chapter did not appear in the original edition, but was first

inserted in the fourth, published in 1690. The intention, therefore, which he expressed to Molineux, has received its fulfilment; and the passage quoted further on in the text, is part of the "addition" which he contemplated.--_Ed._]]

We have now then explored those states of Consciousness which we call Belief in existences;--Belief in present existences; Belief in past existences; and Belief in future existences. We have seen that, in the most simple cases, Belief consists in sensation alone, or ideas alone; in the more complicated cases, in sensation, ideas, and association, combined; and in no case of belief has any other ingredient been found.

In accounting for belief in present objects not acting on the senses,--it appeared, that a certain anticipation of the future entered, for so much, into this compound phenomenon; the explanation of which part we were obliged to leave, till the {378} anticipation of the future had undergone investigation. We have now seen that this part, as well as the rest, consists of association. The whole, therefore, of this case of belief, is now resolved into association.

Mr. Locke, whose expositions of any of our mental phenomena are almost always instructive, even when they stop short of being complete, has given the above account of belief precisely, in one remarkable and very extensive class of cases; those in which the belief is unfounded; which he denominates prejudices.

"There is," he says,[13*] "scarce any one that does not observe something that seems odd to him, and is in itself really extravagant in the opinions, reasonings, and actions, of other men.

[Mill's footnote 13: Essay on the Human Understanding, B. II., Ch. 33.]

"This sort of unreasonableness is usually imputed to education and prejudice; and for the most part truly enough; though that reaches not the bottom of the disease, nor shews distinctly enough whence it rises, or wherein it lies.

"Education is often rightly assigned for the cause; and prejudice is a good general name for the thing itself; but yet, I think, he ought to look a little farther, who would trace this sort of madness to the root it springs from, and so explain it, as to shew whence this flaw has its original in very sober and rational minds, and wherein it consists."

Mr. Locke affords the explanation, which he thought necessary to be given, and proceeds as follows.

"Some of our ideas have a natural correspondence and connexion one with another. It is the office, and {379} excellence, of our reason, to trace these; and hold them together in that union and correspondence, which is founded in their peculiar beings.

"Besides this, there is another connexion of ideas, wholly owing to chance or custom. Ideas, that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some men's minds, that it is very hard to separate them. They always keep in company; and the one no sooner at any time comes into the understanding, but its associate appears with it. And if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang, always inseparable, shew themselves together.

"This wrong connexion, in our minds, of ideas in themselves loose and independent of one another, has such an influence, and is of so great force, to set us awry in our actions, as well moral as natural, passions, reasonings, and notions themselves; that perhaps there is not any one thing that deserves more to be looked after.

"The ideas of goblins and sprights have really no more to do with darkness than light. Yet let but a foolish maid inculcate these often in the mind of a child, and raise them there together, possibly he shall never be able to separate them again so long as he lives; but darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other.

"A man receives a sensible injury from another; thinks on the man and that action over and over; and by ruminating on them strongly, or much in his mind, so cements those two ideas together, that he makes them almost one."

"When this combination is settled, and while it {380} lasts, it is not in the power of reason to help us and relieve us from the effects of it. Ideas in our minds, when they are there, will operate according to their nature and circumstances. And, here, we see the cause why Time cures certain affections, which reason, though in the right, has not power over, nor is able, against them, to prevail with those who are apt to hearken to it in other cases."

After adducing various examples, to illustrate the effect of these associations, in producing both vicious affections, and absurd opinions, he thus concludes:

"That which thus captivates our reasons, and leads men blindfold from common sense, will, when examined, be found to be what we are speaking of. Some independent ideas of no alliance to one another, are, by education, custom, and the constant din of their party, so coupled in their minds, that they always appear there together; and they can no more separate them in their thoughts, than if there were but one idea; and they operate as if they were so. This gives sense to jargon, demonstration to absurdity, and consistency to nonsense; and is the foundation of the greatest, I had almost said, of all, the errors in the world."

Such is Mr. Locke's account of wrong belief, or error. But wrong belief is belief, no less than right belief. Wrong belief, according to Locke, arises from a bad association of ideas. Right belief, then, arises from a right association of ideas; and this also was evidently Locke's opinion. It is, thus, association, in both cases; only, in the case of wrong belief, the association is between ideas which ought not to {381} be associated; in the case of right belief, it is between ideas which ought to be associated. In the case of right belief, the association is between ideas which, in the language of Locke, "have a natural correspondence and connexion one with another:" in the case of wrong belief, it is between ideas, which "in themselves are not at all of kin, and are joined only by chance or custom." The ideas of the colour, shape, and smell of the rose; the ideas of the spark falling on the gunpowder, and the explosion,--are the sorts of ideas which are understood, by Mr. Locke, as having "a natural correspondence and connexion." Ideas, such as those of darkness, with those of ghosts; of the miseries suffered at school, with the reading of books,--are the kind which he describes as "not of kin, and united in the mind only by chance or custom." This, put into accurate language, means, that when the ideas are connected in conformity with the connexions of things, the belief is right belief; when the ideas are connected not in conformity with the connexions of things, the belief is wrong belief. The ideas, however, which are connected in conformity with the connexions among things, are connected by custom, as much as those which are connected not in conformity with those connexions. And the custom which unites them in conformity, is by far the most common of the two. It is, in fact, the regular, the ordinary, the standard custom, the other only constitutes the exceptions.

II. We have divided Belief into, 1, Belief in events, real existences; 2, Belief in testimony; 3, Belief in the truth of propositions.

Though this division, suggested by the ordinary {382} forms of language, appeared to me didactically convenient, it is not logically correct. The expression, "Belief in testimony," is elliptical. When completed, it becomes "Belief in events upon the evidence of testimony." There are then, in reality, only two kinds of Belief; 1. Belief in events or real existences; and 2. Belief in the truth of Propositions. But Belief in events or real existences has two foundations; 1. our own experience; 2. the testimony of others. The first of these we have examined, the consideration of the second remains.

When we begin, however, to look at the second of these foundations more closely, it soon appears, that it is not in reality distinct from the first. For what is testimony? It is itself an event. When we believe any thing, therefore, in consequence of testimony, we only believe one event in consequence of another. But this is the general account of our belief in events. It is the union of the ideas, of an antecedent, and a consequent, by a strong association. I believe it is one o'clock. Why? I have just heard the clock strike. _Striking of the clock_, antecedent; _one o'clock_, consequent; the _second_ closely associated with the _first_. The striking of the clock is in fact a species of testimony. What does it testify? Not one event, but an infinite number of events, of which the term "one o'clock" is the name. At every instant in the course of the day, a number of events are taking place, some known to us, some unknown. The term one o'clock, is the name of those which take place at a particular point of the diurnal revolution. I believe in them all upon the testimony of the clock. Why? From experience;--every one would directly and {383} truly reply. I have found the events constantly, or at least very regularly, conjoined. From junction of the events, junction of the ideas; in other words, belief.

If proof, only, were wanted, this would suffice. For the purpose, however, of instruction, tuition, training, a more minute developement of this important case of belief seems too useful to be dispensed with, notwithstanding the tediousness which so many repetitions of the same process are too likely to produce.

The watchman calling the hour, is a case of human testimony. That the account of our belief, in this case, is precisely the same as that in the case of the striking of the clock, it is wholly unnecessary to prove. But if our reliance on testimony in one case is pure experience, it may reasonably be inferred that it is so in all.

The forms of expression, which we apply to this case of belief, are very misleading. We say, "we believe a man," or, "we believe his testimony." "We attach belief to the man," or, "to his testimony." In these expressions, the name belief is applied to the wrong event; to the antecedent, instead of the consequent. What we mean to say is, that we believe the consequent, the thing testified, not the antecedent, the speaking of the words. The words the man uses, are, to us, sensations: belief that he uses the words, is not what is meant by belief in his testimony. The same form of expression is perfectly absurd, when applied to other cases. We never say that we believe the flame of the candle, or we attach belief to the flame of the candle, when we mean to state the belief, that a finger will be burnt if it is put into the flame; {384} we never say we believe the spark, when we mean to express our belief of an explosion when the spark falls upon the gunpowder.

The only question, then, is, in what manner the words of the testifier, the antecedent, come to be so united with the idea of the thing testified, as to constitute belief. And surely there is no difficulty here, either in conceiving, or admitting the process. Words call up ideas by association, solely. There is no natural connexion between them. The manner in which words are applied to events, I know most intimately by my own experience. I am constantly, and, from the first moment I could use them, have constantly been, employing words in exact conformity with events. Cases occur in which I do not, but they are few in comparison with those in which I do. It has been justly remarked, that the greatest of liars speak truth a thousand times for once that they utter falsehood. The connexion between the use of words, and the idea of conformable existence, is, of course, established into one of the strongest associations of the human mind. In other words, belief, in consequence of testimony, is, strictly, a case of association. That we interpret other men's actions by our own, no one doubts; and that we do so entirely by association has already been proved.

In accounting for belief in past existences where it is not memory, we have found that it is resolvable into belief in testimony, and in the uniformity of the laws of nature; and the explanation of this we postponed till the cases of belief in testimony, and in the uniformity of the laws of nature, should be expounded. A few words will now suffice to connect the {385} explanations formerly given with those which have now been presented.

The two cases, as we have seen, resolve themselves into one; as belief in testimony is but a case of the anticipation of the future from the past; and belief in the uniformity of the laws of nature is but another name for the same thing.

I believe the event called the fire of London, upon testimony. I believe that the stranger who now passes before my window, had a father and mother, was once an infant, then a boy, next a youth, then a man, and that he has been nourished by food from his birth; all this, from my belief in the uniformity of the laws of nature.

After the preceding developments, it is surely unnecessary to be minute in the analysis of these instances. I have had experience, of a constant series of antecedents and consequents, in the life of man; generation, birth, childhood, and so on; as I have had of pain from putting my finger in the flame. A corresponding association is formed. If the sight of a stranger calls up the idea of his origin and progress to manhood, the ordinary train of antecedents and consequents is called up; nor is it possible for me to prevent it. The association is indissoluble, and is one of the cases classed under the name of Belief.

The explanation is still more simple of my belief in the fire of London. The testimony in this case is of that sort which I have always experienced to be conformable to the event. Between such testimony, and the idea of the event testified, I have, therefore, an indissoluble association. The testimony uniformly calls up the idea of the reality of the event, so closely, {386} that I cannot disjoin them. But the idea, irresistibly forced upon me, of a real event, is Belief.[106]

[Bain's footnote 106: The belief in Testimony is derived from the primary credulity of the mind, in certain instances left intact under the wear and tear of adverse experience. Hardly any fact of the human mind is better attested than the primitive disposition to receive all testimony with unflinching credence. It never occurs to the child to question any statement made to it, until some positive force on the side of scepticism has been developed. Gradually we find that certain testimonies are inconsistent with fact; we have, therefore, to go through a long education in discriminating the good testimonies from the bad. To the one class, we adhere with the primitive force of conviction that in the other class has been shaken and worn away by the shocks of repeated contradictions.--_B._]

It is in this way that belief in History is to be explained. It is because I cannot resist the evidence; in other words, because the testimony calls up irresistibly the idea, that I believe in the battle of Marathon, in the existence of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, in that of Socrates, Plato, and so on.

III. We come now to what we set out with stating as the third case of Belief; but which, as there are in reality but two kinds of belief, is, strictly speaking, the second,--I mean Belief in the Truth of Propositions; in other words, verbal truths.

The process by which this Belief is generated, or rather the combination wherein it consists, has, by the writers on Logic, at least those in the Latin and modern languages, been called JUDGMENT. This, however, is a restricted sense. In general, the word Judgment is used with more latitude. Sometimes it is nearly co-extensive with Belief, excluding hardly {387} any but the sudden and momentary cases. We should hardly say, A man _judges_ there are ghosts, who is afraid of them in the dark, but firmly believes his fear is unfounded; or _judges_ the surgeon to be noxious, whom he shudders at the sight of, from recollection of the terrible operation which he underwent at his hands. In all cases, however, either of deliberate or well-founded belief, we seem to apply the word judgment without impropriety. I judge that I see the light, that I hear the drum, that my friend speaks the truth, that water is flowing in the Ganges.

All Belief of events, except that of our present sensations, and ideas, consists, as we have seen, in the combination of the ideas of an antecedent and a consequent. The antecedent is sometimes simple, sometimes compound, being not one event, but various events taken together. These varieties in the antecedent constitute two distinguishable cases of belief. The last of them, that in which the antecedent is complex, is that in which the term judgment is most commonly applied. Again, there are two cases of complex antecedent, one, in which all the events are concordant; another, in which they are not all concordant. It is to this last case that the term judgment is most peculiarly applied. Thus, it is not usual to say, that we judge we shall feel pain if we put a finger in the flame of the candle. But if we saw two armies ready to engage, one of which had considerable superiority, both in numbers and discipline, we should say we judge that it would gain the victory. This case, however, of belief, where the antecedent is complex, will receive additional illustration farther on. {388} We have now to consider the case of Belief in the truth of propositions.

PROPOSITION is a name for that form of words which makes a predication. What Predication is, of what parts it consists, what end it serves, and into how many kinds it is divided, we have already explained. It remains to inquire what is meant by the TRUTH of a Predication, and what state of consciousness it is which is called the recognition or BELIEF of that truth.

Predication consists essentially in the application of two marks to the same thing. Of this there are two remarkable cases; one, That in which two names of equal extent are applied to the same thing; another, That in which two names, one of less, another of greater extent, are applied to the same thing. The questions we have to resolve are, What is meant by truth in these cases; and, What is the process, or complex state of consciousness, which is called assent to the proposition, or belief of it.

