B.UME AND THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY.

WE have already remarked that we consider exclusive attention. to contemporary literature an undesirable limitation of a periodical. aiming at a critical estimate of contemporary thought. Apart. from the reflected lights of other times, the most careful view of our own will leave much that needs to be brought into promi- nence in deep shadow, and he who knows only the productions- of the day will seldom mark what is characteristic, and never what is original in them. This remark is strikingly illustrated by the self- portraiture of the thinker who has last passed away from us. The statement in Mr. Mill's Autobiography that his strength lay not in. original thought, but in interpreting the original thoughts of others,, was taken by many, probably, as evidence of the modesty, and not, as we hold it, the self-knowledge of a great mind. The range of illustration, the sympathy with a large part of what is rejected, the patient and courteous analysis by which so much that is,,. from his point of view, erroneous, is accounted for without arro- gance and with entire plausibility, has, to most minds, the effect of initiative thought. We will not inquire into the comparative value of the two kinds of intellect, but we take it for granted that originality has its own value, and we propose to-day to give. some examination to the thinker who was, in this country, the initiator of that system of thought which Mill made popular here, and which is now oftenest spoken of by the vague and misleading title of the Positive Philosophy."

We use the name in its vaguest and most popular sense, but we cannot use it in any sense without a protest. The well-known -epigram on the Holy Roman Empire, "80 called because it is neither holy nor Roman," is recalled by this appellation for a system of thought which ignores all that Plato meant by philo- sophy, and which, if we use words in their English and not their French sense, is much more negative than positive. But as the name is associated with something not indeed definite in its out- line, but unmistakable at its centre, we make use of it to de- scribe that system which professes to derive all knowledge from experience, and which either does exclude, or is generally supposed to exclude from experience every feeling which cannot be ulti- mately associated with an impression on the senses. We are not proposing to examine, still leas to criticise, this system ; our object is merely to trace its most characteristic idea to a mind as much superior to Mill's in original power, as in- ferior in breadth of sympathy and range of knowledge. If, indeed, we were to inquire who was the first Englishman in whom the convictions embodied in what is called Positivism are found, we should, perhaps, travel back two centuries instead of 'one; but in Hobbes they are found, to use his own fine image, as wine was in the world while yet the vines grew wild and the grapes were unpressed. Now Hume, to adopt another simile of his predecessor's, "did as the statuaries do, who, by hewing off that which is superfluous, do not make, but find the image." The ideas which in the earlier thinker we disentangle laboriously from a set of conceptions entirely heterogeneous to them, emerge in the later with the distinctness which all ideas must acquire before they are to form the starting-point of a new movement of thought. Yet it must be confessed that his writings are not studied by a reader of our day without effort. In one respect, indeed, they have the advantage of the writings of our day. Our language was at a better stage then, we think, than it is now. Before Johnson had Latinised English, expression was simpler -and more homely, and though good writers in our day aim at these -qualities quite as much as, or rather more than they did a hundred years ago, they are not equally successful. And Hume was a master of style. We can hardly exaggerate our sense of the lucid transparency through which his speculations are presented to the reader, and we may say, in passing, that here, as in clear water, this transparency may be sometimes mistaken for shallowness. Nevertheless, few readers now-a-days could get through much of 'his metaphysical writings without some strong reason. They were not very popular in his own day, and the taste for such

