wise I do not know but what we might afford to leave transcendental subtleties for those eternal years, which, in a short half-century, will have dawned on nearly every one of us that is now of an age to be subtle. Why should we persist in running our heads against the wall when the door will so soon be opened? Why, indeed, were it not that abstruse studies. are essential, and are growing more essential, for showing to unbelievers a reason of the faith that is in us. Men pretend to set revelation aside, and peer, with reason's eye alone, into that Upper World, of which every thinker amongst them catches glimpses. They must be disabused; they must be taught by a course of instruction ascending from obvious. truths to truths which tower into mystery, that the right direction of reason is towards faith, and the sum of her counsels, "Hear the Church." Heretics and infidels have rejected this lesson of reason; but then what have they done? They have turned round, they or their successors, and finding the elementary facts with which they started inconsistent with the position of denial where they now stand, they brush the facts out of the way, raise the drawbridge between themselves and ordinary mortals, and flaunt the banner of their scepticism for credulous outsiders to admire, and imitate as their ignorance can.

I have a philosophy that shall confirm the existence of an independent Not-Self. But I do not believe that fact on philosophical grounds. I believed it before I was old enough to think consecutively; and if, when the power of argumentation came to me, I had been offered a proof to the contrary from which I saw no escape, I should rather have mistrusted my own capacity for estimating evidence than have caught at the conclusion that the universe and I were one. I embark in my philosophy, resolved that if the philosophy founders, I will not suffer shipwreck. I am conscious of myself, and of the limits about myself, too intimately to fling that consciousness away in the paroxysm of a disappointed metaphysician. Primarily and essentially, I am a man; secondarily and accidentally, I seek to become a philosopher. As a man, I know certain truths; as a philosopher, I would fain tell how I know them. If I cannot tell how, still I know them. At the same time, I trust that I can tell how I know an independent NotSelf. Let me make the attempt.

To prove, one must assume. I assume, then-a simple assumption-that I am. Also, that I know that I am. This cognition is to be analyzed. It regards an exertion, an effect, and a resultant state. The exertion proceeds from my soul, which, itself ever ready to act, moves the body when that is VOL. XIX.-NO. XXXVII. [New Series.]

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physically disposed for motion. The effect is in the body, the nerves and muscles of which receive a determination to change. The resultant state is in body and soul together, in the body directly, because that alone has been a recipient, and in the soul by concomitance, since the soul is united with the body in oneness of nature. The soul acts consciously, the animate body consciously suffers, soul and body are in a resultant conscious activo-passive state. That is a clumsy metaphysical statement of the plain truth, I am. That I have a soul distinct from my body, is here supposed; proof has been offered for it above. The justice of representing the soul as acting on the body, was shown in discussing Dr. Bain's well-founded doctrine of "spontaneous motion." Lastly, the distinction between an impression received and the state thence resulting, is clear, and, I think, worth remarking. It is evident too, that when two beings are compounded into one nature—that is, one principle of doing and suffering an altered condition of either being must induce a corresponding alteration in the other; so that the compound, as a whole, will be altered. The compound here is the man, the Me. I know me by my action at home. And, knowing that I am, I have entered into the great Idea of Being.

Next comes the difficulty, as to whether I know a Not-Me. I must not assume the affirmative; yes or no upon this question, is the point at issue. But I shall proceed to prove in favour of yes. I assume Dr. Bain's second fact of the primitive mental constitution, the fact of "passive sensation," or "nervous currents inwards." In this fact of consciousness are found the second and third elements of the I am, while the first element is wanting. For in passive sensation the body is impressed, and body and soul join in a resultant conscious state; but there is no action of the soul giving a stimulus to the body. In Dr. Bain's phraseology, the "diffusive wave of feeling" is not" spontaneous." But the triad of cognition is still made up. Instead of my own soul-my truest innermost Me* I mentally place a Not-Me, acting upon my body. I know a Non-Ego, then, in questions of sensory perception, has this meaning "some being, not my soul, is acting on my body; the body receives the action; soul and body are in a resultant conscious state." If this theory is rightly framed, it appears how the Ego is involved in every apprehension, and yet the Non-Ego may be absolutely apprehended. I suffer, mine is the conscious state; but it is not myself that acts

upon me.

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"My Me," because I revert in thought upon myself.

Adversaries will impugn-it is the only possible point of attack-my right to couple the action of a being outside me with an impression and affection of my mind. I vindicate my right thus. A fundamentally similar impression and affection in time past, went along with action; the present impression and affection, therefore, are associated in my mind with action. Action, impression, and their resultant mental affection, formerly implied Being; so they imply Being now. But the action then proceeded from me; now the action is not from me the Being, therefore, which I cognized in the foregone case was my own; in this case it is not my own. well to argue from my own being to foreign being? Certainly, if I am to be a man at all; that is, if I am to generalize, and attain to Ideas. In knowing myself, I came upon the Idea of Being; wherever I find this idea exemplified, there I say is some Being. In an external object perceived, the Idea of Being is exemplified as accurately as it can be exemplified without the object coinciding with my own Being. There is just enough of correspondence for me to identify Being, and enough of diversity for me to disown it for mine.