And, first, as to the case of two names of equal extent, as when we say, "Man is a rational animal;" here the two names are, "Man," and "Rational animal," exactly equivalent; so that "man" is the name of whatever "rational animal" is the name of; and "rational animal" is the name of whatever "man" is the name of. This coincidence of the names is all that is meant by the truth of the proposition; and my recognition of that coincidence is another name for my belief in its truth.

Now, how is it that I recognise two names as equivalent? About this, there will not be any dispute. I recognise the meaning of names solely by {389} association. I recognise that such a name is of such a meaning, by association. I recognise that another name is of the same signification, by the same means. That I recognise the meaning of the last, whatever it is, by association, cannot be doubted, because it is by this that the meaning of every word is established. There is, however, another fact; that I recognise the meaning in the second case, as the same with the meaning in the first case. What is the process of this recognition? The word "Man" is the mark or name of a certain cluster of ideas. A certain cluster of ideas I know to be what it is, by having it. Having it, and knowing it, are two names for the same thing. Having it, and having it again, is knowing it, and knowing it again; and that is the recognition of its sameness. It is a single name for the two states of consciousness. This, then, is all that is meant by our belief in the truth of a proposition, the terms of which are convertible, or of equal extent.

When of two names, applied to the same thing, one is of less, another of greater extent, the association is more complex; but in that is all the difference. Thus, when I believe the truth of the proposition, "Man is an animal," the meaning of the name "man" is called up by association, and the meaning of the name "animal" is called up by association. Thus far is certain. But there is something further. I recognise, that "animal" is a name of whatever "man" is a name of, and also of more. In having the meaning of the name "man" called up by association, that is, in having the ideas, I recognise that "man" is a name of James, and John, and Homer, and Socrates, and all the individuals of the class. {390} This is pure association. In having the meaning of the name "animal" called up by association, I recognise that it is a name of James, and John, and all the individuals of the same class, as well as of all the individuals of other classes; and this is all that is meant by my Belief in the truth of the proposition. Man is the name of one cluster of ideas; animal is the name of a cluster, including both this and other clusters. The latter cluster is partly the same with, and partly different from, the former. But having two clusters, and knowing them to be two, is not two things, but one and the same thing; knowing them in the case in which I call them same, and knowing them in the case in which I call them different, is still having them, having them such as they are, and nothing besides. In this second case also, of the belief of a proposition, there is, therefore, nothing but ideas, and association.

We have already shewn, under the head NAMING, when explaining the purpose to which Predication is subservient, that all Predication may be strictly considered as of one kind, the application to the same thing of another name of greater extent; in other words, that Predication by what Logicians call the Difference, Property, or Accident of a thing, may be reduced to Predication by the Genus or Species; but as there is a seeming difference in these latter cases, a short illustration of them will probably be useful.

Thus, suppose I say, "Man is rational," and that I choose to expound it, without the aid of the word animal, understood; what is there in the case? The word "man," marks a certain cluster of ideas. "Rational" marks a portion of that cluster. In the {391} cluster marked "man," the cluster marked "rational" is included. To recognise this, is also called believing the proposition. But to have one cluster of ideas, and know what it is; then another, and know what it is, is merely to have the two clusters. To have a second cluster, part of a first, and to know that it is a part of the first, is the same thing.

The peculiar property of that class of words to which "Rational" belongs, must here be recollected. They are the _connotative_ class. Beside marking some thing peculiarly, they mark something else in conjunction; and this last, they are said to _connote_. Thus the word "rational," beside the part of the cluster, man, which it peculiarly marks, connotes, or marks in conjunction with it, the part included under the word animal

It will be easy to apply the same explanation to all other cases. I say, the rose is red. Red is a connotative term, distinctively marking the idea of red. The idea of red is part of the cluster I mark by the word rose.

Take a more obscure expression; Fire burns. It is very obvious, that in the cluster of ideas I mark by the word fire, the idea of burning is included. To have the idea, "fire," therefore, and the idea "burning," called up by the names standing in predication, is to believe the proposition.

The Predications, "Virtue is lovely," "Vice is hateful," and the like, all admit of a similar exposition. In the cluster "virtue," the idea of loveliness is included; in the cluster "vice," that of hatefulness is included. Such propositions, therefore, merely say, that what is a part of a thing, is a part of it. The {392} two words call up the two ideas; and to have two ideas, one a part of another, and know that one is part of another, is not two things, but one and the same thing. To have the idea of rose, and the idea of red, and to know that red makes part of rose, is not two things, but one and the same thing.

Little more is necessary to explain this case of Belief in the truth of Propositions. Propositions are formed, either of general names, or particular names, that is, names of individuals. Propositions consisting of general names are by far the most numerous class, and by far the most important. The preceding exposition embraces them all. They are all merely verbal; and the Belief is nothing more than recognition of the coincidence, entire or partial, of two general names.

The case of Propositions formed of particular names, is different, and yet remains to be explained. "Mr. Brougham made a speech in the House of Commons on such a day." The Predicate, "making a speech in the House of Commons," is neither general, so as to include the subject, "Mr. Brougham," as in a species; nor is the cluster of ideas, marked by the predicate, included in the cluster marked by the subject, as a part in its whole. The proposition marks a case either of experience, or of testimony. If I heard the speech, the proposition is an expression of the Memory of an event; Mr. Brougham, antecedent, and making a speech, consequent; and the Belief of the Proposition, is another name for the Memory of the Event. If I did not hear it, Belief of the proposition, is belief in the testimony of those who say they heard it.

{393} As all propositions relating to individual objects are, after this manner, marks either of other men's testimony, or of our own experience, what belief, in these cases, is, has already been explained.

Propositions relating to individuals may be expressions either of past, or of future events. Belief in past events, upon our own experience, is memory; upon other men's experience, is Belief in testimony; both of them resolved into association. Belief in future events, is the inseparable association of like consequents with like antecedents.

It is not deemed necessary to unfold these associations. It has been already done. It seems enough, if they are indicated here.[107] [108]

[Bain's footnote 107: The author has treated in different places several questions intimately allied. These are:--

1. The essential nature of the state of mind called Belief, the mental region whence it springs, or the phenomena that it is to be classed with--whether Intellect, Feeling, or Will.

2. The belief in the Past, and the belief in the Future; in what respect they differ from belief in the present. Inseparably implicated with this, if not prior to it and preparatory to it, is the difference between ideas of Memory and ideas of Imagination.

3. The nature of our continuous Mental Life, or Identity; or what is meant by the Permanent Existence of Mind.

The chapters on Memory, and on Belief, and the section on Identity (Chap. XIV.), all treat of these questions, and contain profound original views on them all.

As regards the nature of Belief, he errs (in common with philosophers generally) in calling it a purely intellectual state. The consequence is to mar the explanations of the other points.

He displays a remarkably just and penetrating insight into the differences between Memory and Imagination, and between {394} our own self or Personality, and the personality of others; whereby he fully accounts for what is involved in Personal Identity.

To resolve the difficult phenomenon of Belief in Memory, of which the belief in the Permanent Existence of Mind is merely another expression, we must clear up the foundations of the state of Belief in general.

The prevailing error on this subject consists in regarding Belief as mainly a fact of the Intellect, with a certain participation of the feelings. The usual assumption is, that if a thing is conceived in a sufficiently vivid manner, or if two things are strongly associated in the mind, the state of belief is thereby induced.

A better clue to the real character of belief is found in the connexion between faith and works. The practical test applied to a man's belief in a certain matter, is his acting upon it. A capitalist's trust in the soundness of a project, is shown by his investing his money.

In its essential character, Belief is a phase of our active nature,--otherwise called the Will. Our tendency to action, under special circumstances, assumes the aspect called belief; as in other circumstances, it takes the form of Desire, and in a third situation, appears as Intention; none of all which are essential to voluntary action in its typical form.

The state of belief or of disbelief is manifested when we are pursuing an Intermediate End. In masticating something sweet, the fruition of the sweetness sustains the energy of the will; there is no case for the believing function properly so called, any more than there is for Desire, Deliberation, or Resolution. In going to a shop to purchase sweets, there is wanting this immediate support of the voluntary energies; the support grows out of an ideal state, the anticipation of the pleasure of sweetness; this state is called Belief. We are said to believe that what we are going to purchase will impart an agreeable sensation. The state is one of degree; we may have a strong belief or a weak belief; the strength having no other measure than the energy of pursuit inspired by it. If we {395} follow the intermediate end with all the avidity shown when we are realizing the full actuality, we have the perfect belief that what we aim at will bring the actuality. If, as often happens, we are less strongly moved than this, our belief is said to be so much weaker. Or, the comparison may be expressed in a different form. If two things are connected together as means and end; and, if on attaining the means, we feel as much elated (the end being something good) as if we had attained the end, then our belief is at the maximum; if less so, our belief is less. The promise made to us by one man gives all the satisfaction of the performance; the promise of another man gives a very inferior satisfaction; the comparison measures our comparative trust in the two men.

So far the matter seems plain. The real difficulty lies in assigning the mental origin or seat of the believing attitude. The view to be maintained in this note is, that the state of belief is identical with the activity or active disposition of the system, at the moment, and with reference to the thing believed. Now as there are various sources of activity, so there are various sources of belief. These are:--First, Spontaneous Activity, or the mere overflow of energy growing out of the nourishment of the system. Secondly, Voluntary Action, in the strictest signification, or the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, under the stimulus of one or other of those states. Thirdly, the tendency of an Idea to become an Actuality, the degree of which tendency accords with the mental excitement attending the idea. Fourthly, the addition of Habit to all the others. Under every one of these four influences, we are prompted to act, and in the same degree disposed to believe. Not one of the tendencies is any guarantee for the truth of the thing believed; which is a somewhat grave consequence of the theory contended for.

It will now be asked, in what acceptation, or under what circumstances, does mere activity, no matter how arising, constitute, or amount to, the state of belief. There are certain situations where the two states are on the surface the same; the fact of going along a certain road implicates the belief that {396} a certain destination will be reached. Nay, farther, a great amount of natural energy would sustain a vigorous pace, irrespective of the certainty of the goal; while physical feebleness would make one languid, however strong the evidence of the distant good. All this shows that the mental state called believing is of little use without the active power, and that the active power readily simulates the believing state, and makes it seem greater or less than it really is.

Let us now look at the question in another light. Having a natural fund of activity, with or without the addition of proper volitional impulses, we commence moving in a certain direction, no matter what. We are not necessarily urged to move by any prospect of what we are to find. We act somehow, because action comes upon us; and we take the consequences. Suppose, however, that we encounter a check, in the form of obstruction or pain: this stops our activity in that direction, but does not prevent it from taking another direction. Now, not only does the actual pain arrest our steps, but also the memory of it (if the circumstances are such as to give it a certain degree of strength) is deterring. We avoid that track in the future. With reference to it there is generated a voluntary activity and determination, containing the whole essence of belief; namely, the avoidance of a certain course, before the point of actual pain. This is, to all intents, belief on the side of prospective harm. Equally important is it to remark, that wherever we have not experienced any positive harm, check, or obstruction, we go on as readily and as energetically as ever. Our natural state of mind, our primitive start is tantamount to full confidence or belief; which is broken in upon, only after hostile experiences; by these, the original condition of implicit confidence is impaired; and in certain directions, a positive anticipation or determining volition and belief of evil is substituted. An animal born on a summer morning, and able to move about from the first, would not anticipate darkness; it would behave exactly as if light were never intermitted. A few days experience makes an {397} in-road on this primitive confidence, and modifies it to suit the facts.

Let us add another circumstance to the foregoing example. Instead of the individual moving blindly on, by mere exuberance or spontaneity, let the movement be favoured by bringing pleasure at every step. In this situation, the whole force of the spontaneity at the time, and the whole force of the will (proportioned to the stimulating pleasure), sustain the movements at a more energetic pace; and there is nothing to counter-work them. The mental disposition is now equivalent to the highest confidence; there is no hesitation, no distrust, nothing but exuberant unrestrained activity. Neither scepticism as to the unknown future, nor a demand for assurance that the present condition is to last, is entertained by the mind. The individual does not inquire whether a precipice, or the lair of a devouring beast be on the track. The ignorance is at once bliss and belief.

Here, then, we may discern the original tendency of the mind as regards belief. To have gone a certain way with safety and with fruition, is an ample inducement to continue in that particular path. The situation contains all that is meant by full and unbounded confidence that the future and the distant will be exactly what the present is. The primary impulse of every creature is at the farthest remove from a procedure according to Logic. In the beginning, confidence is at its maximum; the course of education is towards abating, and narrowing it, so as to adapt it to the fact of things. Every check is a lesson, destroying to a certain extent the over-vaulting assurance of the natural mind, and planting a belief in evil, at points where originally flourished only the illimitable belief in good.

There is thus wrapped up, in the active impulses of our nature, a power of credulity leading us habitually to overstep the experience of the present. We believe in the uniformity of nature with a vengeance. We have to be schooled by adverse encounters, before we are brought within the limits of the real uniformity. Our natural credulity is equally excessive {398} on the side of evil and on the side of good; where we have once suffered we expect always to suffer. In short, whereas to the logician, there is a great gulf between the present and future, the known and the unknown, to the natural man there is not even a break. The early mind laughs the logician's gulf to scorn. All that science or logic has been able to do is to show that at certain points the assumed uniformity is broken in upon; tractable and docile minds learn to respect these exceptions; but wherever an outlet exists, with no barrier, or express prohibition, not only is that outlet followed, it is followed with all the pristine impetuosity of our active nature. The ordinary logician, over-awed by this force of determination, seldom asserts the principle that the present can by no logical implication contain the future, that a present reality holds in itself no warrant for the unknown past, the distant or the future. The barrier that this principle would interpose to our inferences has been carried by assault; the gordian knot is always cut with the sword.