'speculation was far stronger then than it is now. Indeed, if we were to condense into a single epithet our view of the -eighteenth century, we should describe it as the metaphysical age. The attempt to sum up complex and subtle tendencies in one word is even more dangerous for the present than for the past ; but if it had to be made, the physical or scientific age is the name we should -choose for our own time. Now science and theology proclaim a -truce in their long war at any opportunity for a joint attack on metaphysics, and if either of them shows signs of leniency in our day, it is not science. The physicist is far more respectful to the theologian than to the metaphysician. Religion, he thinks, may at least express and evoke emotions which, imaginary though their objects be, are in themselves salutary and admirable ; but this dim and intermediate region, which is neither natural nor -supernatural, this home of pale abstractions and thought divorced at once from emotion and from sense, is shunned and spoken ill of by all. A decision, we are convinced, as erroneous as it will prove temporary ;—still it is the decision of our time, and must be accepted as a main fact in its history. And to the temper of mind expressed in this decision such reading as Hume's Essays is extremely arduous. Many among those to whom Mill's Logic has made an epoch in their intellectual life would turn, pro- bably, from Hume's Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding as from a string of vague and meaningless truisms ; yet all the doctrines expounded and illustrated in the Logic are to be -found in the earlier work. Determinism is there, Utilitarianism is there, the analysis of necessary truth into invariable associa- tion is there.; in a word, the few volumes which, if their author had had his way, would be still fewer (for be vainly strove to recall, in favour of his later utterance, the rash publi- cation of his youth), contain, in germ, the Philosophy of Experience, or, as the Gallicism of the day has it, the Positive Philosophy.

For what is ,Positive Philosoph y, as far as a few words can express it? As we have gone so far on the dangerous path of abrupt description, we will add one more to our bold attempts, and define it as that system of thought which has renounced as illegitimate the conception of Cause. And the thinker who took the initiative in that renunciation was David Hume.

We shall, perhaps, make this connection clearer by turning for a moment from the Englishman whose name we have associated with Hume to one who had almost as much right to be considered his countryman. flume's fame was born in France, three French kings made their well-taught compliments to him in the nursery, and fashionables to whom his face had long been familiar in Edinburgh were eager to bring introductions to him as soon as he was settled in Paris. It would be easy and interesting, did space permit, to dwell on this ground for joining his name with that of Comte, but we can only touch upon it in passing on to the system which shows clearly to those who can trace thought in its filtration through opposite character the relation between two minds. Comte's law of the three stages bars now taken so familiar a place in general estimation, that illustration rather than description is the natural way of recalling it to the attention of a reader. The Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Positive phases of thought have become definite conceptions, technically labelled, to which any one may refer, quite apart from his opinions on theology or metaphysics. To confine ourselves to our own day, meteorology must be acknowledged to be a specimen of a science still in its theological stage as long as people suppose that the laws of the weather have a more direct relation to the will of God than the laws, for instance, of the earth's movement ; and if Pro- fessor Miiller's phonetic types had obtained general credence, philology would have afforded us a specimen of a science not yet emerged from subjection to metaphysics. But it is not without difficulty that we cite either contemporaneous or successive speci- mens to illustrate this whole process of development. The con- ception of will as the immediate source of natural events which gave the first stimulus to observation lies, for the most part, beyond the range of history, and what we have to do with as an actual fact interwoven with the records of thought and discovery is the conception of cause. And it is therefore less in the trans- mutation of will to cause than in the transmutation of cause to invariable antecedence that the true battle of science has been fought. Science had once to be disentangled from theology, no doubt, but in following its growth under the daylight of history, we are almost exclusively occupied with its disentanglement from metaphysics. A striking instance of the confusion which precedes the disentanglement, to our mind (though we cite with some hesitation a scientific fallacy from the very head-quarters of science), is to be found in those speculations which at one time occupied much of Newton's attention on the cause of gravity. It might, he thought, be perhaps explained by the action of an ether, graduated in fineness in an inverse direction to the atmosphere, and pressing bodies downwards in a complicated manner which, if we have rightly understood it, would be possible only by at- tributing something like desire to this ether. "The grosser ether," he says, "being less apt to be lodged in the pores of bodies than the finer ether below, it will endeavour to get out, and make way for this finer ether, which cannot be without bodies descending to make room for it to go out into." That mere gross matter should endeavour to get at its like was too violent a sup- position, as, on the other hand, the simple fact that, under certain circumstances, matter always approached matter, was not an ultimate resting-place for a mind seeking after absolute Cause. But the same principle which blinded our translators of the New Testament to the absurdity of the wind blowing where it listeth, led Newton to fancythat though matter could not "endeavour" to move in any direction, it was quite possible that a subtle ether should do so. This has always been the temptation of the mind which, not being satisfied with causes, seeks after cause, and so long as it prevails, sciesice will remain in the metaphysical phase which precedes Positivism.

