DEAN MANSEL.
THE loss of a clear, vigorous, and acutely logical thinker in the maturity of his intellectual powers, and with the apparent capacity of much good work still in him, is, in the present state of metaphysical science in England, of no light character. We can- not afford to lose, in times in which the tendencies of a pseudo- positivism both in mental and moral and in physical science are growing daily stronger and spreading wider, any thinker, whatever the specialities of his own opinions, who values philosphy for its own sake, even though philosophy in his hands must, if consistently dealt with, cease to be what it has been among the most brilliant speculators of both ancient and modern days. Whatever, there- fore, we may think of the general tendencies and effect of the philosophy which the late Dean of St. Paul's did so much to propagate, we must deeply regret his sudden and too early removal from our midst. Ho was a man of, it may be, nar- row, but strong convictions ; he was honest and fearless in working out his principles from his own point of view, and with a nature keen rather than broad, but endowed with a faculty of acute discrimination and a power of patient careful analysis, he laboured earnestly and zealously to disseminate the particular opinions in philosophy which he had come to hold with the tenacity that was characteristic of him. It is certainly very much owing to him that the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton has come to pre- vail to such an extent as it does outside the country of its author. What was lacking to Hamilton as an expositor and as a con- sistent thinker, Dean Manse' laboured, and not ineffect- ually, to supply. The fragmentary condition in which the mighty logician left his works and the record of his views, the mere hints of suggestions for a system of philosophy which in too many instances were all he had prepared or set down in writing, demanded an expositor and commentator with powers similar and not far inferior to those of Hamilton himself. It is the distinctive work of Dean Mansel that he supplied much at least of what was wanting. He clothed the skeleton with flesh, and filled up many of the blanks and defects which re- mained, so as to present a scheme of thought consistent with itself and in its several parts.. The influence which Dean Manse', and Sir William Hamilton through him, came to exercise in Oxford and elsewhere in England is a sufficient proof of the truth of what we have said.
Although, and especially of late years, Dr. Mansel endeavoured to elucidate, and defend against the assaults of opponents, the philosophical views of his master from a purely metaphysical stand-point, yet it WREi in the sphere of theology that he first won his greatest laurels. By far the most popular of his works, which has gone through numerous editions, and has largely affected the thought of his age, was the series of lectures on the " Limits of Religious Thought," which formed the Bampton Lectures for 1858. In these the lecturer endeavoured to save religion—we can hardly say theology—by an appeal to Hamilton's and his own theory of the impotence of thought. Even had he perfectly succeeded in all he professed to aim at here, he would only have saved religion or revelation for a blind faith, not for an enlightened epiritual knowledge. He strove to ground theology—if we may use the term in such a reference—upon human nescience. Because, by the constitution of our minds, through the very nature of thought itself, we are unable to attain to any real or adequate knowledge of God, seeing that we can only think within and under conditions, and God is the Infinite and Unconditioned, it foltowe that we are incompetent to deal with the problems of theology. When we attempt to conceive or form ideas or notions of the Infinite, we attain as our products to only negative conceptions of the finite. These must not only be in- -adequate, they must be even false, since the only positive ideas we can entertain are of directly opposite and contradictory character to the Infinite. We are thus excluded from the highest region of -existence, to which human thought, nevertheless, ever tends, and after which it ever longs, and all we can do is to receive with -humble faith the fact that there is an Infinite and Unconditioned whom we can neither comprehend nor come nigh to. Accordingly, we have no right to be staggered by mysteries and seeming con- tradictions within the sphere of the objects of faith. We are bound simply to receive the restilts which Revelation communicates to -us, having been forced by the knowledge which we have of our own powers and capacities to atinsit ourselves incapable of dealing in thought with the highest realities. It is plain, indeed, that by the use of this kind of argument Dr. Mansel might succeed in vindicating the possibility of the truth of Revelation, but it could only be that,' and no more. His teat of truth is a purely negative -one. He shows that by the nature of our thought we have no right to sit in judgment upon Revelation, that we are inadequate to deal with its contents, and therefore are not entitled to conclude from any amount of seeming mystery or inconsistency that any given doctrine is untrue. But that does not take us very far. Having proved that, so far as objections drawn from the aide of "human thought are concerned, they have no applicability to Revela- tion, we therefore admit that Revelation not is, but only may be, true. We still wait for a positive test of the truth of the actual contents,—all we have done has been to remove obstacles which would have barred the way against admitting the possibility of their truth. Both Hamilton and Mansel, indeed, here fall back upon -faith, and tell us we are compelled to believe what we are unable -to understand. After the latter has told us that "the Absolute and the Infinite are, film the Inconceivable and Imperceptible, names indicating not an object of thought or of consciousness at all, but the mere absence of the conditions under which conscious- mess is possible," he yet goes on to inform us that this mental impotence, whose product is nothing, in some wonderful "in- -direct way" "leads us to believe in the existence of that Infinite 'which we cannot conceive." And Hamilton also says, "By a -wonderful revelation, we are, in the