From the point of view of the logician, a serious difficulty attaches to our belief in the Memory of the Past; the psychologist can refer it to the incontinence of the mind, in moving freely away from the present in any direction, in accounting the step next to be entered upon in the absence of impediment, as secure as the one actually taken.

Let us consider the process first by reverting to the anticipation of the Future. That a state of things now begun will continue indefinitely is what the mind not only assumes but proceeds upon with a vehemence proportioned to its active endowments and dispositions, until admonished to the contrary by the experience of being checked. All instruction, or corroborating information, is dispensed with at the outset: the burden is always laid upon the denier. Of this tendency of the mind the examples are innumerable, and need only to be indicated. In the default of evidence, on one side, and against what ought to be considered evidence on the other side, we believe that, as we feel now, so we shall feel always. And our belief is not simply giving the benefit of any doubt there may {399} be to the opinion we incline to; it is a powerful impulse, counteracted only by a severe and protracted discipline. Also, we believe that our own feelings exactly measure and correspond to the feelings of every one else. Very few are ever brought within the limits of the actual truth on this point; the primitive tendency is not met by a sufficient force of the requisite education.

It is the belief in the future that offers the simplest and clearest example of the mind's tendency to overleap the actual, to see no hard line between the present and the remote. The belief in nature's continuance and uniformity has always been in excess. From the very same tendency springs whatever belief we have of our own continued existence and identity. We make light of the difference between the conceived future and the real present.

Much more subtlety attends the Belief in Memory: the meaning of which is, that, whereas certain ideas recalled by memory are, _de facto_, ideas, or mental elements of a kind that imagination might furnish, they yet carry with them the belief that they represent what was once actuality, like any sensation of the present moment.

Let us first apply to the case the overweening instinct now fully set forth. To the logician, the past, however recent, is divided by a deep gulf from the present: the idea and the actuality can never be interchanged. It is not so with the mind following its native disposition. I have a present sensation of thirst; in that present consciousness, I have the highest attainable assurance; my action upon it is unhesitating and complete. Let that sensation, however, pass away for one minute, and there remains only the idea which, as a mere idea, by virtue of its recency, may be at its maximum strength. The point now to be explained is, why I believe not merely that I have the idea, which as a fact of present consciousness I am entitled to believe to the utmost, but that the idea was lately a full actuality as much as is my present state of satisfied sensation. The explanation seems to be, that we really make no radical difference between a present and a proximate past; {400} the march of the mind is to and fro, into the past and the future, with the same tendency to act out both, as to act out the present, assuming always the absence of a positive check or break. Such is the inveterate persistence of the natural activity, that the belief in the thirst when present (shown by action in accordance therewith) has a continuing efficacy second only to the belief in a still present state. At the moment of actual thirst, I, in the absence of corrective influences, (and to some degree in spite of these), would be disposed to believe that I always was, and always would be thirsty. The satisfaction that has followed reduces that belief to a fraction of its former state; and my utmost licence of assumption would be, (in the absence of contradictory beliefs) that all my past has been one thirst. The fact is, that, in these moments, when I give full licence to the sway of the idea, by voluntarily remitting attention to my new experience, that idea may swell out into a pitch of mental occupation hardly distinguishable from the real presence; in which case, my past self and my present self are, as it were, one and indivisible; they are freely interchanged; the actual consciousness compounds and contains them both.

Going another step backward, let us consider the state prior to the thirst; say a consciousness of heat and muscular fatigue. What proof have I that these penultimate states were present in continuity of time and in immediate precedence to the thirst, and are not vagaries of imagination, nor drawn from a remote past, accidentally revived? There seems no other evidence than that already given regarding the proximate state. In surrendering our mind to the idea still remaining, and so imparting a momentary quasi-reality to the state, we have an experience possessing the characteristic features of present reality.

Another consideration has to be mentioned. The state of transition from reality to reality is a distinct and unmistakeable experience. The transition from a present sensation of thirst to a present sensation of satisfied thirst is a march of its own kind--unique and explicit. There are in it attendant {401} circumstances, not to be confounded with the transition from a present to a past across a break. The recent and proximate state of thirst has a mode of continuity, a setting in contact with the present, such as did not belong to the thirst of yesterday, and still less belongs to the idea of the narrated thirst of another person. No sensation ever comes to us alone, or without a group of collaterals; and the collaterals of the formerly actual, and of the ideal never an actual, are wholly different. (This point has been well illustrated in the text, Chap. X. on Memory). The peculiar link whereby a present actual passes out of actuality into proximate actuality, when it is barely deprived of existence in the real, is a fact that remains and attaches to everything that has been actual; and the unbroken sequence of these is our past life of actuality, clearly marked out from every aggregate of ideas indiscriminately culled and united in a whole of imagination. This last process has its own distinctive collaterals; it is accompanied by numerous shocks of agreement in difference, under the law of similarity; but we do not confound these or other accompaniments with the gliding movement of the mind over the chronological past. Thus to take the extreme instance. We can assume another person's mental state (to a certain degree); and yet we do not fuse that with our own identity. There is a broad line of demarcation between each one's experience that they term their actual, and the assumption of a second person's experience, say of thirst, of fear, of curiosity. Our own past has continuity and fusion, in itself, and a peculiar set of circumstantial surroundings; in general, too, it is easy to remember. The other person's experience is received through a machinery of objective signs, laboriously interpreted, and not realized with the collaterals of an experience of our own; it is shorn of all the beams of our own personality, whether in the present or in the recollected past.

The distinction now drawn, (substantially what is exemplified at length in the chapter referred to,) is confirmed by what happens on occasions when memory and imagination are confounded. When a fact is long past, and all but forgotten, {402} the oblivion overtakes the evidentiary collaterals, the marks of continuity that link together what has been one actual state to what has been another actual state. I remember having had the idea or purpose to say or to do something on a certain occasion; but I do not remember whether I actually did or said the thing. The memory of the occasion is incomplete; the links are snapped that connect that idea with my remembered acting at the time referred to; it is not in its place in that authenticated series; and it is not associated with the collateral circumstances that always attend an actual transaction. On the other hand, as is well remarked in the chapter quoted, imagination may simulate remembered reality, when there is wanting the real memory that would people the occasion with authentic circumstances, and when the imagination has been excited and exercised so as to include in its compass the collaterals that go with an experience in the actual.--_B._]

[Editor's footnote 108: The analysis of Belief presented in this chapter, brings out the conclusion that all cases of Belief are simply cases of indissoluble association: that there is no generic distinction, but only a difference in the strength of the association, between a case of belief and a case of mere imagination: that to believe a succession or coexistence between two facts is only to have the ideas of the two facts so strongly and closely associated, that we cannot help having the one idea when we have the other.

If this can be proved, it is the greatest of all the triumphs of the Association Psychology. To first appearance, no two things can be more distinct than thinking of two things together, and believing that they are joined together in the outward world. Nevertheless, that the latter state of mind is only an extreme case of the former, is, as we see, the deliberate doctrine of the author of the Analysis; and it has also in its favour the high psychological authority of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Bain, in the preceding note, as well as in his systematic work, looks at the phenomenon from another side, and pronounces that what constitutes Belief is the power which an {403} idea has obtained over the Will. It is well known and understood that a mere idea may take such possession of the mind as to exercise an irresistible control over the active faculties, even independently of Volition, and sometimes in opposition to it. This, which Mr. Bain calls the power of a Fixed Idea, is exemplified in the cases of what is called fascination: the impulse which a person looking from a precipice sometimes feels to throw himself down it; and the cases of crimes said to have been committed by persons who abhor them, because that very horror has filled their minds with an intense and irrepressible idea of the act. Since an idea is sometimes able to overpower volition, it is no wonder that an idea should determine volition; as it does whenever we, under the influence of the idea of a pleasure or of a pain, will that which obtains for us the pleasure or averts the pain. In this voluntary action, our conduct is grounded upon a relation between means and an end; (that is, upon a constant conjunction of facts in the way of causation, ultimately resolvable into a case of resemblance and contiguity): in common and unanalytical language, upon certain laws of nature on which we rely. Our reliance is the consequence of an association formed in our minds between the supposed cause and its effect, resulting either from personal experience of their conjunction, from the teachings of other people, or from accidental appearances. Now, according to Mr. Bain, when this association between the means and the end, the end calling up the idea of the means, arrives at the point of giving to the idea thus called up a command over the Will, it constitutes Belief. We believe a thing, when we are ready to act on the faith of it; to face the practical consequences of taking it for granted: and therein lies the distinction between believing two facts to be conjoined, and merely thinking of them together. Thus far Mr. Bain: and with this I fully agree. But something is still wanting to the completeness of the analysis. The theory as stated, distinguishes two antecedents, by a difference not between themselves, but between their consequents. But when the consequents differ, the antecedents cannot be the same. An association {404} of ideas is or is not a Belief, according as it has or has not the power of leading us to voluntary action: this is undeniable: but when there is a difference in the effects there must be a difference in the cause: the association which leads to action must be, in some respect or other, different from that which stops at thought. The question, therefore, raised, and, as they think, resolved, by the author of the Analysis and by Mr. Spencer, still demands an answer. Does the difference between the two cases consist in this, that in the one case the association is dissoluble, in the other it is so much more closely riveted, by repetition, or by the intensity of the associated feelings, as to be no longer dissoluble? This is the question we are compelled to face.

I.

In the first place, then, it may be said--If Belief consisted in an indissoluble association, Belief itself would be indissoluble. An opinion once formed could never afterwards be destroyed or changed. This objection is good against the _word_ indissoluble. But those who maintain the theory do not mean by an indissoluble association, one which nothing that can be conceived to happen could possibly dissolve. All our associations of ideas would probably be dissoluble, if experience presented to us the associated facts separate from one another. If we have any associations which are, in practice, indissoluble, it can only be because the conditions of our existence deny to us the experiences which would be capable of dissolving them. What the author of the Analysis means by indissoluble associations, are those which we cannot, by any mental effort, at present overcome. If two ideas are, at the present time, so closely associated in our minds, that neither any effort of our own, nor anything else which can happen, can enable us now to have the one without its instantly raising up the other, the association is, in the author's sense of the term, indissoluble. There would be less risk of misunderstanding if we were to discard the word indissoluble, and confine ourselves to the expression which the author employs as its equivalent, inseparable. This I will henceforth do, and {405} we will now enquire whether Belief is nothing but an inseparable association.

In favour of this supposition there is the striking fact, that an inseparable association very often suffices to command belief. There are innumerable cases of Belief for which no cause can be assigned, except that something has created so strong an association between two ideas that the person cannot separate them in thought. The author has given a large assortment of such cases, and has made them tell with great force in support of his theory. Locke, as the author mentions, had already seen, that this is one of the commonest and most fertile sources of erroneous thought; deserving to be placed high in any enumeration of Fallacies. When two things have long been habitually thought of together, and never apart, until the association between the ideas has become so strong that we have great difficulty, or cannot succeed at all, in separating them, there is a strong tendency to believe that the facts are conjoined in reality; and when the association is closer still, that their conjunction is what is called Necessary. Most of the schools of philosophy, both past and present, are so much under the influence of this tendency, as not only to justify it in principle, but to elect it into a Law of Things. The majority of metaphysicians have maintained, and even now maintain, that there are things which, by the laws of intelligence, cannot be separated in thought, and that these things are not only always united in fact, but united by necessity: and, again, other things, which cannot be united in thought--which cannot be thought of together, and that these not only never do, but it is impossible they ever should, coexist in fact. These supposed necessities are the very foundation of the Transcendental schools of metaphysics, of the Common Sense school, and many others which have not received distinctive names. These are facts in human nature and human history very favourable to the supposition that Belief is but an inseparable association, or at all events that an inseparable association suffices to create Belief.

On the contrary side of the question it may be urged, that {406} the inseparable associations which are so often found to generate Beliefs, do not generate them in everybody. Analytical and philosophical minds often escape from them, and resist the tendency to believe in an objective conjunction between facts merely because they are unable to separate the ideas. The author's typical example of an inseparable association, (and there can be none more suited to the purpose,) is the association between sensations of colour and the tangible magnitudes, figures, and distances, of which they are signs, and which are so completely merged with them into one single impression, that we believe we see distance, extension, and figure, though all we really see is the optical effects which accompany them, all the rest being a rapid interpretation of natural signs. The generality of mankind, no doubt, and all men before they have studied the subject, believe what the author says they do; but a great majority of those who have studied the subject believe otherwise: they believe that a large portion of the facts which we seem to see, we do not really see, but instantaneously infer. Yet the association remains inseparable in these scientific thinkers as in others: the retinal picture suggests to them the real magnitude, in the same irresistible manner as it does to other people. To take another of the author's examples: when we look at a distant terrestrial object through a telescope, it appears nearer; if we reverse the telescope it appears further off. The signs by which we judge of distance from us, here mislead, because those signs are found in conjunction with real distances widely different from those with which they coexist in our ordinary experience. The association, however, persists, and is irresistible, in one person as much as in another; for every one recognises that the object, thus looked at, _seems_ nearer, or farther off, than we know it to be. But does this ever make any of us, except perhaps an inexperienced child, _believe_ that the object is at the distance at which we seem to see it? The inseparable association, though so persistent and powerful as to create in everybody an optical illusion, creates no _de_lusion, but leaves our belief as conformable to the realities of fact as if no such illusive appearance had presented {407} itself. Cases similar to this are so frequent, that cautious and thoughtful minds, enlightened by experience on the misleading character of inseparable associations, learn to distrust them, and do not, even by a first impulse, believe a connexion in fact because there is one in thought, but wait for evidence.

