Aristotle
would reply: "By the test of experience, and by that alone: if these
cognitions, which have been elicited in your mind through experience,
are refuted or not confirmed when tested by subsequent experience
carefully watched and selected for the purpose, they are not true or
trustworthy cognitions." But Hamilton would not concur in this
answer: he would say that the cognitions, though elicited _through_
experience, did not derive their authority or trustworthiness _from_
experience, but were binding and authoritative in themselves, whether
confirmed by experience or not. In speaking about Axioms, p. 764, b.,
he says: "Aristotle limited" (this is not correct: Aristotle did not
_limit_ as here affirmed) "the expression Axiom to those judgments
which, on occasion of experience, arise naturally and necessarily in
the conscious mind, and which are therefore virtually prior to
experience." That they are not prior to experience in _order of
time_, is admitted in the words just cited from Hamilton himself: he
means, therefore, prior in _logical authority_--carrying with them
the quality of _necessity_, even though experience may afford no
confirmation of them. This is what he says, on pp. 753-754, about
causality: metaphysical causality _must_ be believed, as a necessary
and subjective law of the observer--though there is no warrant for it
in experience.
The question between Hamilton and the Inductive School, I repeat, is
not so much about the psychological genesis of beliefs, as about the
test for distinguishing true from false or uncertified beliefs, among
those beliefs which arise, often and usually, in the minds of most
men. Is there any valid test other than experience itself, as
intentionally varied by experiments and interpreted by careful
Induction? Are we ever warranted in affirming what transcends
experience, except to the extent to which the inference from
Induction (from some to all) always transcends actual observation?
This seems to me the real question at issue between the contending
schools of Metaphysics. Hamilton, while he rejects experience as the
test, furnishes no other test whereby we can discriminate the
erroneous beliefs "which are elicited into consciousness through
experience," from the true beliefs which are elicited in like manner.
In discussing the doctrine which Hamilton and other philosophers
entitle Common Sense (in the metaphysical import which they assign to
it), it is proper to say a few words on the legitimate meaning of
this phrase, before it was pressed into service by a particular
school of metaphysicians. Every one who lives through childhood and
boyhood up to man's estate will unavoidably acquire a certain amount
of knowledge and certain habits of believing, feeling, judging, &c.;
differing materially in different ages and countries, and varying to
a less degree in different individuals of the same age and country,
yet still including more or less which is common to the large
majority. That fire burns; that water quenches thirst and drowns;
that the sun gives light and heat; that animals are all mortal and
cannot live long without nourishment,--these and many other beliefs
are not possessed by a very young child, but are acquired by every
man as he grows up, though he cannot remember how or when he learnt
them. The sum total of the beliefs thus acquired, by the impressions
and influences under which every growing mind might pass, constitutes
the Common Sense of a particular age and country. A person wanting in
any of them would be considered, by the majority of the inhabitants,
as deficient in Common Sense. If I meet an adult stranger, I presume
as a matter of course that he has acquired them, and I talk to him
accordingly. I also presume (being in England) that he has learnt the
language of the country; and that he is familiar with the forms of
English speech whereby such beliefs and their correlative disbeliefs
are enunciated. If I affirm to him any one of these beliefs, he
assents to it at once: it appears to him self-evident--that is,
requiring no farther or extraneous evidence to support it. Though it
appears to him self-evident, however, the proposition may possibly be
false. To a Greek of the Aristotelian age, no proposition could
appear more self-evident than that of the earth being at rest. No
term can be more thoroughly relative than the term _self-evident_:
that which appears so to one man, will often not appear so to
another, and may sometimes appear altogether untrue.
But, if we suppose an individual to whom one of these beliefs does
not appear self-evident, and who requires proof, he will not be
satisfied to be told that every one else believes it, and that it is
a dictate of Common Sense. He probably knows that already, and yet,
nevertheless, he is not convinced. Aristarchus of Samos was told
doubtless, often enough, that the doctrine of the earth being at rest
was the plain verdict of Common Sense; but he did not the less
controvert it. You must produce the independent proof which the
recusant demands; and, if your doctrine is true and trustworthy, such
proof can be produced. I will here remark that, in so far as Common
Sense can properly be quoted as an authority or presumptive
authority, it is such only in the sense proclaimed by Herakleitus and
La Mennais, as cited by Hamilton, pp. 770-771: "as a magazine of
ready-fabricated dogmas." Hamilton finds fault with both of them; but
it appears to me that they rightly interpret, and that he wrongly
interprets, what Common Sense, as generally understood, is; and
moreover, that most of the other authorities whom he himself quotes
understand the phrase as these two understand it. Common Sense is "a
magazine of ready-fabricated dogmas," as La Mennais (see p. 771, a.)
considers it--dogmas assumed as self-evident, and as requiring no
proof. It only becomes "a source of elementary truths" when analysed
and remodelled by philosophers. Now philosophers differ much in their
mode of analysing it (as Hamilton himself declares emphatically), and
bring out of it different elementary truths; each of them professing
to follow Common Sense and quoting Common Sense as warranty. It is
plain that Common Sense is no authority for either one of two
discrepant modes of analysis. Its authority counts for those dogmas
out of which the analysis is made, in so far as Common Sense is
authoritative at all.