very consciousness of our inability to conceive aught above the relative and finite, inspired with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned, beyond -the sphere of all reprehensible reality." Assuredly it must be a -very " wonderful revelation" which appeals to and is appre- -heeded by an organ that all the while is ignorant of what it appre- lends, or whether it be anything or nothing. What does faith put -faith in ? Is it God as object or—since that is impossible—what is 'contained in our belief? What constitutes the "something uncoil- 4litioned" which we are supposed to see? Is it a real being, and if so, low is it that we have transcended—in the act of recognizing it— the circle of conceptions of the finite in which we were said to be bound? Call it faith, or knowledge, or thought, if we apprehend .a real it must be by a positive act of thought, and the " something 'unconditioned" must in some way be known, or thought of, or about. But in truth, Hamilton and Mansel never had any right, -according to their own principles, to give a positive deliverance -ou the subject of man's knowledge of God, or of the Unconditioned. If the Infinite or Unconditioned be absolutely unknowable, it must be impossible for us to know so much of it as to affirm -that it is unknowable. And as negative thinking gives and can only give nothing, it is impossible to reconcile the belief or faith of the .Scotch philosopher with a theory which denies the power to thought of dealing with the Infinite at all. Moreover, it seems strange that dio acute a reasoner as Dean Mansel should not have seen that if
he remove God so far from man, it must be impossible for the latter ever to identify any Revelation from God as really his. For in order to do that, we must first of all have some idea of what He is.
But we have dwelt sufficiently on the purely religious or theo- logical aspects of the Hamiltonian and Manselian philosophy. We have left ourselves little space to consider the fundamental position of these two logicians in a purely philosophical aspect. We may still, however, be permitted a few sentences on this important point. We speak of this fundamental position of the philosophy of nescienoo, and the theory can be reduced within such definite limits. The philosophy of the Conditioned or the Un- conditioned, as it may indifferently be termed, rests upon. the assumption and assertion that relativity is a universal law applic- able to both things and thought, and that it holds good wherever human thought operates. We think only under conditions, in the mutual reference of subject and object ; and it is only the product of the reference that can become known to us. How much or what element of the result is supplied by the subject taken by itself, and how much or what by the object by itself, remains hidden from us. Consequently, we know only what is under relations, and as it is under relations ; and inasmuch as relation must limit, since all determination is negative, God as the Absolute must be the Unrelated, and we must ever be unable to make Him the object of our thought. This argument, however, proves too much for the purposes of its authors. In assuming relativity as a universal law of knowledge, they have also converted it into a universal law of being. The God who is the Unrelated and Unconditioned in this strictly nega- tive sense is thereby deprived of all reality, and turned into a negation which is simply convertible with non-being, the g'S' Ai is of the Alexandrians. In order to think anything about God, we must denude Him of all self-conscious determination and of all specific attributes, so that the result in the sphere of being is nothing. Not only so, but the very terms of the argument are self-contradictory. If the Absolute must be the Unrelated, then there can be no relation between God and the World, and thereby we obtain two Absolutes, which is nonsense. Again, if the Absolute cannot relate himself to the finite, he cannot be absolute, for the world will exist without Him. And if He cannot reveal himself, He is subjected to a limiting necessity which places over against Him the world as equally absolute with himself,—in revealing himself, He must abdicate his own absolute nature. This is the result of linking the law of relativity universally valid in both things and thought, and the end of all is to reduce the Unconditioned to mere negation of being. It is certainly true, as was shown by Kant, that when thought attempts to deal with the highest realities it finds itself faced by contradictions which may be solved in either of two opposite ways. But instead of asserting that the antinomies are due to the nature and constitution of thought, may we not try another solu- tion, and say—as we find in fact—that the antinomies are in exist- ence, in the existence of the finite and conditioned, and do not apply at all to the Absolute, which must be pure self -identitr and free from all contradictions? It is true that we find ourselves faced by the negative, and that when limited and conditioned by it the positive itself becomes negative, and each seems only the reciprocal condition of the other and relative thereto. Therefore the disciples of Hamilton conclude to the universality of relativity as a law of existence and knowledge. But the negative and positive which we-see everywhere and which land us in antinomies are only equal, as it were, mathematically, just as 1 and 1 are equal numeri- cally to whatever realities it may be that they correspond. In reality, the negative derives from the positive all that is real in it ; nega- tion is thus dependent upon affirmation which itself has no need of the former. Negation and non-being are not, therefore, of equal rank and reality, for the negative is only secondary and derivative, the positive is original ; and if in nature limitation is everywhere, it is not, therefore, of the essence of the real. Above the state of contradiction and autinomy, which is that of nature and in part of man, there is an absolute state—of pure thought-- where is only reality, and in which negation, which is taken by us to be the condition of existence, has no place. Our space only permits us thus briefly to hint at a solution which would require
more elaborate treatment to make it plain. S. 11.
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