Following up the same objection, it may be said that if belief is only an inseparable association, belief is a matter of habit and accident, and not of reason. Assuredly an association, however close, between two ideas, is not a sufficient _ground_ of belief; is not _evidence_ that the corresponding facts are united in external nature. The theory seems to annihilate all distinction between the belief of the wise, which is regulated by evidence, and conforms to the real successions and coexistences of the facts of the universe, and the belief of fools, which is mechanically produced by any accidental association that suggests the idea of a succession or coexistence to the mind: a belief aptly characterized by the popular expression, believing a thing because they have taken it into their heads.

Indeed, the author of the Analysis is compelled by his theory to affirm that we actually believe in accordance with the misleading associations which generate what are commonly called illusions of sense. He not only says that we believe we see figure and distance--which the great majority of psychologists since Berkeley do not believe; but he says, that in the case of ventriloquy "we cannot help believing" that the sound proceeds from the place, of which the ventriloquist imitates the effect; that the sound of bells opposed by the wind, not only appears farther off, but is believed to come from farther off, although we may know the exact distance from which it comes; that "in passing on board ship, another ship at sea, we _believe_ that she has all the motion, we none:" nay even, that when we have turned ourselves round with velocity several times, "we believe that the world is turning round." Surely it is more true to say, as people generally do say, "the world _seems_ to us to turn round." To me these cases appear so many experimental proofs, that the tendency of an inseparable association to generate belief, even when that {408} tendency is fully effectual in creating the irresistible appearance of a state of things that does not really exist, may yet be impotent against reason, that is, against preponderant evidence.

In defence of these paradoxes, let us now consider what the author of the Analysis might say. One thing he would certainly say: that the belief he affirms to exist in these cases of illusion, is but a momentary one; with which the belief entertained at all other times may be at variance. In the case, for instance, of those who, from an early association formed between darkness and ghosts, feel terror in the dark though they have a confirmed disbelief in ghosts, the author's opinion is that there is a temporary belief, at the moment when the terror is felt. This was also the opinion of Dugald Stewart: and the agreement (by no means a solitary one) between two thinkers of such opposite tendencies, reminds one of the saying "Quand un Français et un Anglais sont d'accord, il faut bien qu'ils aient raison." Yet the author seems to adopt this notion not from observation of the case, but from an antecedent opinion that "dread implies belief, and an uncontrollable belief," which, he says, "we need not stay to prove." It is to be wished, in this case, that he had stayed to prove it: for it is harder to prove than he thought. The emotion of fear, the physical effect on the nervous system known by that name, may be excited, and I believe often is excited, simply by terrific imaginations. That these imaginations are, even for a moment, mistaken for menacing realities, may be true, but ought not to be assumed without proof. The circumstance most in its favour (one not forgotten by the author) is that in dreams, to which may be added hallucinations, frightful ideas are really mistaken for terrible facts. But dreams are states in which all other sensible ideas are mistaken for outward facts. Yet sensations and ideas are intrinsically different, and it is not the normal state of the human mind to confound the one with the other.

Besides, this supposition of a momentary belief in ghosts breaking in upon and interrupting an habitual and permanent belief that there are no ghosts, jars considerably with the {409} doctrine it is brought to support, that belief is an inseparable association. According to that doctrine, here are two inseparable associations, which yet are so far from exclusively possessing the mind, that they alternate with one another, each Inseparable implying the separation of the other Inseparable. The association of darkness with the absence of ghosts must be anything but inseparable, if there only needs the presence of darkness to revive the contrary association. Yet an association so very much short of inseparable, is accompanied, at least in the absence of darkness, by a full belief. Darkness is in this case associated with two incompatible ideas, the idea of ghosts and that of their absence, but with neither of them inseparably, and in consequence the two associations alternately prevail, as the surrounding circumstances favour the one or the other; agreeably to the laws of Compound Association laid down with great perspicuity and reach of thought by Mr. Bain in his systematic treatise.

To the argument, that the inseparable associations which create optical and other illusions, do not, when opposed by reason, generate the false belief, the author's answer would probably be some such as the following. When the rational thinker succeeds in resisting the belief, he does so by more or less completely overcoming the inseparableness of the association. Associations may be conquered by the formation of counter-associations. Mankind had formerly an inseparable association between sunset and the motion of the sun, and this in separable association compelled them to believe that in the phenomenon of sunset the sun moves and the earth is at rest. But Copernicus, Galileo, and after them, all astronomers, found evidence, that the earth moves and the sun is at rest: in other words, certain experiences, and certain reasonings from those experiences, took place in their minds, the tendency of which was to associate sunset with the ideas of the earth in motion and the sun at rest. This was a counter-association, which could not coexist, at least at the same instant, with the previous association connecting sunset with the sun in motion and the earth at rest. But for a long time the new {410} associating influences could not be powerful enough to get the better of the old association, and change the belief which it implied. A belief which has become habitual, is seldom overcome but by a slow process. However, the experiences and mental processes that tended to form the new association still went on; there was a conflict between the old association and the causes which tended to produce a new one; until, by the long continuance and frequent repetition of those causes, the old association, gradually undermined, ceased to be inseparable, and it became possible to associate the idea of sunset with that of the earth moving and the sun at rest; whereby the previous idea of the sun moving and the earth at rest was excluded for the time, and as the new association grew in strength, was at last thrown out altogether. The argument should go on to say that after a still further prolongation of the new experiences and reasonings, the old association became impossible and the new one inseparable; for, until it became inseparable, there could, according to the theory, be no belief. And this, in truth, does sometimes happen. There are instances in the history of science, even down to the present day, in which something which was once believed to be impossible, and its opposite to be necessary, was first seen to be possible, next to be true, and finally came to be considered as necessarily true, and its opposite (once deemed necessary) as impossible, and even inconceivable; insomuch that it is thought by some that what was reputed an impossibility, might have been known to be a necessity. In such cases, the quality of inseparableness has passed, in those minds at least, from the old association to the new one. But in much the greatest number of cases the change does not proceed so far, and both associations remain equally possible. The case which furnished our last instance is an example. Astronomers, and all educated persons, now associate sunset with motion confined to the earth, and firmly believe this to be what really takes place; but they have not formed this association with such exclusiveness and intensity as to have become unable to associate sunset with motion of the sun. On the contrary, the visible appearance still suggests {411} motion of the sun, and many people, though aware of the truth, find that they cannot by any effort make themselves see sunset any otherwise than as the sinking of the sun below the earth. My own experience is different: I find that I can represent the phenomenon to myself in either light; I can, according to the manner in which I direct my thoughts, see sunset either as the earth tilting above the sun, or as the sun dipping below the earth: in the same manner as when a railway train in motion passes another at rest, we are able, if we prevent our eyes from resting on any third object, to imagine the motion as being either in the one train or in the other. How, then, can it be said that there is an inseparable association of sunset with the one mode of representation, and a consequent inability to associate it with the other? It is associated with both, and the one of the two associations which is nearest to being inseparable is that which belief does not accompany. The difference between different people in the ability to represent to themselves the phenomenon under either aspect, depends rather on the degree of exercise which they have given to their imagination in trying to frame mental pictures conformable to the two hypotheses, than upon those considerations of reason and evidence which yet may determine their belief.

The question still remains, what is there which exists in the hypothesis believed, and does not exist in the hypothesis rejected, when we have associations which enable our imagination to represent the facts agreeably to either hypothesis? In other words, what is Belief?

I think it must be admitted, that when we can represent to ourselves in imagination either of two conflicting suppositions, one of which we believe, and disbelieve the other, neither of the associations can be inseparable; and there must therefore be in the fact of Belief, which exists in only one of the two cases, something for which inseparable association does not account. We seem to have again come up, on a different side, to the difficulty which we felt in the discussion of Memory, in accounting for the distinction between a fact remembered, and the same fact imagined. There is a close parallelism between {412} the two problems. In both, we have the difference between a fact and a representation in imagination; between a sensation, or combination of sensations, and an idea, or combination of ideas. This difference we all accept as an ultimate fact. But the difficulty is this. Let me first state it as it presents itself in the case of Memory. Having in our mind a certain combination of ideas, in a group or a train, accompanying or succeeding one another; what is it which, in one case, makes us recognize this group or train as representing a group or train of the corresponding sensations, remembered as having been actually felt by us, while in another case we are aware that the sensations have never occurred to us in a group or train corresponding to that in which we are now having the ideas? This is the problem of Memory. Let me now state the problem of Belief, when the belief is not a case of memory. Here also we have ideas connected in a certain order in our own mind, which makes us think of a corresponding order among the sensations, and we believe that this similar combination of the sensations is a real fact: _i.e._, whether we ever felt it or not, we confidently expect that we should feel it under certain given conditions. In Memory, we believe that the realities in Nature, the sensations and combinations of sensations presented to us from without, _have_ occurred to us in an order which agrees with that in which we are representing them to ourselves in thought: in those cases of Belief which are not cases of Memory, we believe, not that they have occurred, but that they would have occurred, or would occur, in that order.

What is it that takes place in us, when we recognize that there is this agreement between the order of our ideas and the order in which we either had or might have had the sensations which correspond to them--that the order of the ideas represents a similar order either in our actual sensations, or in those which, under some given circumstances, we should have reason to expect? What, in short, is the difference _to our minds_ between thinking of a reality, and representing to ourselves an imaginary picture? I confess that I can perceive no escape from the opinion that the distinction is ultimate and primordial. {413} There is no more difficulty in holding it to be so, than in holding the difference between a sensation and an idea to be primordial. It seems almost another aspect of the same difference. The author himself says, in the chapter on Memory, that, a sensation and an idea being different, it is to be expected that the remembrance of having had a sensation should be different from the remembrance of having had an idea, and that this is a sufficient explanation of our distinguishing them. If this, then, is an original distinction, why should not the distinction be original between the remembrance of having had a sensation, and the actually having an idea (which is the difference between Memory and Imagination); and between the expectation of having a sensation, and the actually having an idea (which is the difference between Belief and Imagination)? Grant these differences, and there is nothing further to explain in the phenomenon of Belief. For every belief is either the memory of having had a sensation (or other feeling), or the expectation that we should have the sensation or feeling in some given state of circumstances, if that state of circumstances could come to be realized.

II.

That all belief is either Memory or Expectation, will be clearly seen if we run over all the different objects of Belief. The author has already done so, in order to establish his theory; and it is now necessary that we should do the same.

The objects of Belief are enumerated by the author in the following terms:--1. Events, real existences. 2. Testimony. 3. The truth of propositions. He intended this merely as a rough grouping, sufficient for the purpose if it includes everything: for it is evident that the divisions overlap one another, and it will be seen presently that the last two are but cases of the first.

Belief in events he further divides into belief in present events, in past events, and in future events. Belief in present events he subdivides into belief in immediate existences present to my senses, and belief in immediate existences not present {414} to my senses. We see by this that he recognises no difference, in a metaphysical sense, between existences and events, because he regards, with reason, objects as merely the supposed antecedents of events. The distinction, however, requires to be kept up, being no other than the fundamental difference between simultaneousness, and succession or change.

Belief in immediate existences present to my senses, is either belief in my sensations, or belief in external objects. Believing that I feel what I am at this moment feeling, is, as the author says, only another name for having the feeling; with the idea, however, of Myself, associated with it; of which hereafter.

The author goes on to analyse Belief in external objects present to our senses; and he resolves it into a present sensation, united by an irresistible association with the numerous other sensations which we are accustomed to receive in conjunction with it. The Object is thus to be understood as a complex idea, compounded of the ideas of various sensations which we have, and of a far greater number of sensations which we should expect to have if certain contingencies were realized. In other words, our idea of an object is an idea of a group of possibilities of sensation, some of which we believe we can realize at pleasure, while the remainder would be realized if certain conditions took place, on which, by the laws of nature, they are dependent. As thus explained, belief in the existence of a physical object, is belief in the occurrence of certain sensations, contingently on certain previous conditions. This is a state of mind closely allied to Expectation of sensations. For--though we use the name Expectation only with reference to the future, and even to the probable future--our state of mind in respect to what _may_ be future, and even to what _might have been_ future, is of the same general nature, and depends on the same principles, as Expectation. I believe that a certain event will positively happen, because the known conditions which always accompany it in experience have already taken place. I believe that another event will certainly happen _if_ the known conditions which always accompany it take place, and those conditions I can produce when I please. I believe {415} that a third event will happen if its conditions take place, but I must wait for those conditions; I cannot realize them at pleasure, and may never realize them at all. The first of these three cases is positive expectation, the other two are conditional expectation. A fourth case is my belief that the event would have happened at any former time if the conditions had taken place at that time. It is not consonant to usage to call this Expectation, but, considered as a case of belief, there is no essential difference between it and the third case. My belief that I should have heard Cicero had I been present in the Forum, and my belief that I shall hear Mr. Gladstone if I am present in the House of Commons, can nowise be regarded as essentially different phenomena. The one we call Expectation, the other not, but the mental principle operative in both these cases of belief is the same.