Ought Apt Positivism, therefore, to be emphatic in acknow- ledging its obligation to the man who first distinctly set before the world of thinkers the question,—What is the true nature of the relation of cause and effect ? But, indeed, the obligations of this school are shared by its opponents. The question is like some test thrown into a chemical combination, precipitating the sub- stance held in solution and leaving the other element free from it, an operation equally useful, whichever of the elements we wish to preserve. Hume answered his own question—" We have no other idea of cause and effect but that of certain objects which have been always joined together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable." But he did not peas by without explaining the fact that people suppose themselves to mean more than this by Cause. The genealogy of this illusion, according to him, is a very obvious one. There is a tendency in human nature by which mankind transfer their own feelings to the outward world. When one event always cornea after another, we call tbat its cause, but what people mean when they add to this definition the assertion that the effect not only does, but must follow the cause, is simply this—that they must think of the two things to- gether. We cannot help thinking of heat when we imagine flame, but if, indeed, there be anything like this "cannot help" in the world without, it is something utterly beyond the reach of our understanding or imagination, and we must let it alone or waste our time. Experience is our only source of knowledge, and experience has never revealed anything in cause and effect but invariable sequence. When, therefore, we go on from this invariable sequence which we know. to such asser- tions as "that every event must have a cause," we are simply trying to manufacture knowledge out of our incapacity, and making the limits of our imagination the foundation of a belief as to the facts of the universe. Such an attempt can lead to nothing but sophistry and illusion.

This is not a paraphrase of any single passage in Hume, nor is it given entirely in his dialect, but it is the shortest way in which we can represent the effect of his reasoning on the mind of a reader who looks back upon it through the intervening atmosphere of thought. In spite of his careful guarding of his meaning, he was greatly misunderstood. Even so intelligent a critic as Reid urged that if Hume were on a jury, he would never suggest as a possible explanation of an apparent crime that the circumstances which implied it might possibly have no cause,—an argument which went as far towards refuting him as striking a stick on the floor towards refuting Berkeley. Hume never meant to deny that the se- quences which experience reveals are the proper guides for experience. He would not have done any violence to his philosophical prin- ciples in arguing that a man with his throat cut and his pockets rifled lying on the highway suggested to the mind a band of high- waymen, and that this suggestion was one on which it was de- sirable to take very decided steps. Only when it is not a question of action at all, but of knowledge, does his philosophy step in, and put a veto on the substitution of a dogma for a rule. The true meaning of this veto would have been much clearer, probably, if Hume had written at a time when free speech was safe. The Church of the eighteenth century, as Gibbon says of the University which was her stronghold, "united the extremes of bigotry and indifference ;" and with the fate of Woolston before his eyes, Hume was obliged to veil his attacks on religion in irony which we should have thought transparent enough, if it had not blinded his able and impartial biographer. But we have now to do merely with his influence on philosophy, and it is evident that this view of causation, though it could only have arisen in a metaphysical mind, lays the axe to the very root of metaphysics. If we do not know that everything which begins to exist must have a came, we can know nothing but the succes- sion of our sensations. The question whether they are or are not caused must be laid aside, as one with which we have nothing to do. In perfect harmony with this view, therefore, Hume teaches that Belief is only a lively kind of sensation. A conception of a certain dimness indicates a mere imagination, that very conception, with no other change but increased vividness, points out something rousing in us that feeling we call Belief, a feeling on which we act, which leads us to expect other sensations, and not to be deceived in the expectation. Evidently if this is so, there is in man no faculty which lays hold of that which is.

