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

what is meant by "logical" in such an application; it cannot mean, according to the rules of formal logic, it must mean, according to reason; and then comes in the important fact that reason and experience are not, properly speaking, opposed. The distinction, however, points to a truth, inasmuch as our intuitions, as mental faculties, laws, or tendencies, are in the mind prior to the exercise of them. There is a difficulty, however, in apprehending what is meant by the logical or reason element being first, but not chronologically. The intuition as a law is in the mind prior, chronologically, to the experience of it. The individual exhibition of the conviction and the experience of it come chronologically together. It is true, however, in the fullest sense, that an experience is necessary in order to our being able to present the necessary conviction in the form of an abstract definition or general maxim. This distinction connects itself with another, which I am now to examine.

VI. DISTINCTION BETWEEN REASON AS THE CAUSE, AND SENSE AND EXPERIENCE AS THE OCCASION. 1-It is allowed that, apart from sense and experience, the mind cannot have any ideas; still, it is not experience which produces our necessary ideas, it is merely the occasion of them, the true cause being the reason. Thus, without an exercise of sense, there could be no idea of space in the mind; but then the operation is merely the occasion on which the idea of space is produced by an inherent mental energy. Aloof from a special event, there could be no idea of time; but then it is affirmed that upon an event becoming apprehended, the idea of time, already potentially in the mind, is ready to spring up. Without the observation of contiguous concurrences, there could be no idea of cause; but on such being presented, the mind is found to be already in possession of an idea of cause by which to bind them in a necessary connexion. Till some human action is presented, there could be no idea of moral good but on a benevolent action being apprehended, the idea of moral good is ready to spring up.

There is important truth which this account is intended to express, but it does not bring it out accurately. It is not so easy to settle precisely the difference between cause and occasion: the occasion is, in fact, one of the elements of the unconditional cause, or rather, concause, which produces the effect. In regard to the original faculty or law of the mind, it is undoubtedly the main element of the complex cause which issues in a spontaneous intuitive conviction. But there is need of a concurrence of circumstances in order to this faculty operating. But instead of confusedly binding all these up in the one expression "occasion," it is better to spread them out individually, when it will be found that each acts in its own way. Thus we should show that an action of the organism is needful to call our intuition of sense-perception into exercise. We should show, too, that an apprehension of an object or objects is needed, in order to call into action our intuitions as to the infinity of time, and eternal relations, and moral good; and then it may be seen that this apprehension may not have been got from sense, and that in our primary cognition of the object there may have been intuition,—thus, it is because we intuitively know every object as having being, that we declare its identity of being at different times. Again, in respect to the generalized maxim, or notion, the account is fitted to

1 Cudworth refers to ideas of a high kind, which he admits are “most commonly excited and awakened occasionally from the appulse of outward objects knocking at the door of the senses," ," and complains of men not distinguishing "betwixt the outward occasion, or invitation, of these cogitations, and the immediate active or productive cause of them" (Immut. Mor. iv. ii. 2).

leave a very erroneous impression, for it makes it appear as if it were upon the occasion of the presentation of a material object, that there springs up the abstract idea of space; and of an event becoming known, that there arises the idea of time or of a succession of events being apprehended, that the mind forms an idea of cause. It is all true that there must be experience in order to the construction of the abstract or general notion, but the notion is formed, after all, by the ordinary process of abstraction and generalization.

These are topics which the subtle Greek mind delighted to discuss from the time that reflective thought was first awakened within it, that is, from at least five hundred years before the Christian era. I confess I should like to have been present when they were handled on that morning when Socrates, as yet little more than a boy, met the aged Parmenides, so venerable with his noble aspect and hoary locks, and Zeno, tall and graceful, and in the vigour of his manhood, in the house of Pythodorus, in the Ceramicus, beyond the walls of Athens. At the same time, I fear that, after all, I could have got little more than a glimpse of the meaning of the interlocutors. It is clear that even Socrates himself is not sure whether he is listening to solid argument, or losing himself among verbal disquisitions and dialectic sophistries. And who will venture to make intelligible to a modern mind— even to a Teutonic mind—the arguments by which Parmenides and Zeno prove that Being is One, and the impossibility of NonBeing; or translate with a meaning, into any other tongue, the subtleties of those Dialogues, such as Parmenides and the Sophist, in which Plato makes his speakers discourse of the One and of the Existing? The grand error of all these disputations arises from those who conduct them imagining that truth lies at the bottom of the well, whereas it is at the surface; and in going past the pure waters at the top, they have only gone down into mud and stirred up mire. We are knowing, and knowing being, at every waking hour of our existence, and all that the philosopher can do is to

See the opening of the Parmenides of Plato.

observe them, to separate each from the other, and from all with which it is associated, and to give it a right expression. But the ancient Greeks, followed by modern metaphysicians, imagined that they could do more, and so have done infinitely less. They have tried to get a more solid foundation for what rests on itself, and so have made that insecure which is felt to be stable. They have laboured to make that clearer which is already clear, and have thus darkened the subject by assertions which have no meaning. They have explained what might be used to explain other truths, but which itself neither requires nor admits of explanation, and so have only landed and lost themselves in distinctions which proceed on no differences in the nature of things, and in mysteries of their own creation.

Knowing, in the concrete, is a perpetual mental exercise, ever under the eye of consciousness; and we can by an intellectual act separate it from its object, and contemplate it in the abstract. In all acts of knowledge we know Being in the concrete; that is, we know things as existing, and we can separate in thought the thing from our knowledge of it, and the thing as existing from all else which we may know about the thing. The science which treats of Being, or Existence, is Ontology. In a loose sense, every real science, that is, every science which treats of existing objects,— might be called an ontological science. But every one sees that it would be preposterous to represent astronomy and geology and agriculture as departments of ontology, for these sciences treat not so much of the mere being of objects generally, as of certain qualities and laws of special classes of objects. We must therefore confine the science within more stringent limits. If we define Ontology as the science of what we know of things intuitively, we are giving it a precise field, which can be taken in from the waste, and cultivated. Gnosiology and Ontology may be treated to a great extent together in a Metaphysics which unfolds, as has been attempted in this treatise, the original convictions of the mind. Still they can be distinguished, and the distinction between them should be steadily kept in view. The one seeks to find what are our original powers, the other to determine what we know of things by these powers.

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