The author goes on to say, that the belief that we should have the sensations if certain conditions were realized, that is, if we had certain other sensations, is merely an inseparable association of the two sets of sensations with one another, and their inseparable union with the idea of ourselves as having them. But I confess it seems to me that all this may exist in a case of simple imagination. The author would himself admit that the complex idea of the object, in all its fulness, may be in the mind without belief. What remains is its association with the idea of ourselves as percipients. But this also, I cannot but think, we may have in the case of an imaginary scene, when we by no means believe that any corresponding reality exists. Does the idea of our own personality never enter into the pictures in our imagination? Are we not ourselves present in the scenes which we conjure up in our minds? I apprehend we are as constantly present in them, and as conscious of our presence, as we are in contemplating a real prospect. In either case the vivacity of the other impressions eclipses, for the most part, the thought of ourselves as spectators, but not more so in the imaginary, than in the real, spectacle.

It appears to me, then, that to account for belief in external {416} objects, we must postulate Expectation; and since all our expectations, whether positive or contingent, are a consequence of our Memory of the past (as distinguished from a representation in fancy), we must also postulate Memory. The distinction between a mere combination of ideas in thought, and one which recals to us a combination of sensations as actually experienced, always returns on our hands as an ultimate postulate.

The author proceeds to shew how this idea of a mere group of sensations, actual or contingent, becomes knit up with an idea of a permanent Something, lying, as it were, under these sensations, and causing them; this further enlargement of the complex idea taking place through the intimate, or, as he calls it, inseparable association, generated by experience, which makes us unable to imagine any phenomenon as beginning to exist without something anterior to it which causes it. This explanation, seems to me quite correct as far as it goes; but, while it accounts for the difficulty we have in not ascribing our sensations to some cause or other, it does not explain why we accept, as in fact we do, the group itself as the cause. I have endeavoured to clear up this difficulty elsewhere (Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy), and in preference to going over the ground a second time, I subjoin, at the end of the volume, the chapter containing the explanation. That chapter supplies all that appears to me to be further necessary on the subject of belief in outward objects; which is thus shewn to be a case of Conditional Expectation.

It is unnecessary to follow the author into the minute consideration of Belief in the existence of objects not present since the explanation already given equally applies to them. My belief in the present existence of St. Paul's is correctly set forth by the author as consisting of the following elements: I believe that I have seen St. Paul's: I believe that I shall see St. Paul's, when I am again in St. Paul's Churchyard: I believe that I should see St. Paul's, if I were in St. Paul's Churchyard at this instant. All this, as he justly remarks, is Memory or Expectation. And this, or some part of this, is {417} the whole of what is in any case meant by belief in the real existence of an external object. The author adds, I also believe that if any creature whose senses are analogous to my own, is now in St. Paul's Churchyard, it has the present sensation of that edifice. But this belief is not necessary to my belief in the continued existence of St. Paul's. For that, it suffices that I believe I should myself see it. My belief that other creatures would do so, is part of my belief in the real existence of other creatures like myself; which is no more mysterious, than our belief in the real existence of any other objects some of whose properties rest not on direct sensation, but on inference.

Belief in past existences, when those existences have been perceived by ourselves, is Memory. When the past existences are inferred from evidence, the belief of them is not Memory, but a fact of the same nature as Expectation; being a belief that we _should have had_ the sensations if we had been cotemporary with the objects, and had been in the local position necessary for receiving sensible impressions from them.

We now come to the case of Belief in testimony. But testimony is not itself an object of belief. The object of belief is what the testimony asserts. And so in the last of the author's three cases, that of assent to a proposition. The object of belief, in both these cases, is an assertion. But an assertion is something asserted, and what is asserted must be a fact, similar to some of those of which we have already treated. According to the author, belief in an assertion is belief that two names are both of them names of the same thing: but this we have felt ourselves obliged to discard, as an inadequate explanation of the import of any assertions, except those which are classed as merely verbal. Every assertion concerning Things, whether in concrete or in abstract language, is an assertion that some fact, or group of facts, has been, is, or may be expected to be, found, wherever a certain other fact, or group of facts, is found. Belief in this, is therefore either remembrance that we did have, or expectation that we shall have, or a belief of the same nature with expectation that in {418} some given circumstances we should have, or should have had, direct perception of a particular fact. Belief, therefore, is always a case either of Memory or of Expectation; including under the latter name conditional as well as positive expectation, and the state of mind similar to expectation which affects us in regard to what _would_ have been a subject of expectation, if the conditions of its realization had still been possible.

It may be objected, that we may believe in the real existence of things which are not objects of sense at all. We may. But we cannot believe in the real existence of anything which we do not conceive as capable of acting in some way upon our own or some other being's consciousness; though the state of consciousness it produces may not be called a sensation. The existence of a thing means, to us, merely its capacity of producing an impression of some sort upon some mind, that is, of producing some state of consciousness. The belief, therefore, in its existence, is still a conditional expectation of something which we should, under some supposed circumstances, be capable of feeling.

To resume: Belief, as I conceive, is more than an inseparable association, for inseparable associations do not always generate belief, nor does belief always require, as one of its conditions, an inseparable association: we can believe that to be true which we are capable of conceiving or representing to ourselves as false, and false what we are capable of representing to ourselves as true. The difference between belief and mere imagination, is the difference between recognising something as a reality in nature, and regarding it as a mere thought of our own. This is the difference which presents itself when Memory has to be distinguished from Imagination; and again when Expectation, whether positive or contingent (i.e. whether it be expectation that we shall, or only persuasion that in certain definable circumstances we should, have a certain experience) has to be distinguished from the mere mental conception of that experience.

III.

Let us examine, once more, whether the speculations in the text afford us any means of further analysing this difference.

{419} The difference presents itself in its most elementary form in the distinction between a sensation and an idea. The author admits this distinction to be ultimate and primordial. "A sensation is different from an idea, only because it is felt to be different." But, after having admitted that these two states or consciousness are distinguishable from each other in and by themselves, he adds, that they are also distinguishable by their accompaniments. "The accompaniments of a sensation are always generically different from those of an idea. . . . . The accompaniments of a sensation, are all the simultaneous _objects of sensation_, together with all those which, to a certain extent, both preceded and followed it. The accompaniments of an idea are not the simultaneous objects of sensation, but _other ideas_; namely, the neighbouring facts, antecedent and consequent, of the mental train." There can be no doubt that in those individual cases in which ideas and sensations might be confounded, namely, when an idea reaches or approaches the vivacity of a sensation, the indication here pointed out helps to assure us that what we are conscious of is, nevertheless, only an idea. When, for instance, we awake from a dream, and open our eyes to the outward world, what makes us so promptly recognise that this and not the other is the real world, is that we find its phenomena connected in the accustomed order of our objects of sensation. But though this circumstance enables us, in particular instances, to refer our impression more instantaneously to one or the other class, it cannot be by this that we distinguish ideas at first from sensations; for the criterion supposes the distinction to be already made. If we judge a sensation to be a sensation because its accompaniments are other sensations, and an idea to be an idea because its accompaniments are other ideas, we must already be able to distinguish those other sensations from those other ideas.

A similar remark is applicable to a criterion between sensations and ideas, incidentally laid down by Mr. Bain in the First Part of his systematic treatise. "A mere picture or _idea_ remains the same whatever be our bodily position or {420} bodily exertions; the sensation that we call the actual is entirely at the mercy of our movements, shifting in every possible way according to the varieties of action that we go through." (_The Senses and the Intellect_, 2nd ed. p. 381.) This test, like the author's, may serve in cases of momentary doubt; but sensations in general must have been already distinguished from ideas, before we could have hit upon this criterion between them. If we had not already known the difference between a sensation and an idea, we never could have discovered that one of them is "at the mercy of our movements," and that the other is not.

It being granted that a sensation and an idea are _ipso facto_ distinguishable, the author thinks it no more than natural that "the copy of the sensation should be distinguishable from the revival of the idea, when they are both brought up by association." But he adds, that there is another distinction between the memory of a sensation, and the memory of an idea, and it is this. In all Memory the idea of self forms part of the complex idea; but in the memory of sensation, the self which enters into the remembrance is "the sentient self, that is, seeing and hearing:" in the memory of an idea, it is "not the sentient self, but the conceptive self, self having an idea. But" (he adds) "myself percipient, and myself imagining, or conceiving, are two very different states of consciousness: of course the ideas of these states of consciousness, or these states revived by association, are very different ideas."

Concerning the fact there is no dispute. Myself percipient, and myself imagining or conceiving, are different states, because perceiving is a different thing from imagining; and being different states, the remembrance of them is, as might be expected, different. But the question is, in what does the difference between the remembrances consist? The author calls one of them the _idea_ of myself perceiving, and the other the _idea_ of myself imagining, and thinks there is no other difference. But how do the idea of myself having a sensation, and the idea of myself having an idea of that sensation, differ from one another? since in either case an idea of the sensation is all {421} that I am having now. The thought of myself perceiving a thing at a former time, and the thought of myself imagining the thing at that former time, are both at the present moment facts of imagination--are now merely ideas. In each case I have an ideal representation of myself, as conscious in a manner very similar in the two cases; though not exactly the same, since in the one case I remember to have been conscious of a sensation, in the other, to have been conscious only of an idea of that sensation: but, in either case, that past consciousness enters only as an idea, into the consciousness I now have by recollection. In what, then, as far as mere ideas are concerned, do my present mental representations of the two cases differ? Will it be said, that the idea of the sensation is one thing, the idea of the idea of the sensation another thing? Or are they both the same idea, namely, the idea of the sensation; and is the element that is present in the one case, but absent in the other, not an idea but something else? A difference there is admitted to be between the remembrance of having had a sensation, and the remembrance of having merely thought of the sensation, i.e. had the idea of it: is this difference a difference in the ideas I have in the two cases, or is the idea the same, but accompanied in the one case by something not an idea, which does not exist in the other? for if so, this something is a Belief.

I have touched upon this question in a former note, and expressed my inability to recognise, in the idea of an idea, anything but the idea itself; in the thought of a thought, anything but a repetition of the thought. My thought of Falstaff, as far as I can perceive, is not a copy but a repetition of the thought I had of him when I first read Shakespeare: not indeed an exact repetition, because all complex ideas undergo modification by time, some elements fading away, and new ones being added by reverting to the original sources or by subsequent associations; but my first mental image of Falstaff, and my present one, do not differ as the thought of a rose differs from the sight of one; as an idea of sensation differs from the sensation. On this point the author was perhaps of {422} the same opinion, since we find him contrasting the "copy" of the sensation with the "revival" of the idea, as if the latter was a case of simple repetition, the former not. It would have been well if he had made this point a subject of express discussion; for if his opinion upon it was what, from this passage, we may suppose it to have been, it involves a serious difficulty. If (he says) a sensation and an idea "are distinguishable in the having, it is likely that the copy of the sensation should be distinguishable from the revival of the idea." But the copy of the sensation is the idea; so that, on this shewing, the idea is distinguishable from its own revival, that is, from the same idea when it occurs again. The author's theory would thus require him to maintain that an idea revived is a specifically different idea, and not the same idea repeated: since otherwise the two states of mind, so far as regards the ideas contained in them, are undistinguishable, and it is necessary to admit the presence in Memory of some other element.

Let us put another case. Instead of Falstaff, suppose a real person whom I have seen: for example General Lafayette. My idea of Lafayette is almost wholly, what my idea of Falstaff is entirely, a creation of thought: only a very small portion of it is derived from my brief experience of seeing and conversing with him. But I have a remembrance of having seen Lafayette, and no remembrance of having seen Falstaff, but only of having thought of him. Is it a sufficient explanation of this difference to say, that I have an idea of myself seeing and hearing Lafayette, and only an idea of myself thinking of Falstaff? But I can form a vivid idea of myself seeing and hearing Falstaff. I can without difficulty imagine myself in the field of Shrewsbury, listening to his characteristic soliloquy over the body of Hotspur; or in the tavern in the midst of his associates, hearing his story of his encounter with the men in buckram. When I recal the scene, I can as little detach it from the idea of myself as present, as I can in the case of most things of which I was really an eye-witness. The spontaneous presence of the idea of Myself in the {423} conception, is always that of myself as percipient. The idea of myself as in a state of mere imagination, only substitutes itself for the other when something reminds me that the scene is merely imaginary.

I cannot help thinking, therefore, that there is in the remembrance of a real fact, as distinguished from that of a thought, an element which does not consist, as the author supposes, in a difference between the mere ideas which are present to the mind in the two cases. This element, howsoever we define it, constitutes Belief, and is the difference between Memory and Imagination. From whatever direction we approach, this difference seems to close our path. When we arrive at it, we seem to have reached, as it were, the central point of our intellectual nature, presupposed and built upon in every attempt we make to explain the more recondite phenomena of our mental being.--_Ed._]

{424} CHAPTER XII.

RATIOCINATION.

"It would afford great light and clearness to the art of Logic, to determine the precise nature and composition of the ideas affixed to those words which have complex ideas; _i.e._, which excite any combinations of simple ideas, united intimately by association."--_Hartley_. _Prop._ 12, _Corol._ 3.

RATIOCINATION is one of the most complicated of all the mental phenomena. And it is worthy of notice, that more was accomplished towards the analysis of it, at an early period in the history of intellectual improvement, than of any other of the complex cases of human consciousness.

It was fully explained by Aristotle, that the simplest case of Ratiocination consists of three propositions, which he called a syllogism. A piece of ratiocination may consist of one, or more syllogisms, to any extent; but every single step is a syllogism.

A ratiocination, then, or syllogism, is first resolved into three propositions. The following may be taken as one of the simplest of all examples. "All men are animals: kings are men: therefore kings are animals."

