But while we must yield to our intuitive beliefs as well as perceptions, we are not therefore to suppose that our faiths are beyond inspection and above examination. They are liable to be tried, and should at times be tried, by the very same tests as our cognitions. We are not to allow ourselves, without examination and without review, to yield to whatever may suggest itself to our own minds, or be recommended to us by others, as a primitive belief. We must try the spirits, whether they are of God. In nothing is man so apt to run into excess and extravagance, into folly and error, as in yielding to plausible beliefs. The tendency of faith is upwards, but it needs weights and plummets to hold it down, lest it mount into a region of thin air, and there burst and dissolve. Fortunately we have a ready means at hand of trying our constitutional beliefs, and determining for us when they should be disallowed, and when they should be allowed to flow out freely. Are they self-evident? Are they necessary, so necessary that we cannot believe the opposite? Are they universal? These three questions, searchingly asked and honestly answered, will settle for us Kant or Hamilton would put faith. The difficulty of finding a place for faith, and we may add, for conscience and imagination, shows that their threefold division of the mental attributes is defective; the same may be said of that of Professor Bain. (Senses and Intellect, pp. 2-10, and App. I.) But passing over this, it would almost look as if Hamilton would have to put faith into the compartment of feeling. "Knowledge and belief differ not only in degree but in kind. Knowledge is certainly founded on intuition. Belief is certainly founded upon feeling" Logic, Lect. 37). We cannot conceive a more radically defective account than this of faith, to found it upon feeling, which he explains as consisting in pleasure and pain. The disciples of Hamilton have not thrown any light on the subject. Faith is explained by Professor Fraser (Essays, p. 32), as " the belief of principles which in themselves are incognizable or irreconcilable by the understanding, and yet unquestionable." But surely we have faith in God who yet is not incognizable. Professor Veitch says (Art. Hamilton in Dict. Univ. Biog.), "The absolute or infinite is cast beyond the sphere of thought and science; it is still, however, allowed by Hamilton to remain in some sense in consciousness, for it is grasped by faith, and faith is a conscious act. The question, accordingly, at once meets us : In what sense and how far can there be an object within consciousness which is not properly within thought or know. ledge? In other words, how far is our faith in the infinite intelligent and intelligible? This point demands farther and more detailed treatment than it has met with either at the hands of Sir. W. Hamilton himself, or any one who has sought to carry out his principles." For years past I have been calling on the disciples of Hamilton to explain what they mean by faith. Till this point is cleared up, there is an unfilled-up chasm in the whole psychology and philosophy of the school.

whether we ought or ought not to follow a belief proffered to our acceptance. We are at liberty to employ a belief in argument, appeal, and speculation, only under the same conditions as a cognition; that is, having shown that it is a constitutional one, we must further determine more accurately its nature and law, its extent and limits. Thus, and thus only, can we hope on the one hand to be kept from mistaking our own fancies, misapprehensions, wishes, or prejudices, for primitive and heaven-born beliefs, and, on the other hand, be justified in appealing to the faiths which have the sanction of our constitution, and the God who gave us our constitution, and in using them as a basis on which to rear a fabric of philosophical, or ethical, or theological truths.

But the question is started, Whence the seeming mistakes of memory? We find at times two honest witnesses giving different accounts of the same transaction. We have all found ourselves at fault in our recollections on certain occasions. I believe we must account for the seeming treachery of the memory in much the same way as we do for the deception of the senses. There ever mingle with our proper recollections more or fewer inferences, and in these there may be errors. In order to clear up the subject we must draw the distinction between our natural or pure reminiscences and those mixed ones in which there are processes of reasoning.

It is not very easy to determine what bare memory consists in apart from its adjuncts. Writers on mental science have scarcely entered upon the subject, they have certainly not discussed it. It is clear that in every act of memory proper there must be a recollection of self, and of self in a certain state, say perceiving feeling or thinking. When an external thing has been observed, or an occurrence witnessed, there will coëxist with the remembrance of self a recollection of the object or event. Very frequently the thing perceived fills the mind, and the coëxisting reminiscence of self is scarcely attended to. Such, I suppose, must be our original memory. Such, I suppose, must be the whole memory of the infant, and hence its floating and uncertain character.