But is it

But I not only am, but live; how is it that I learn to strip the attribute of life off the material things that surround me? Where do I find a suture of division between existence and vitality? Well, I find hardly any division at first children think, and childish men have thought, that stocks and stones are alive. At the same time, the child's notion of life is confused and inadequate. Experience slowly shows him that the laws of motion are not the same for inanimate things as for living things like himself. The longer he consciously lives, the better he identifies life and its indications; and the better he discriminates it from all things else, marking where no sign of it appears.

I seem to have made the knowledge of self the steppingstone to knowledge of a world beyond self, slighting the common observation, that children and youthful minds generally are taken up with things outside them, and not till mature years do they advert much to themselves. This well-observed fact, however, makes nothing against my theory. Once cognized, the outside view may be more interesting than the view inside; it does not, therefore, follow that it was cognized first. Both are cognized very indistinctly for the first five years of life. I maintain that the infant, during that period, understands little that passes around it, for the reason that it is as yet unfamiliar with the face of its own inner being. The phrase," coming to the years of discretion," I consider to import the full recognition by the Ego of its own existence, and

thence of the existence of beings which the Ego is not. From the age of five to fifteen, and onwards, perhaps, to fifty and to death, the Non-Ego will still exercise a predominant influence upon the attention; still the Ego can, and occasionally does, turn to contemplate itself. That is enough for my argument. Mediately through that self-introspective faculty is the external world perceived.

Metaphysical theories are slippery things. I will state mine again, that the reader may better grasp it. Certain "spontaneous movements" put me in the way of certain "passive sensations." Of the movements, I feel myself the author, or cause, and thereby I apprehend the Idea of Cause; but who shall answer for the sensory impressions? Not mine own

mind; for, able as I am to advert to my mental acts, I have been unable to detect my mind in the act of causing these impressions. Yet they must have some cause. Change to me means a caused change; only as a something caused, has the phenomenon of change met my experience. I ascribe those impressions, therefore, to Being other than my mind, Being endowed with independent power to impress my sensibility thus whensoever I may expose it. I recognize the activity of foreign substance, an activity likened amid diversity to that wherewith I myself am active. But I am also passive-susceptible of change. And I find myself able to produce absolute changes on the activities around me. From those changes I gather that the external world too is passive. Knowing its activity and its passivity, I know its substantial being; for "conspiration of an active and a passive principle into oneness" is the metaphysical expression for the natural state of a created substance.

"There now," my opponents say, "the ghost which Locke ་ had laid, has been conjured up, a new bugbear. Who does not know that substance is but a catalogue of properties, with a form of the mind to hold them together? Away with this realistic necromancy! perish objectified forms of thought!"

Well, my friends, but beware lest the inductive sciences, of which you are so justly proud, perish along with that scouted phantom. Induction rests on the principle that what has happened in the past, will happen, under like conditions, in the future. A principle need be solidly and surely set, that bears such a weight of inference as this bears. How then is it established? what is its security? Mr. Mill steps forward. He will prove the principle. "It has been tried in millions of instances, and never been known to fail; therefore it never will fail." But does not Mr. Mill see that this therefore slily performs the very operation, the justice of which is under dis

cussion, namely, the leap to the future? What avails it to quote precedents to me, if I entirely repudiate the force of precedent? "But they have always been followed hitherto," you say. "How is that to bar their being departed from henceforth?" Such is the retort. Dr. Bain seems to approve its cogency. Treading as he does, in his logical march, close in the footsteps of his great predecessor, it is curious how, in this particular, he silently eschews Mr. Mill's track.* He acknowledges We can give no reason or evidence for this uniformity,"-that uniformity of which Mr. Mill had said, "I hold it to be itself an instance of induction." What, then, does Dr. Bain surrender the principle? No. The reason follows in his own words :

Without the assumption we could not take the smallest steps in practical matters: we could not pursue any object or end in life. Unless the future is to reproduce the past, it is an enigma, a labyrinth. Our natural prompting is to assume such identity, to believe it first, and prove it afterwards.

Then the author, who has written so much upon "the primitive corruption of this part of our nature," who has said, "Nothing can be affirmed as true except upon the warrant of experience," and yet that "It [experience] does not prove that anything will always be in the future what it has been in the past; " this same author calmly announces his intention to yield to his "intuitive tendency," and believe, and build his knowledge on the belief, that "What has uniformly been in the past, will be in the future." And he goes on to say of this postulate," Our only error is in proposing to give any reason or justification of it, to treat it as otherwise than as begged at the very outset."¶

Now I do not quarrel with Dr. Bain simply for making postulates. The lawyer needs laws, and the reasoner needs data. But I do grudge his assigning to what he calls "experience," "an exclusive place in our estimation as the canon of credibility;" forgetful that he is assuming throughout the objective

Compare Mill's "Logic," Book III. chap. iii. § 1, with Bain's "Logic," -Deduction, pp. 273-4.

+ See "Emotions and Will," -Belief, §§ 11-14, with the note there; "Logic,"-Deduction, pp. 12, 13; "Logic,"-Induction, pp. 377-8; and Mill's "Logic," Book III. chap. xxi. § 1, to which Dr. Bain refers. I invite the reader to consider these passages carefully, and view the à priori assumption about uniformity in the light of Dr. Bain's own experientialist disclaimers. + Deduction, p. 13.

Ibid. p. 274. Ibid. p. 274.

Attention has already been called to this strange exhibition of Dr. Bain's, in the DUBLIN REVIEW for October, 1871, pp. 311, 312.