But this, the puzzled reader may exclaim, is Scepticism, not Positivism. Why are Carneades and Pyrrho to come back upon us under a disguise to which of all others they would seem to have the least right? Surely whatever else they were, they were not Positivists. It is indeed one of the extreme disadvantages of our simply adopting instead of translating a French term, that we are obliged to use both it and that which in coratnon accept- ance is its very opposite for the same thing. Scepticism is the negative side of Positivism. Neither Carneades nor Pyrrha could have been more emphatic than Comte (and certainly flume was less so) that such and such questions lie beyond the reach of our know- ledge. Some of his predictions were unfortunate,—in more than one case a few years have added to the undisputed domain of science territory which the founder of Positivism warned his disciples must for ever remain beyond the range of speculation. But to any attacks on this score, we think his disciples might reply that their master failed only where he was untrue to his own principle. He was so afraid of any excursion into the forbidden region lying beyond that of phenomena, that he was always trying to ward off speculation from what is ultimate in phenomena ; and we suspect that if Newton had been his contemporary, the law of gravitation

would have figured in the Philosophic Positive as an example oF the intrusion of metaphysical ideas into science. A firmer trust in his own principles would have allowed them to be carried out to their utmost limit. We must judge every teacher by his prin- ciples, and not by his failures to apply them. Comte's denial of the possibility of our knowing anything of cause is but one side of, his discernment that what we mean by Science is not a knowledge of cause. Stated in this form, it is no dogma of a particular

school, but the revelation of science to our generation. Of course a physicist would not less now than in former days seek for the cause of any new phenomenon his investigations revealed to him, but he'

would do so simply in the spirit of Hume, seeking for that ia the antecedent phenomena which would reproduce the other, not with any notion of finding some entity which produced it as an oak

produces acorns. Now the old way of looking at science found such entities everywhere. Caloric is a familiar example, still pre-

sented to us in not very old text-books of Science. Phlogiston. (the cause of flame) is a more obviously, but not a more really metaphysical conception. What has banished all these abstrac- tions, like ghosts at cock-crow, and substituted for them, to use the words of one of the most pregnant books of our time (Grove on the Correlation of Force), the conviction that "the proper object of physical science is the search, not after causes, but after facts, and relations " ? Not only the mighty conquests of Science- herself, but to some degree the influence of that philosophy of which we hold flume to be the most distinct and original'

enunciator.

But physical science, under the philosophy we are endeavouring

to follow, fills the whole scope of knowledge. The characters an& actions of men are results just as much as any other results, an& from a knowledge of their antecedents might be predicted as much. as any event in the natural world. Whence, then, has arisen the' opinion of the freedom of the will ? flume's answer to this ques- tion seems to us the most original part of his speculations. In. the first place, he denies that there has been any real difference. of opinion about the matter. Both philosophers and the vulgar- (to divide mankind with his invariable simplicity) have always, he. says, acknowledged "the conjunction between motives and volun- tary actions to be as regular and uniform as that between the cause- and effect in any part of nature." To whichever of these cate- gories a man might belong, he would be quite as much surprised to. find his purse full of gold on the pavement of Cheapside an hour- after he dropped it there as to see it fly away like a feather, and, "above one-half of human reasonings contain inferences of aa similar nature." The explanation of the fact that in spite of these' undeniable truths, there are supposed to be two opinions on the- matter, is beat given in Plume's own words :— "I have frequently considered what could possibly be the reason, why all mankind, though they have ever acknowledged the doctrine of necessity in practice, have yet discovered such a reluctance to acknow- ledge it in words. The matter, I think, may be accounted for after the following manner :—If we examine the operations of body, we shalt find that all our faculties can never carry us further in our knowledge- of cause and effect, than barely to observe that particular objects are. constantly conjoined together, and that the mind is carried by a customary. transition from the appearance of the one to the belief of the other. But men still entertain a strong propensity to believe that they pene- trate further into the powers of nature, and perceive something like a, necessary connection between the cause and the effect. When, again, they turn their reflections towards the operations of their own minds, and feel no such connection of the motive and the action, they are thence apt to suppose that there is a difference between the effects- which result from material force and those which arise from thought and intelligence."