Next, the Proposition is resolved into its proximate elements. These are three; two Terms, one called the Subject, the other the Predicate, and the _Copula_. {425} What is the particular nature of each of these elements we have already seen, and here, therefore, need not stay to inquire.

The ancient writers on Logic proceeded in their analysis, no farther than Terms. After this, they only endeavoured to enumerate and classify terms; to enumerate and classify propositions; to enumerate and classify syllogisms; and to give the rules for making correct syllogisms, and detecting incorrect ones. And this, as taught by them, constituted the whole science and art of Logic.

What, under this head, we propose to explain, is--the process of association involved in the syllogism, and in the belief which is part of it.

That part of the process which is involved in the two antecedent propositions, called the premises, has been already explained. It is only, therefore, the third proposition, called the conclusion, which further requires exposition.

We have seen, that in the proposition, "All men are animals," Belief is merely the recognition that the meaning of the term, "all men," is included in that of the term "animals," and that the recognition is a case of association. In the proposition also, "kings are men," the belief is merely the recognition, that the individuals named "kings," are part of the many, of whom "men," is the common name. This has already been more than once explained. And now, therefore, remains only to be shewn what further is involved in the third proposition, or conclusion, "kings are animals."

In each of the two preceding propositions, two terms or names are compared. In the last {426} proposition, a third name is compared with both the other two; immediately with the one, and, through that, with the other; the whole, obviously, a complicated case of association.

In the first proposition, "all men are animals," the term, "all men," is compared with the term animals; in other words, a certain association, already expounded, takes place. In the second proposition, "kings are men," the term "kings," is compared with the term "all men;" comparison here, again, being only a name for a particular case of association. In the third proposition, "kings are animals," the name "kings," is compared with the name "animals," but mediately through the name, "all men." Thus, "kings," is associated with "all men," "all men," with "animals;" "kings," therefore, with "animals," by a complicated, and, at the same time, a rapid, and almost imperceptible process. It would be easy to mark the steps of the association. But this would be tedious, and after so much practice, the reader will be at no loss to set them down for himself.[109]

[Editor's footnote 109: This chapter, which is of a very summary character, is a prolongation of the portion of the chapter on Belief, which examines the case of belief in the truth of a proposition; and must stand or fall with it. The question considered is, how, from belief in the truth of the two premises of a syllogism, we pass into belief in the conclusion. The exposition proceeds on the untenable theory of the import of propositions, on which I have so often had occasion to comment. That theory, however, was not necessary to the author for shewing how two ideas may become inseparably associated through the inseparable association of each of them with a third idea: and inasmuch as an inseparable association between the subject and {427} predicate, in the author's opinion, constitutes belief, an explanation of ratiocination conformable to that given of belief follows as a matter of course.

Although I am unable to admit that there is nothing in belief but an inseparable association, and although I maintain that there may be belief without an inseparable association, I can still accept this explanation of the formation of an association between the subject and predicate of the conclusion, which, when close and intense, has, as we have seen, a strong tendency to generate belief. But to shew what it is that gives the belief its validity, we must fall back on logical laws, the laws of evidence. And independently of the question of validity, we shall find in the reliance on those laws, so far as they are understood, the source and origin of all beliefs, whether well or ill-founded, which are not the almost mechanical or automatic products of a strong association--of the lively suggestion of an idea. We may therefore pass at once to the nature of Evidence, which is the subject of the next chapter.

I venture to refer, in passing, to those chapters in my System of Logic, in which I have maintained, contrary to what is laid down in this chapter, that Ratiocination does not _consist_ of Syllogisms; that the Syllogism is not the analysis of what the mind does in reasoning, but merely a useful formula into which it can translate its reasonings, gaining thereby a great increase in the security for their correctness.--_Ed._]

{428} CHAPTER XIII.

EVIDENCE.

"In consequence of some very wonderful laws, which regulate the successions of our mental phenomena, the science of mind is, in all its most important respects, a science of analysis." _Brown's Lect._, i., 108.

BEFORE leaving the subject of Belief, it will be proper to shew, in a few words, what is included, under the name Evidence. Evidence, is either the same thing with Belief, or it is the antecedent, of which Belief is the consequent.

Belief we have seen to be of two sorts: Belief of events; Belief of propositions.

Of events, believed on our own experience, the evidence of the present is sense; of the past, memory; and in these cases, the evidence and the belief are not two things, but one and the same thing. The lamp, which at this moment lights me, I say that I see burning, and that I believe it burning. These are two names of one and the same state of consciousness.--"I remember it was burning at the same hour last night," and "I believe it was burning at the same hour last night," are also two expressions for the same thing.--In the simple anticipation of the future, from the past, also, the evidence, and the belief, are {429} not two things, but one and the same thing. There is a close and inseparable association of the idea of a like antecedent, with the idea of a like consequent. This has not a single name, like memory; but, like memory, it is both evidence and belief.

The case of testimony is different. The Testimony is one thing, the Belief is another. The name Evidence is given to the testimony. The association of the testimony, with the event testified, is the belief.

Beside the belief of events which are the immediate objects of sense, of memory, and of anticipation (the consequence of sense and memory), and of those which are the immediate objects of testimony; there is a belief of events which are not the immediate objects of any of those operations. The sailor, who is shipwrecked on an unknown coast, sees the prints of a man's foot on the sand. The print of the foot is here called the evidence; the association of the print, as consequent, with a man, as antecedent, is called the belief. In this case, the sensation of one event, the print of a foot on the sand, induces the belief of another event, the existence of a man. The sailor who has seen the mark, reports it to his companions who have not quitted the wreck. Instantly they have the same belief; but it is a remove farther off, and there is an additional link of evidence. The first event to them, is the affirmation of their companion; the second, the existence of the print; the third, that of the man. There is here evidence of evidence; the testimony, evidence of the print; the print, evidence of the man.

The companions of the sailor, having themselves gone on shore, perceive, indeed, no man, but see a {430} large monkey, which leaves prints on the sand very much resembling those which had first been perceived by their companion. What is now the state of their minds? Doubt. But doubt is a name; what do we call by that name? A phenomenon of some complexity, but of which the elements are not very difficult to trace. There is, here, a double association with the print of the foot. There is the association of a man, and there is the association of a monkey. First, the print raises the idea of a man, but the instant it does so, it raises also the idea of a monkey. The idea of the monkey, displacing that of the man, hinders the first association from the fixity which makes it belief; and the idea of man, displacing that of monkey, hinders the second association from that fixity which constitutes belief.

When evidence is complex; that is, consists of more than one event; the events may be all on the same side, or not all on the same side; that is, they may all tend to prove the same event; or some of them may tend to prove it, some may have an opposite tendency.

Thus, if after discovering the print on the sand, the sailors had seen near it a stick, which had any appearance of having been fashioned into a club, or a spear, this would have been another event, tending, as well as the print on the sand, to the belief of the presence of men. The evidence would have been complex, but all on one side. The process is easy to trace. There is now a double association with the existence of men. The print of the foot excites that idea, the existence of the club excites that idea. This double excitement gives greater permanence to the {431} idea. By repetition, the two exciting causes coalesce, and, by their united strength, call up the associated idea with greater force.

In the case of the appearance of the monkey, in which one of the events tended to one belief, the other to another, we have just seen that the effect is precisely contrary; to lessen the strength of the association with the existence of a man, and to hinder its becoming belief.

These expositions may be applied with ease to the other cases of complex evidence, which can only consist of a greater or less number of events, either all tending to the belief of the same event, or some tending that way, some another; but all operating in the manner which has just been pointed out. Thus we may complicate the present case still further, by the supposition of additional events. After the appearance of the monkey, the sailors may discover, in the neighbourhood, the vestiges of a recent fire, and of the victuals which had been cooked by it. The association of human beings with these appearances is so strong, that, combined with the association between the print and the same idea, it quite obscures the association between the print and the monkey; and the belief that the place has inhabitants becomes complete. But suppose, further; that after a little observation, they discover an English knife, and fork, and a piece of English earthenware near the same place. The idea of an English ship having touched at the place, is immediately excited, and all the evidence of local inhabitants, derived from the marks of fire and cookery, is immediately destroyed. In other words, a new association, that with an English ship, {432} is created, which completely supersedes the idea, formerly associated, that of inhabitants existing on the spot.

The whole of the events, which go in this manner to form a case of belief, or of doubt, or of disbelief, are called Evidence. And the association, which binds them together into a sort of whole, as antecedent, and connects with them the event to which they apply as consequent, and which constitutes the belief, doubt, or disbelief, very often goes by the names of "judgment," "judging of the evidence," "weighing the evidence," and so on.

In these cases of the belief of Events upon complicated evidence, there is an antecedent and a consequent; the antecedent consisting of all the events which are called evidence, the consequent of the event, or events evidenced; and lastly, there is that close association of the antecedent and the consequent, which we have seen already, in so many instances, constitutes belief.

We have now to consider, what we call evidence in the case of the Belief of Propositions.

There are two cases of the Belief of propositions. There is belief in the case of the single proposition; and there is belief of the conclusion of a syllogism, which is the result of a combination of Propositions.

We have seen what the process of belief in Propositions is. The subject and predicate, two names for the same thing, of which the predicate is either of the same extent with the subject, or of a greater extent, suggests, each of them, its meaning; that is, call up, by association, each of them, its peculiar cluster of ideas. Two clusters of ideas are called up in {433} connexion, and that a peculiar connexion, marked by the copula. To have two clusters of ideas, to know that they are two, and to believe that they are two, this is nothing more than three expressions for the same thing. To know that two clusters are two clusters, and to know that they are either the same, or different, is the same with having them. In this case, then, as in that of the belief of events, in sense and memory, the belief and the evidence are the same thing.

Belief of the conclusion of a syllogism, is preceded by two other beliefs. There is belief of the major proposition; belief of the minor proposition; by the process immediately above explained, in which the evidence and the belief are the same thing. These are the antecedent. There is, thirdly, belief of the conclusion, this is the consequent. The process of this belief has been so recently explained, that I do not think we need to repeat it. In this case, it is sometimes said, that the two premises are the evidence; sometimes it is said, that the ratiocination is the evidence; in the former of these applications of the word evidence, the belief of the concluding proposition of the syllogism is not included; in the last, it is. The ratiocination is the belief of all the three propositions; and, in this acceptation of the word, the evidence and the belief are not considered as two things, but one and the same thing. This, however, is only a difference of naming. About the particulars named, there is no room for dispute.[110]

[Editor's footnote 110: This chapter on Evidence is supplementary to the chapter on Belief, and is intended to analyse the process of weighing and balancing opposing grounds for believing.

{434} Evidence is either of individual facts (not actually perceived by oneself), or of general truths. The former is the only case to which much attention is paid in the present chapter; which very happily illustrates it, by the case of navigators having to decide on the existence or non-existence of inhabitants in a newly discovered island. The process of balancing the evidence for and against, is depicted in a very lively manner. Let us see whether the mental facts set down in the exposition, are precisely those which take place.

When the sailors have seen prints of a foot, resembling those of a man, the idea is raised of a man making the print. When they afterwards see a monkey, whose feet leave traces almost similar, the idea is also raised of a monkey making the print, and the state of their minds, the author says, is doubt. Of this state he gives the following analysis: "There is here a double association with the print of the foot. There is the association of a man, and there is the association of a monkey. First, the print raises the idea of a man, but the instant it does so, it raises also the idea of a monkey. The idea of the monkey, displacing that of the man, hinders the first association from the fixity which makes it belief; and the idea of man, displacing that of monkey, hinders the second association from that fixity which constitutes belief."

This passage deserves to be studied; for without having carefully weighed it, we cannot be certain that we are in complete possession of the author's theory of Belief.

There are two conflicting associations with the print of the foot. The picture of a man making it, cannot co-exist with that of a monkey making it. But the two may alternate with one another. Had the association with a man been the only association, it would, or might (for on this point the author is not explicit) have amounted to belief. But the idea of the monkey and that of the man alternately displacing one another, hinder either association from having the fixity which would make it belief.

This alternation, however, between the two ideas, of a monkey making the footprint and of a man making it, may {435} very well take place without hindering one of the two from being accompanied by belief. Suppose the sailors to obtain conclusive evidence, testimonial or circumstantial, that the prints were made by a monkey. It may happen, nevertheless, that the remarkable resemblance of the foot prints to those of a man, does not cease to force itself upon their notice: in other words, they continue to associate the idea of a man with the footsteps; they are reminded of a man, and of a man making the footsteps, every time they see or think of them. The double association, therefore, may subsist, and the one which does not correspond with the fact may even be the most obtrusive of the two, while yet the other conception may be the one with which the men believe the real facts to have corresponded.

All the rest of the exposition is open to the same criticism. The author accounts very accurately for the presence of all the ideas which the successive appearance of the various articles of evidence arouses in the mind. But he does not shew that the belief, which is ultimately arrived at, is constituted by the expulsion from the mind of one set of these ideas, and the exclusive possession of it by the other set. It is quite possible that neither of the associations may acquire the "fixity" which, according to the apparent meaning of the author, would defeat the other association altogether, and drive away the conception which it suggests; and yet, one of the suppositions may be believed and the other disbelieved, according to the balance of evidence, as estimated by the investigator. Belief, then, which has been already shewn not to require an inseparable association, appears not to require even "fixity"--such fixity as to exclude the idea of the conflicting supposition, as it does exclude the belief.

