only one of the elements, persons may allot to the whole a certainty which can be claimed only in behalf of one of the parts.

One other distinction requires to be drawn under this head. There are cases in which primitive judgments are founded on primitive cognitions and beliefs, and are thus necessary throughout. It is thus that, proceeding on our primitive knowledge and faith as to time, we declare there can be no break in its flowing stream. But in other cases our judgment may proceed on a proposition reached by a gathered experience. Thus, having found that laurel-water is poisonous, intuition insists that he who has drunk laurel-water has drunk poison. The necessity here simply is, that the conclusion follows from the premises; and the conclusion itself is as certain as the observational premiss, neither less nor more.

SECT. VI.-(SUPPLEMENTARY). — ON THE DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN THE UNDERSTANDING AND THE REASON; BETWEEN A PRIORI AND A POSTERIORI PRINCIPLES; BETWEEN FORM AND MATTER; BETWEEN SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE; BETWEEN THE LOGICAL AND CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF IDEAS; BETWEEN THE CAUSE AND OCCASION OF INNATE IDEAS.

We are now in circumstances to examine certain distinctions which have been drawn by the supporters of innate ideas, or intuitive reason, mainly in order to reconcile their views with the claims of experience.

I. THERE IS THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE UNDERSTANDING AND THE REASON.--Milton draws the distinction between reason "intuitive" and "discursive." Reid and Beattie represent Reason as having two degrees: in the former, reason sees the truth at once; in the other, it reaches it by a process. There is evidently ground for these distinctions. But the distinction I am now to examine was first drawn in a formal manner by Kant, and has since assumed divers shapes in Germany and in this country. According to Kant, the mind has three general intellectual powers, the Sense, the Understanding (Verstand), and the Reason (Vernunft); the Sense giving us presentations or phenomena; the Understanding binding these by categories; and the Reason bringing the judgments of the Understanding to unity by three Ideas-of Substance, Totality of Phenomena, and Deity—which are especially the Ideas of Reason. The distinction was introduced among the English-speaking nations by Coleridge, who however modified it. "Reason," says he, "is the power of universal and necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense, and having their evidence in themselves. Its presence is always marked by the necessity of the positions affirmed" (Aids to Reflection, I. 168). It has become an accepted distinction among a certain class of metaphysicians and divines all over Europe and the English-speaking people of the great American continent. These parties commonly illustrate their views in some such way as the following :—The mind, they say, must have some power by which it gazes immediately on the true and the good. But sense, which looks only to the phenomenal and fluctuating, cannot enable us to do so. As little can the logical understanding, whose province it is to generalize the phenomena of sense, mount into so high a sphere. We must therefore bring in a transcendental power-call it Reason, or Intellectual Intuition, or Faith, or Feeling-to account for the mind's capacity of discovering the universal and the necessary, and of gazing at once on eternal Truth and Goodness, on the Infinite and the Absolute.

Now there is great and important truth aimed at and meant to be set forth in this language. The speculators of France, who derive all our notions from sense, and those of Britain, who draw all our maxims from experience, are overlooking the most wondrous properties of the soul, which has principles at once deeper and higher than sense, and the faculty which compounds and compares the material supplied by sense. And if by Reason is meant the aggregate of Regulative Principles, I have no objections to the phrase, and to certain important applications of it, but then we must keep carefully in view the mode in which these principles operate.