No one can enter into the controversy as to the freedom of the' will without seeing that great minds have ranged themselves on either side, and feeling, if he has any modesty at all, that both sides must have much to say for themselves. A candid mind will extend this impression to a third view,—the belief that since both sides have in the ages of discussion made so little progress towards solving their respective difficulties, this is one of the questions which men had better let alone. But the further opinion that in fact there are no two parties at all stirs in us, we own, some impatience. Were it not true of such men as HUme. and Mill, we should call it childish to regard the convictions for

which great men have been willing to die as verbal confusions ; and arrogant to consider it more likely that through many centuries thinkers should mistake their own meaning, than that their critic should mistake another person's. In Hume this shallowness is not out of place. We think of him as a gentleman in a laced'waist- coat and a powdered wig, the idol of a Parisian sakn, the master

of raillery and innuendo ; the externals of life make up a large part of the portrait. We confess that want of depth seems to us a greater defect in an age which, whatever its faults, does not hide or forget the infinite hopes and fears of life. But this view that a good dictionary would have shown the asserters of necessity and of free-will that they meant the same thing is quite separable from the theory of Determinism itself, and we carefully guard ourselves from applying these remarks to that theory,—a theory as distinct in Hume as in Mill, and to our thinking more original.

We have aimed at tracing in brief outline the germinal idea of Hume, and endeavouring to show its development into the philo- sophy in vogue at the present day. To criticise such a philosophy in a newspaper article would be absurd, yet if we have at all succeeded in our delineation, the reader will appreciate the sense in which we called this a negative philosophy. It subtracts from our conceptions, it shows with wonderful ingenuity how those which remain are more fertile than we thought, but it adds nothing to them. People thought when they said, "Everything must have a cause," that they meant something more than "every event has its invariable antecedent, or group of ante- cedents." They supposed that the assertion that the will was free meant more than " We can take either course in an alternative, if we prefer it," but it seems that in both cases they did not know what an accretion of associated impressions gathered round and magnified the truths which look so small when they are stripped of this adventitious growth. We think the process must at least be confessed to be a negative one. For let it be noted that the antithetical view of our mental constitution does not exclude any of the principles which Hume suggested and Mill developed as the sole principles of our knowledge. We see clearly that the whole conception of cause as applied to the outer world is no more than a telescope through which we have brought the distant near, and that at the present stage of our knowledge of that world it has to be exchanged for that of transmuted force. We see, too, that a large part of human action is the result of previous conditions,—that character is formed, to some extent, as soil is formed. The question between us and this Philosophy of Experience is not " Are these principles true?" but "Are they the whole truth ?" We see no cause in the external world, but does not this correlative notion of cause and effect correspond to that distinction of spirit and matter which is at least an equally deep-seated belief in human nature? Does not the fallacious attempt to explain material phenomena by agencies which seem to approach the spiritual world point to the fact that in seeking cause the mind can rest only on will ?—and the persistent protest, in face of all the enormous difficulty it involves, that human will is free, indicate a profound conviction that where- ever will is a mere effect it has abdicated something of that crea- tive power which is its true nature? These are the deepest questions the human spirit can ask ; we add to our statement of them only the assertion that the philosophy which answers them with a blank "No!" however sympathetically and ingeni- ously it may account for their origin, is a negative philosophy.

We have dealt with it only as it touches on that speculation concerning Cause which Hume was the first to open,—a specula- tion, we hold, containing the seed of that discussion concerning origin which has occupied so much of the intellect of our day. On a future occasion we propose to turn to the moral aspect of this philosophy, and trace the utilitarianism which was, we think, John Mill's most valued bequest to his generation, to its germ in the writings of his forerunner.