The problem of Evidence divides itself into two distinguishable enquiries: what effect evidence ought to produce, and what determines the effect that it does produce: how our belief ought to be regulated, and how, in point of fact, it is regulated. The first enquiry--that into the nature and probative force of evidence: the discussion of what proves what, and {436} of the precautions needed in admitting one thing as proof of another--are the province of Logic, understood in its widest sense: and for its treatment we must refer to treatises on Logic, either inductive or ratiocinative. All that would be in place here, reduces itself to a single principle: In all cases, except the case of what we are directly conscious of (in which case, as the author justly observes, the evidence and the belief are one and the same thing)--in all cases, therefore, in which belief is really grounded on evidence, it is grounded, in the ultimate result, on the constancy of the course of nature. Whether the belief be of facts or of laws, and whether of past facts or of those which are present or future, this is the basis on which it rests. Whatever it is that we believe, the justification of the belief must be, that unless it were true, the uniformity of the course of nature would not be maintained. A cause would have occurred, not followed by its invariable effect; an effect would have occurred, not preceded by any of its invariable causes; witnesses would have lied, who have always been known to speak the truth; signs would have proved deceptive, which in human experience have always given true indication. This is obvious, whatever case of belief on evidence we examine. Belief in testimony is grounded on previous experience that testimony is usually conformable to fact: testimony in general (for even this may with truth be affirmed); or the testimony of the particular witness, or the testimony of persons similar to him. Belief that the sun will rise and set to-morrow, or that a stone thrown up into the air will fall back, rests on experience that this has been invariably the case, and reliance that what has hitherto occurred will continue to occur hereafter. Belief in a fact vouched for by circumstantial evidence, rests on experience that such circumstances as are ascertained to exist in the case, never exist unaccompanied by the given fact. What we call evidence, whether complete or incomplete, always consists of facts or events tending to convince us that some ascertained general truths or laws of nature must have proved false, if the conclusion which the evidence points to is not true.

{437} Belief on evidence is therefore always a case of the generalizing process; of the assumption that what we have not directly experienced resembles, or will resemble, our experience. And, properly understood, this assumption is true; for the whole course of nature consists of a concurrence of causes, producing their effects in a uniform manner; but the uniformity which exists is often not that which our first impressions lead us to expect. Mr. Bain has well pointed out, that the generalizing propensity, in a mind not disciplined by thought, nor as yet warned by its own failures, far outruns the evidence, or rather, precedes any conscious consideration of evidence; and that what the consideration of evidence has to do when it comes, is not so much to make us generalize, as to limit our spontaneous impulse of generalization, and restrain within just bounds our readiness to believe that the unknown will resemble the known. When Mr. Bain occasionally speaks of this propensity as if it were instinctive, I understand him to mean, that by an original law of our nature, the mere suggestion of an idea, so long as the idea keeps possession of the mind, suffices to give it a command over our active energies. It is to this primitive mental state that the author's theory of Belief most nearly applies. In a mind which is as yet untutored, either by the teachings of others or by its own mistakes, an idea so strongly excited as for the time to keep out all ideas by which it would itself be excluded, possesses that power over the voluntary activities which is Mr. Bain's criterion of Belief; and any association that compels the person to have the idea of a certain consequence as following his act, generates, or becomes, a real expectation of that consequence. But these expectations often turning out to have been ill grounded, the unduly prompt suggestion comes to be associated, by repetition, with the shock of disappointed expectation; and the idea of the desired consequent is now raised together with the idea not of its realization, but of its frustration: thus neutralizing the effect of the first association on the belief and on the active impulses. It is in this stage that the mind learns the habit of looking out for, and weighing, evidence. It presently discovers {438} that the expectations which are least often disappointed are those which correspond to the greatest and most varied amount of antecedent experience. It gradually comes to associate the feeling of disappointed expectation with all those promptings to expect, which, being the result of accidental associations, have no, or but little, previous experience conformable to them: and by degrees the expectation only arises when memory represents a considerable amount of such previous experience; and is strong in proportion to the quantity of the experience. At a still later period, as disappointment nevertheless not unfrequently happens notwithstanding a considerable amount of past experience on the side of the expectation, the mind is put upon making distinctions in the kind of past experiences, and finding out what qualities, besides mere frequency, experience must have, in order not to be followed by disappointment. In other words, it considers the conditions of right inference from experience; and by degrees arrives at principles or rules, more or less accurate, for inductive reasoning. This is substantially the doctrine of the author of the Analysis. It must be conceded to him, that an association, sufficiently strong to exclude all ideas that would exclude itself, produces a kind of mechanical belief; and that the processes by which this belief is corrected, or reduced to rational bounds, all consist in the growth of a counter-association, tending to raise the idea of a disappointment of the first expectation: and as the one or the other prevails in the particular case, the belief, or expectation, exists or does not exist, exactly as if the belief were the same thing with the association. It must also be admitted that the process by which the belief is overcome, takes effect by weakening the association; which can only be effected by raising up another association that conflicts with it. There are two ways in which this counter-association may be generated. One is, by counter-evidence; by contrary experience in the specific case, which, by associating the circumstances of the case with a contrary belief, destroys their association with the original belief. But there is also another mode of weakening, or altogether {439} destroying, the belief, without adducing contrary experience: namely, by merely recognising the insufficiency of the existing experience; by reflecting on other instances in which the same amount and kind of experience have existed, but were not followed by the expected result. In the one mode as in the other, the process of dissolving a belief is identical with that of dissolving an association; and to this extent--and it is a very large extent--the author's theory of Belief must be received as true.

I cannot, however, go beyond this, and maintain with the author that Belief is identical with a strong association; on account of the reason already stated, viz. that in many cases--indeed in almost all cases in which the evidence has been such as required to be investigated and weighed--a final belief is arrived at without any such clinging together of ideas as the author supposes to constitute it; and we remain able to represent to ourselves in imagination, often with perfect facility, both the conflicting suppositions, of which we nevertheless believe one and reject the other.--_Ed._]

{440} APPENDIX.

(_From "An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy."_)

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF THE BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL WORLD.

WE have seen Sir. W. Hamilton at work on the question of the reality of Matter, by the introspective method, and, as it seems, with little result. Let us now approach the same subject by the psychological. I proceed, therefore, to state the case of those who hold that the belief in an external world is not intuitive, but an acquired product.

This theory postulates the following psychological truths, all of which are proved by experience, and are not contested, though their force is seldom adequately felt, by Sir W. Hamilton and the other thinkers of the introspective school.

It postulates, first, that the human mind is capable of Expectation. In other words, that after having had actual sensations, we are capable of forming the conception of Possible sensations; sensations which we are not feeling at the present moment, but which we might feel, and should feel if certain conditions were present, the nature of which conditions we have, in many cases, learnt by experience.

It postulates, secondly, the laws of the Association of Ideas. So far as we are here concerned, these laws are the following: 1st. Similar phænomena tend to be thought of together. 2nd. Phænomena which have either been experienced or conceived {441} in close contiguity to one another, tend to be thought of together. The contiguity is of two kinds; simultaneity, and immediate succession. Facts which have been experienced or thought of simultaneously, recall the thought of one another. Of facts which have been experienced or thought of in immediate succession, the antecedent, or the thought of it, recalls the thought of the consequent, but not conversely. 3rd. Associations produced by contiguity become more certain and rapid by repetition. When two phænomena have been very often experienced in conjunction, and have not, in any single instance, occurred separately either in experience or in thought, there is produced between them what has been called Inseparable, or less correctly, Indissoluble Association: by which is not meant that the association must inevitably last to the end of life--that no subsequent experience or process of thought can possibly avail to dissolve it; but only that as long as no such experience or process of thought has taken place, the association is irresistible; it is impossible for us to think the one thing disjoined from the other. 4th. When an association has acquired this character of inseparability--when the bond between the two ideas has been thus firmly riveted, not only does the idea called up by association become, in our consciousness, inseparable from the idea which suggested it, but the facts or phænomena answering to those ideas come at last to seem inseparable in existence: things which we are unable to conceive apart, appear incapable of existing apart; and the belief we have in their coexistence, though really a product of experience, seems intuitive. Innumerable examples might be given of this law. One of the most familiar, as well as the most striking, is that of our acquired perceptions of sight. Even those who, with Mr. Bailey, consider the perception of distance by the eye as not acquired, but intuitive, admit that there are many perceptions of sight which, though instantaneous and unhesitating, are not intuitive. What we see is a very minute fragment of what we think we see. We see artificially that one thing is hard, another soft. We see artificially that one thing is hot, another cold. We see artificially that {442} what we see is a book, or a stone, each of these being not merely an inference, but a heap of inferences, from the signs which we see, to things not visible. We see, and cannot help seeing, what we have learnt to infer, even when we know that the inference is erroneous, and that the apparent perception is deceptive. We cannot help seeing the moon larger when near the horizon, though we know that she is of precisely her usual size. We cannot help seeing a mountain as nearer to us and of less height, when we see it through a more than ordinarily transparent atmosphere.

Setting out from these premises, the Psychological Theory maintains, that there are associations naturally and even necessarily generated by the order of our sensations and of our reminiscences of sensation, which, supposing no intuition of an external world to have existed in consciousness, would inevitably generate the belief, and would cause it to be regarded as an intuition.

What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own thoughts? We mean, that there is concerned in our perceptions something which exists when we are not thinking of it; which existed before we had ever thought of it, and would exist if we were annihilated; and further, that there exist things which we never saw, touched, or otherwise perceived, and things which never have been perceived by man. This idea of something which is distinguished from our fleeting impressions by what, in Kantian language, is called Perdurability; something which is fixed and the same, while our impressions vary; something which exists whether we are aware of it or not, and which is always square (or of some other given figure) whether it appears to us square or round--constitutes altogether our idea of external substance. Whoever can assign an origin to this complex conception, has accounted for what we mean by the belief in matter. Now all this, according to the Psychological Theory, is but the form impressed by the known laws of association, upon the conception or notion, obtained by experience, of Contingent Sensations; {443} by which are meant, sensations that are not in our present consciousness, and individually never were in our consciousness at all, but which in virtue of the laws to which we have learnt by experience that our sensations are subject, we know that we should have felt under given supposable circumstances, and under these same circumstances, might still feel.

I see a piece of white paper on a table. I go into another room. If the phænomenon always followed me, or if, when it did not follow me, I believed it to disappear _è rerum naturâ_, I should not believe it to be an external object. I should consider it as a phantom--a mere affection of my senses: I should not believe that there had been any Body there. But, though I have ceased to see it, I am persuaded that the paper is still there. I no longer have the sensations which it gave me; but I believe that when I again place myself in the circumstances in which I had those sensations, that is, when I go again into the room, I shall again have them; and further, that there has been no intervening moment at which this would not have been the case. Owing to this property of my mind, my conception of the world at any given instant consists, in only a small proportion, of present sensations. Of these I may at the time have none at all, and they are in any case a most insignificant portion of the whole which I apprehend. The conception I form of the world existing at any moment, comprises, along with the sensations I am feeling, a countless variety of possibilities of sensation: namely, the whole of those which past observation tells me that I could, under any supposable circumstances, experience at this moment, together with an indefinite and illimitable multitude of others which though I do not know that I could, yet it is possible that I might, experience in circumstances not known to me. These various possibilities are the important thing to me in the world. My present sensations are generally of little importance, and are moreover fugitive: the possibilities, on the contrary, are permanent, which is the character that mainly distinguishes our idea of Substance or Matter from our notion of sensation. These possibilities, which are conditional {444} certainties, need a special name to distinguish them from mere vague possibilities, which experience gives no warrant for reckoning upon. Now, as soon as a distinguishing name is given, though it be only to the same thing regarded in a different aspect, one of the most familiar experiences of our mental nature teaches us, that the different name comes to be considered as the name of a different thing.

There is another important peculiarity of these certified or guaranteed possibilities of sensation; namely, that they have reference, not to single sensations, but to sensations joined together in groups. When we think of anything as a material substance, or body, we either have had, or we think that on some given supposition we should have, not some one sensation, but a great and even an indefinite number and variety of sensations, generally belonging to different senses, but so linked together, that the presence of one announces the possible presence at the very same instant of any or all of the rest. In our mind, therefore, not only is this particular Possibility of sensation invested with the quality of permanence when we are not actually feeling any of the sensations at all; but when we are feeling some of them, the remaining sensations of the group are conceived by us in the form of Present Possibilities, which might be realized at the very moment. And as this happens in turn to all of them, the group as a whole presents itself to the mind as permanent, in contrast not solely with the temporariness of my bodily presence, but also with the temporary character of each of the sensations composing the group; in other words, as a kind of permanent substratum, under a set of passing experiences or manifestations: which is another leading character of our idea of substance or matter, as distinguished from sensation.