We may mark the following errors, or oversights in the school referred to :(1.) Intuitive Reason is not, properly speaking, opposed to Sense, but is involved in certain exercises of sense. There is knowledge, and this intuitive, in all sense-perception. It may be proper indeed to draw the distinction between the two elements which are indissolubly wrapt up in the one concrete act. Kant endeavoured to do so, but gave a perversely erroneous account when he represented intuition as giving to objects the form of space and time; whereas intuition simply enables us to discover that bodies are in space, and events in time. There is certainly a high intuitional capacity involved in every exercise of mind which takes in extension or regards objects as exercising property. And then it is altogether wrong to represent sense as the one original source of experiential knowledge, which is derived from consciousness as well as from perception through the senses. (2.) It is wrong to represent Intuitive Reason as opposed to the Understanding. There is intuitive reason involved in certain exercises of the understanding, as when we infer that what is true of a given class must be true of each of the members of the class. Nor is it to be forgotten that the understanding can abstract and generalize upon a great deal more than the objects of sense; it can do so upon the materials supplied by consciousness, and by all the further convictions of the mind, such as the conscience. (3.) It is wrong to represent the mind as gazing immediately and intuitively on the true or the good, upon the necessary or the universal. It can indeed rise to the conception of these, but, in order to its doing so, it has to engage in abstraction and generalization, which makes the truth gained no longer a truth of pure reason, but of reason and understanding combined. It is not consistent with the natural history of the mind to represent it as at once rising to the contemplation of some ideal of the fair and good, which it is able to look at when the spirit is not agitated by passion or bedimmed by earthliness. We are undoubtedly led by native taste to admire the beautiful, but it is when embodied in a lovely object. We are constrained, in spite of a rebellious will, to approve of the good, but it is when a good action, or rather, a good being performing a good action, is presented to the mind. The general ideas of the true, the fair, and the good, do not spring up intuitively in the mind, but are fashioned out of intuitive elements by those addicted to reflection. (4.) It is preposterously wrong to suppose that the mind can employ intuitive convictions in philosophic or religious speculations without any associated exercise of the logical understanding. Not being immediately conscious of the Regulative Principles of the mind, we cannot employ them in discussion till we have first inquired into their nature by induction, and embodied their rule in a clear definition or a precise axiom.

II. DISTINCTION BETWEEN "A PRIORI" AND "A POSTERIORI" PRINCIPLES. Prior to the time of David Hume, the phrase a priori was applied to the procedure from principle to consequent, and from cause to effect, using the word cause in a wider and looser sense than in these times; while the phrase a posteriori was employed to characterize the procedure from consequent to antecedent, or from effect to cause. Since the publication of Hume's philosophic works, and more especially since the Kritik of Pure Reason came to have such an extensive influ

1 Cudworth's language is, "The abstract universal rationes, reasons,' are that higher station of the mind, from whence, looking down upon individual things, it hath a commanding view of them, and, as it were, a priori comprehends or knows them" (Immut. Mor. I. iii 2)

ence, a priori denotes whatever is supposed to be in the mind prior to experience; and a posteriori whatever has been acquired by experience. The distinction thus indicated and designated may be admitted without allowing that it probes the subject to its depths, and certainly without admitting all the views usually associated with it. Even in regard to knowledge acquired by experience, I maintain that, prior to its acquisition, the mind has the power of acquiring it. The bodily frame has certainly the organs of sense prior to seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, or smelling. The mind has certainly the capacity of perception before it actually observes any external object, and the power of comparison before it can notice relatious. And, in acknowledging the distinction, we must ever protest against the idea that any universal or necessary truth can be discerned by the mind without a process of a posteriori induction and arrangement. So far as the phrase is applied to general maxims, it should be on the understanding that they have been drawn by a logical process out of the individual a priori convictions.

Closely allied to the question of a priori truth is the question, Can there be an a priori science? This is a topic which will come more fully before us in some of the chapters of the next book. There is a sense in which certain sciences are a priori, that is, the principles of them are in the constitution of the mind, and are ready to manifest themselves in individual acts. In another sense there can be no a priori science, for science employs general principles, and there are no such principles known a priori. But there are sciences, the ground-principles of which are not the generalizations of a gathered experience, but of the necessary decisions of the mind, and these sciences may be called a priori with perfect propriety, provided always that it be understood, that while the general law is in the mind prior to its manifestation, it is discovered by us only through the generalization of the individual exercises.