But around our pure memories there will gather a host of constructions. Thus, we cannot directly remember that such an event

happened ten years ago, for this would imply a continuous recollection of the whole ten years. But we recollect that it happened at the same time with some incident which we have fixed ten years back, or before some occurrence which took place nine years ago. The memory thus rises out of its vague infant state, and grows by an association with other mental exercises, and by an adhesion of accumulated experiences. We fix on dates in our personal history such as the time of our going to school, or of our leaving school, or of our going to college, or entering on the business of life, or changing our place of residence or mode of life, and we arrange all events in the intervals. It is thus, too, that in history we settle the dates of great epochs, and hook lesser events upon them.

In estimating distance in time we lay down rules in many respects analogous to those by which we calculate distance by the eye. We see an object across a country covered with dwellings, or undulated by hills and hollows all under the view, and we conclude that the distance is great. Again, we look on a house across an arm of the sea or a plain in which there is no prominent object, and we make the distance less than it is. In much the same way the days and hours seem long when we are discontented with the present, or anxiously looking for some expected event, and so frequently contemplating the passing of time, and comparing the present with the past. On the other hand, those portions of time seem short in which we are pleasantly absorbed in the present, and so are kept from looking back on the past, or so much as remembering that there is a past. The subject is an interesting and an unexplored one, but it is not necessary to enter further upon it in this treatise. Enough has been advanced to show that the mistakes of the memory may arise from the associated inferences, and not from the pure reminiscences which are often faint but are never fallacious.

CHAPTER II.

SPACE AND TIME.

OF space in the concrete we have an immediate knowledge; that is, by the senses, certainly by some of them, such as the touch and the sight, most probably by all of them, we know bodies, say our own bodily organism as extended, that is, as occupying space. By abstraction we can fix our attention on the space as distinct from associated qualities, and by inward reflection we can gather what are the convictions attached. These convictions pass beyond knowledge proper, and become beliefs, that is, convictions in regard to something which we do not immediately know, nay, which we may never be able to know.

With time, also, we have an immediate acquaintance. In senseperception and self-consciousness we know a particular object or mental state as now present. Our consciousness is continuous; speedily does immediate consciousness slide into memory; the present becomes past, and is remembered as past. The child's organism is now in a state of pain; immediately after the pain is gone, but the pain of the past is remembered, and remembered as being past. Already, then, there is the idea of time always in the concrete,—we remember something as having been under our consciousness in the past. By abstraction we can then think of the time as different from the event remembered in time; and by introspection we can ascertain the nature of the attached convictions. Many of these are of the nature of faiths going far beyond what is, or ever can be, immediately known.

Space and time mingle with all our perceptions. Yet after all we can say little about them; all that we can do as metaphysi(177)

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cians is to analyse and express our original convictions. It belongs to the mathematician to evolve deductively what is involved in certain of them. In unfolding the necessary convictions we may make the following affirmations:

I. Time and space have a reality independent of the percipient mind, and out of the percipient mind. The intelligence does not create them, it discovers them, and it discovers them as having an existence independent of the mind contemplating them, as having this existence whether the mind contemplates them or no, and an existence out of and beyond the mind as it thinks of them. He who denies this, is in the very act setting aside one of the clearest of native principles, and has left himself no standpoint from which to repel any proposal, suggested to himself or offered by another, to set aside any other conviction, or all other convictions. If some one affirm that space has no objective existence,' he leaves it competent for any other coming after him, to maintain that the objects perceived in space have no reality. He who allows that time may have no reality except in the contemplative mind, will find himself greatly troubled to answer the sceptic, when he insists that the events in time are quite as unreal as the time is in which they are perceived as having occurred. There is only one sure and consistent mode of avoiding these troublesome and dangerous consequences, and that is by standing up for the veracity of all our fundamental perceptions, and, among others, of our convictions regarding the reality of space and time.

According to Kant, space and time are the forms given by the mind to the phenomena which are presented through the senses, and are not to be considered as having anything more than a subjective existence. It is one of the most fatal heresies-that is, dogmas opposed to the revelations of consciousness-ever introduced into philosophy, and it lies at the basis of all the aberrations in the school of speculation which followed. For those who were

1 Lucretius (i. 460) maintained that time has no existence of itself: "Tempus item per se non est." Very possibly space and time may have no independent existence. Very possibly there may be no such thing as unoccupied space, or time without an event. Most probably, space and time may not be independent of God. Still they exist, and exist independent of our contemplation of them.