Let us now take into consideration another of the general characters of our experience, namely, that in addition to fixed groups, we also recognise a fixed Order in our sensations; an Order of succession, which, when ascertained by observation, gives rise to the ideas of Cause and Effect, according to what I hold to be the true theory of that relation, and is on any {445} theory the source of all our knowledge what causes produce what effects. Now, of what nature is this fixed order among our sensations? It is a constancy of antecedence and sequence. But the constant antecedence and sequence do not generally exist between one actual sensation and another. Very few such sequences are presented to us by experience. In almost all the constant sequences which occur in Nature, the antecedence and consequence do not obtain between sensations, but between the groups we have been speaking about, of which a very small portion is actual sensation, the greater part being permanent possibilities of sensation, evidenced to us by a small and variable number of sensations actually present. Hence, our ideas of causation, power, activity, do not become connected in thought with our sensations as actual at all, save in the few physiological cases where these figure by themselves as the antecedents in some uniform sequence. Those ideas become connected, not with sensations, but with groups of possibilities of sensation. The sensations conceived do not, to our habitual thoughts, present themselves as sensations actually experienced, inasmuch as not only any one or any number of them may be supposed absent, but none of them need be present. We find that the modifications which are taking place more or less regularly in our possibilities of sensation, are mostly quite independent of our consciousness, and of our presence or absence. Whether we are asleep or awake the fire goes out, and puts an end to one particular possibility of warmth and light. Whether we are present or absent the corn ripens, and brings a new possibility of food. Hence we speedily learn to think of Nature as made up solely of these groups of possibilities, and the active force in Nature as manifested in the modification of some of these by others. The sensations, though the original foundation of the whole, come to be looked upon as a sort of accident depending on us, and the possibilities as much more real than the actual sensations, nay, as the very realities of which these are only the representations, appearances, or effects. When this state of mind has been arrived at, then, and from that time forward, we are never {446} conscious of a present sensation without instantaneously referring it to some one of the groups of possibilities into which a sensation of that particular description enters; and if we do not yet know to what group to refer it, we at least feel an irresistible conviction that it must belong to some group or other; _i.e._ that its presence proves the existence, here and now, of a great number and variety of possibilities of sensation, without which it would not have been. The whole set of sensations as possible, form a permanent background to any one or more of them that are, at a given moment, actual; and the possibilities are conceived as standing to the actual sensations in the relation of a cause to its effects, or of canvas to the figures painted on it, or of a root to the trunk, leaves, and flowers, or of a substratum to that which is spread over it, or, in transcendental language, of Matter to Form.

When this point has been reached, the Permanent Possibilities in question have assumed such unlikeness of aspect, and such difference of apparent relation to us, from any sensations, that it would be contrary to all we know of the constitution of human nature that they should not be conceived as, and believed to be, at least as different from sensations as sensations are from one another. Their groundwork in sensation is forgotten, and they are supposed to be something intrinsically distinct from it. We can withdraw ourselves from any of our (external) sensations, or we can be withdrawn from them by some other agency. But though the sensations cease, the possibilities remain in existence; they are independent of our will, our presence, and everything which belongs to us. We find, too, that they belong as much to other human or sentient beings as to ourselves. We find other people grounding their expectations and conduct upon the same permanent possibilities on which we ground ours. But we do not find them experiencing the same actual sensations. Other people do not have our sensations exactly when and as we have them: but they have our possibilities of sensation; whatever indicates a present possibility of sensations to ourselves, indicates a present possibility of similar sensations to them, except so far as {447} their organs of sensation may vary from the type of ours. This puts the final seal to our conception of the groups of possibilities as the fundamental reality in Nature. The permanent possibilities are common to us and to our fellow-creatures; the actual sensations are not. That which other people become aware of when, and on the same grounds, as I do, seems more real to me than that which they do not know of unless I tell them. The world of Possible Sensations succeeding one another according to laws, is as much in other beings as it is in me; it has therefore an existence outside me; it is an External World.

If this explanation of the origin and growth of the idea of Matter, or External Nature, contains nothing at variance with natural laws, it is at least an admissible supposition, that the element of Non-ego which Sir W. Hamilton regards as an original datum of consciousness, and which we certainly do find in our present consciousness, may not be one of its primitive elements--may not have existed at all in its first manifestations. But if this supposition be admissible, it ought, on Sir W. Hamilton's principles, to be received as true. The first of the laws laid down by him for the interpretation of Consciousness, the law (as he terms it) of Parcimony, forbids to suppose an original principle of our nature in order to account for phænomena which admit of possible explanation from known causes. If the supposed ingredient of consciousness be one which might grow up (though we cannot prove that it did grow up) through later experience; and if, when it had so grown up, it would, by known laws of our nature, appear as completely intuitive as our sensations themselves; we are bound, according to Sir W. Hamilton's and all sound philosophy, to assign to it that origin. Where there is a known cause adequate to account for a phænomenon, there is no justification for ascribing it to an unknown one. And what evidence does Consciousness furnish of the intuitiveness of an impression, except instantaneousness, apparent simplicity, and *unconsciousness on our part of how the impression came into our minds? These features can only prove the impression to be {448} intuitive, on the hypothesis that there are no means of accounting for them otherwise. If they not only might, but naturally would, exist, even on the supposition that it is not intuitive, we must accept the conclusion to which we are led by the Psychological Method, and which the Introspective Method furnishes absolutely nothing to contradict.

Matter, then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. If I am asked, whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I do not. But I affirm with confidence, that this conception of Matter includes the whole meaning attached to it by the common world, apart from philosophical, and sometimes from theological, theories. The reliance of mankind on the real existence of visible and tangible objects, means reliance on the reality and permanence of Possibilities of visual and tactual sensations, when no such sensations are actually experienced. We are warranted in believing that this is the meaning of Matter in the minds of many of its most esteemed metaphysical champions, though they themselves would not admit as much: for example, of Reid, Stewart, and Brown. For these three philosophers alleged that all mankind, including Berkeley and Hume, really believed in Matter, inasmuch as unless they did, they would not have turned aside to save themselves from running against a post. Now all which this manoeuvre really proved is, that they believed in Permanent Possibilities of Sensation. We have therefore the unintentional sanction of these three eminent defenders of the existence of matter, for affirming, that to believe in Permanent Possibilities of Sensation is believing in Matter. It is hardly necessary, after such authorities, to mention Dr. Johnson, or any one else who resorts to the _argumentum baculinum_ of knocking a stick against the ground. Sir W. Hamilton, a far subtler thinker than any of these, never reasons in this manner. He never supposes that a disbeliever in what he means by Matter, ought in consistency to act in any different mode from those who believe in it. He knew {449} that the belief on which all the practical consequences depend, is the belief in Permanent Possibilities of Sensation, and that if nobody believed in a material universe in any other sense, life would go on exactly as it now does. He, however, did believe in more than this, but, I think, only because it had never occurred to him that mere Possibilities of Sensation could, to our artificialized consciousness, present the character of objectivity which, as we have now shown, they not only can, but unless the known laws of the human mind were suspended, must necessarily, present.

Perhaps it may be objected, that the very possibility of framing such a notion of Matter as Sir W. Hamilton's--the capacity in the human mind of imagining an external world which is anything more than what the Psychological Theory makes it--amounts to a disproof of the theory. If (it may be said) we had no revelation in consciousness, of a world which is not in some way or other identified with sensation, we should be unable to have the notion of such a world. If the only ideas we had of external objects were ideas of our sensations, supplemented by an acquired notion of permanent possibilities of sensation, we must (it is thought) be incapable of conceiving, and therefore still more incapable of fancying that we perceive, things which are not sensations at all. It being evident however that some philosophers believe this, and it being maintainable that the mass of mankind do so, the existence of a perdurable basis of sensations, distinct from sensations themselves, is proved, it might be said, by the possibility of believing it.

Let me first restate what I apprehend the belief to be. We believe that we perceive a something closely related to all our sensations, but different from those which we are feeling at any particular minute; and distinguished from sensations altogether, by being permanent and always the same, while these are fugitive, variable, and alternately displace one another. But these attributes of the object of perception are properties belonging to all the possibilities of sensation which experience guarantees. The belief in such permanent possibilities seems {450} to me to include all that is essential or characteristic in the belief in substance. I believe that Calcutta exists, though I do not perceive it, and that it would still exist if every percipient inhabitant were suddenly to leave the place, or be struck dead. But when I analyse the belief, all I find in it is, that were these events to take place, the Permanent Possibility of Sensation which I call Calcutta would still remain; that if I were suddenly transported to the banks of the Hoogly, I should still have the sensations which, if now present, would lead me to affirm that Calcutta exists here and now. We may infer, therefore, that both philosophers and the world at large, when they think of matter, conceive it really as a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. But the majority of philosophers fancy that it is something more; and the world at large, though they have really, as I conceive, nothing in their minds but a Permanent Possibility of Sensation, would, if asked the question, undoubtedly agree with the philosophers: and though this is sufficiently explained by the tendency of the human mind to infer difference of things from difference of names, I acknowledge the obligation of showing how it can be possible to believe in an existence transcending all possibilities of sensation, unless on the hypothesis that such an existence actually is, and that we actually perceive it.

The explanation, however, is not difficult. It is an admitted fact, that we are capable of all conceptions which can be formed by generalizing from the observed laws of our sensations. Whatever relation we find to exist between any one of our sensations and something different from _it_, that same relation we have no difficulty in conceiving to exist between the sum of all our sensations and something different from _them_. The differences which our consciousness recognises between one sensation and another, give us the general notion of difference, and inseparably associate with every sensation we have, the feeling of its being different from other things: and when once this association has been formed, we can no longer conceive anything, without being able, and even being compelled, to form also the conception of something different from it. {451} This familiarity with the idea of something different from each thing we know, makes it natural and easy to form the notion of something different from all things that we know, collectively as well as individually. It is true we can form no conception of what such a thing can be; our notion of it is merely negative; but the idea of a substance, apart from its relation to the impressions which we conceive it as making on our senses, is a merely negative one. There is thus no psychological obstacle to our forming the notion of a something which is neither a sensation nor a possibility of sensation, even if our consciousness does not testify to it; and nothing is more likely than that the Permanent Possibilities of sensation, to which our consciousness does testify, should be confounded in our minds with this imaginary conception. All experience attests the strength of the tendency to mistake mental abstractions, even negative ones, for substantive realities; and the Permanent Possibilities of sensation which experience guarantees, are so extremely unlike in many of their properties to actual sensations, that since we are capable of imagining something which transcends sensations, there is a great natural probability that we should suppose these to be it.

But this natural probability is converted into certainty, when we take into consideration that universal law of our experience which is termed the law of Causation, and which makes us mentally connect with the beginning of everything, some antecedent condition, or Cause. The case of Causation is one of the most marked of all the cases in which we extend to the sum total of our consciousness, a notion derived from its parts. It is a striking example of our power to conceive, and our tendency to believe, that a relation which subsists between every individual item of our experience and some other item, subsists also between our experience as a whole, and something not within the sphere of experience. By this extension to the sum of all our experiences, of the internal relations obtaining between its several parts, we are led to consider sensation itself the aggregate whole of our sensations as deriving its origin from antecedent existences {452} transcending sensation. That we should do this, is a consequence of the particular character of the uniform sequences, which experience discloses to us among our sensations. As already remarked, the constant antecedent of a sensation is seldom another sensation, or set of sensations, actually felt. It is much oftener the existence of a group of possibilities, not necessarily including any actual sensations, except such as are required to show that the possibilities are really present. Nor are actual sensations indispensable even for this purpose; for the presence of the object (which is nothing more than the immediate presence of the possibilities) may be made known to us by the very sensation which we refer to as its effect. Thus, the real antecedent of an effect--the only antecedent which, being invariable and unconditional, we consider to be the cause--may be, not any sensation really felt, but solely the presence, at that or the immediately preceding moment, of a group of possibilities of sensation. Hence it is not with sensations as actually experienced, but with their Permanent Possibilities, that the idea of Cause comes to be identified: and we, by one and the same process, acquire the habit of regarding Sensation in general, like all our individual sensations, as an Effect, and also that of conceiving as the causes of most of our individual sensations, not other sensations, but general possibilities of sensation. If all these considerations put together do not completely explain and account for our conceiving these Possibilities as a class of independent and substantive entities, I know not what psychological analysis can be conclusive.

It may perhaps be said, that the preceding theory gives, indeed, some account of the idea of Permanent Existence which forms part of our conception of matter, but gives no explanation of our believing these permanent objects to be external, or out of ourselves. I apprehend, on the contrary, that the very idea of anything out of ourselves is derived solely from the knowledge experience gives us of the Permanent Possibilities. Our sensations we carry with us wherever we go, and they never exist where we are not; but when we change {453} our place we do not carry away with us the Permanent Possibilities of Sensation: they remain until we return, or arise and cease under conditions with which our presence has in general nothing to do. And more than all--they are, and will be after we have ceased to feel, Permanent Possibilities of sensation to other beings than ourselves. Thus our actual sensations, and the Permanent Possibilities of sensation, stand out in obtrusive contrast to one another: and when the idea of Cause has been acquired, and extended by generalization from the parts of our experience to its aggregate whole, nothing can be more natural than that the Permanent Possibilities should be classed by us as existences generically distinct from our sensations, but of which our sensations are the effect.

The same theory which accounts for our ascribing to an aggregate of possibilities of sensation, a permanent existence which our sensations themselves do not possess, and consequently a greater reality than belongs to our sensations, also explains our attributing greater objectivity to the Primary Qualities of bodies than to the Secondary. For the sensations which correspond to what are called the Primary Qualities (as soon at least as we come to apprehend them by two senses, the eye as well as the touch) are always present when any part of the group is so. But colours, tastes, smells, and the like, being, in comparison, fugacious, are not, in the same degree, conceived as being always there, even when nobody is present to perceive them. The sensations answering to the Secondary Qualities are only occasional, those to the Primary, constant. The Secondary, moreover, vary with different persons, and with the temporary sensibility of our organs; the Primary, when perceived at all, are, as far as we know, the same to all persons and at all times.

END OF VOL. I.

LONDON:

SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,

COVENT GARDEN.

ANALYSIS

OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE

HUMAN MIND.

ANALYSIS

OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE

HUMAN MIND

BY JAMES MILL

WITH NOTES ILLUSTRATIVE AND CRITICAL BY

ALEXANDER BAIN

ANDREW FINDLATER

AND

GEORGE GROTE

EDITED WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES BY

JOHN STUART MILL

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.

SECOND EDITION

LONDON

LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER.

1878

CONTENTS

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME.

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