III. DISTINCTION BETWEEN FORM AND MATTER.-This phraseology was introduced by Aristotle, who represented everything as having in itself both matter (λŋ) and form (εidos). It had a new signification given to it by Kant, who supposes that the mind supplies from its own furniture a form to impose on the matter presented from without. The form thus corresponds to the a priori element, and the matter to the a posteriori. But the view thus given of the relation in which the knowing mind stands to the known object is altogether a mistaken one. It supposes that the mind in cognition adds an element from its own resources, whereas it is simply so constituted as to know what is in the object. This doctrine needs only to be carried out consequentially to sap the foundations of all knowledge, for if the mind may contribute from its own stores one element, why not another? why not all the elements? In fact, Kant did, by this distinction, open the way to all those later speculations which represent the whole universe of being as an ideal construction. There can, I think, be no impropriety in speaking of the original principles of the mind as forms or rules, but they are forms merely, as are the rules of grammar, which do not add anything to correct speaking and writing, but are merely the expression of the laws which they follow. As to the word "matter," it has either no meaning in such an application, or a meaning of a misleading character.

IV. DISTINCTION BETWEEN SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE.-The word "subject" has a diversity of meaning in the English language. In logic it denotes the term of which predication is made; in common discourse, it means the topic about which affirmations are made; and in metaphysics, the mind contemplat

ing an object. The term "object," too, is not without its ambiguity. Sometimes it stands for a thing contemplated by the mind, and sometimes for a thing considered in itself, and often it denotes the aim or end which the mind has in any of its pursuits. I am afraid it will be impossible, in common discourse, to deprive the phrases of any one of these various significations. The adjectives "subjective” and “objective” have not had such a variety of meaning, and the nouns "subject" and "object," when used together, in philosophic discussion, should be limited so as to be exactly coincident with them. They should, in my opinion, never be used except as correlative phrases; the terms "subject" and "subjective" being employed to designate, not the mind in itself, but the mind as contemplating a thing; and the terms "object" and "objective" to denote, not a thing in itself, but a thing as contemplated by the mind. It is clear that if the phrases were employed in this sense when used at the same time, we should be saved an immense amount of word-warfare, in which subject and object, subjective and objective, act so prominent a part. We should be prevented from speaking, as is so often done, of the mind as subject or subjective, except when it is looking at something, or of the thing as an object or objective, except when it is contemplated by a thinking mind. We would also know at once what is meant when it is said that the subject implies the object, and the object the subject. It does not mean that the existence of mind implies an external thing to be contemplated, or that a thing, as such, implies a mind to consider it: it signifies simply that the one implies the other, as the husband implies the wife, and the wife a husband, from which we cannot argue that every man must have a wife and every woman a husband, but merely that when the man is a husband, he must have a wife, and when the woman is a wife, she must have a husband. The subject implies the objective merely in the sense that when the mind is contemplating a thing, it must be contemplating it, and that when a thing is contemplated, it must be contemplated by a contemplative mind.

With a large school of metaphysicians and divines the words "subjective" and "objective" are used in a Kantian sense, and are made, without the persons employing them being aware of it, to bring in the whole peculiarities of the critical philosophy. In the philosophy which has germinated from Kant, the subject mind is supposed to have a formative power, and the object thing is supposed to be a thing, or phenomenon, plus a shape or a colour given it by the mind. Proceeding on this view, the phrase "subjective comes to express that which is contributed by the mind in cognition. Thus by a juggling use of these phrases, persons are being involved, without their having the least suspicion of it, in a philosophy which makes it impossible for us ever to know things except under aspects twisted and distorted no man can tell how far from the reality. We can be saved from this only by using them as correlatives, and insisting, when we do so, that the subjective mind is so constituted as to know the object as it is, under the aspects presented.

V. LOGICAL AND CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF IDEAS.-Sir W. Hamilton quotes a saying of Patricius, "Cognitio omnis a mente primam originem, a sensibus exordium habet primum." The distinction is deep in Kant, and has been fully and skilfully elaborated by M. Cousin. It is said that there are ever two factors in the formation of our a priori ideas, reason and experience; and that logically reason is first, whereas chronologically experience comes first. The distinction is not clearly nor happily drawn by such phraseology. For it is difficult to understand what is meant by "origin" as distinguished from "beginning;" and