The Philosophy of Natural Theology: An Essay in confutation of the scepticism of the present dayJackson, William
Religion
The Philosophy of Natural Theology: An Essay in confutation of the scepticism of the present day
Jackson, William
Natural theology; Religion -- Philosophy; Religion and science
[132] In the just published Edition of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature,
I. p. 140. We must all regret the loss of Dean Mansel's ultimate
thoughts on "The real error of Berkeley's Idealism." Letters &c. p.
391. But more than a dozen years earlier, he wrote, (_Prolegomena
Logica_, Chap. V.) "The fault of Berkeley did not consist in doubting
the existence of matter, but in asserting its non-existence." How far
Mansel himself went in the direction of this same doubt may be judged
from the following passage, which occurs in the Prolegomena one page
before. "Beyond the range of conscious beings, we can have only a
negative idea of substance. The name is applied in relation to certain
collections of sensible phenomena, natural or artificial, connected
with each other in various ways; by locomotion, by vegetation, by
contributing to a common end, by certain positions in space. But here
we have no positive notion of substance distinct from phenomena. I do
not attribute to the billiard ball a consciousness of its own figure,
colour, and motion; but, in denying consciousness, I deny the only
form in which unity and substance have been presented to me. I have
therefore no data for thinking one way or the other on the question.
Some kind of unity between the several phenomena may exist, or it may
not; but if it does exist, it exists in a manner of which I can form no
conception; and if it does not exist, my faculties do not enable me to
detect its absence." In other words (as Mr. O'Hanlon might have phrased
it) "My friend Smith is I know a person,--therefore a substance. But
Smith's hat and coat, being unconscious, lack the only forms in which
unity and substance have been presented to me. Smith's coat is blue,
its fabric woollen; his hat black, and of silken texture;--there
may or may not be unities in which these phenomena of colour and
structural appearance cohere; my faculties do not, however, enable me
to decide whether hat and coat are or are not _positively_ substantial
unifications.
It would appear from all this, that hats and coats and other familiar
so-called substances, are as little _essentially_ known to us as
that vast territory of supernatural Being which has been named the
"Unknowable."
[133] From Mr. Wallace's translation of Hegel's Logik, pp. 65, 8, and
9. As the translator preserves the numbering of the Sections, reference
is easy to the original German. Hegel adds a remark well worthy of
attention:--"The scepticism of Hume, by whom this observation was
chiefly made, should be clearly marked off from Greek scepticism. Hume
founds his remarks on the truth of the empirical element, on feeling
and sensation, and proceeds to attack universal truths and laws,
because they do not derive their authority from sense-perception. So
far was ancient scepticism from making feeling and sensation a canon
of truth, that it turned against the deliverances of sense first of
all."--Ibid. p. 69.
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