Hamilton cites or indicates thirteen different Aristotelian passages,
in order to support his view that Aristotle is to be numbered among
the champions of authoritative Common Sense. It will be seen that
most of the passages prove nothing, and that only one proves much, in
favour of that view. I shall touch upon them _seriatim_.
(_a_) "First truths are such as are believed, not through aught else"
(say rather _through other truths_) "but through themselves alone.
For, in regard to the first principles of science, we ought not to
require the reason _Why_; for each such principle behoves to be
itself a _belief_ in and of itself."[1] After the words _reason Why_,
Hamilton inserts the following additional words of his own in
brackets--"but only the fact _That_ they are given."
[Footnote 1: Aristot. Topic. I. i. p. 100, a. 30; Hamilton's Reid, p.
772, a.]
I demur to the words in brackets, as implying an hypothesis not
contained in Aristotle; who says only that the truth affirmed by the
teacher must be such as the learner is prepared to believe without
asking any questions. It may be an analytical truth (_sensu
Kantiano_), in which the predicate asserts only what the learner
knows to be already contained in the definition of the subject. It
may be a synthetical truth; yet asserting only what he is familiar
with by constant, early, uncontradicted, obvious, experience. In
either case, he is prepared to believe it at once; and thus the
conditions of a First Scientific Truth are satisfied, as here
described by Aristotle; who says nothing about the truth _being
given_.
The next passage cited (_b_) is from the Analytica Posteriora (the
reference is printed by mistake _Priora_). According to Hamilton,
Aristotle says:--"We assert not only that science does exist, but also
that there is given a certain beginning or principle of science, _in
so far as_ (or, on another interpretation of the term [Greek:
ê(=|]--_by which_) we recognize the import of the terms."[2] I think
Hamilton has not exactly rendered the sense of the original when he
translates it--"we recognize the import of the terms;" and he
proceeds to add expository words of his own which carry us still
farther away from what I understand in Aristotle. If Hamilton's
rendering is correct, all the _principia_ of Science would be
analytical propositions (_sensu Kantiano_), which I do not think that
Aristotle intended to affirm or imply. In the last chapter of the
Analytica Posteriora, Aristotle not only affirmed that there were
First Principles of Science, but described at length the inductive
process by which we reached them: referring them ultimately to the
cognizance and approval of Noûs or Intellect. What Aristotle means
is, that, in ascending from propositions of lower to propositions of
higher universality, we know when we have reached the extreme term of
ascent; and this forms the _principium_.
[Footnote 2: Aristot. Anal. Post. I. iii. p. 72, b. 23: [Greek:
tau=ta/ t' ou)=n ou(/tô le/gomen, kai\ ou) mo/non e)pistê/mên a)lla\
kai\ a)rchê\n e)pistê/mês ei)=nai/ tina/ phamen, ê(=| tou\s o(/rous
gnôri/zomen.]
Neither Philoponus, nor Buhle, nor M. Barthélemy St.-Hilaire,
translate the words [Greek: tou\s o(/rous gnôri/zomen] in the same
way as Sir W. Hamilton. It rather seems to me that the words mean
_terms or limits of regress_, which coincides with the paraphrase of
Philoponus: [Greek: tou/tô| ga\r (tô=| nô=|) ta\s a)rchoeidesta/tas
kai\ oi(onei\ o(/rous ou)/sas gnôri/zomen] (Schol. p. 201, b. 13,
Br.), as well as substantially with the note of M. St.-Hilaire.]
Sir W. Hamilton next gives us another passage (_c_) from the
Analytica Posteriora, in which Aristotle affirms that the First
Principles must be believed in a superlative degree, because we know
and believe all secondary truths through them:[3] a doctrine which
appears to me to require both comment and limitation; but about which
I say nothing, because, even granting it to be true, I do not see how
it assists the purpose--to prove that Aristotle is the champion of
authoritative Common Sense. Nor do I find any greater proof in
another passage previously (p. 764, b.) produced from Aristotle: "Of
the immediate principles of syllogism, that which cannot be
demonstrated, but which it is not necessary to possess as the
pre-requisite of all learning, I call _Thesis_: and that _Axiom_,
which he who would learn aught, must himself bring (and not receive
from his instructor). For some such principles there are; and it is to
these that we are accustomed to apply the name."[4] Such principles
there doubtless are, which the learner must bring with him; but
Aristotle does not assert, much less prove, that they are intuitions
given by authoritative Common Sense. Nay, in the passage cited in my
former page, he both asserted and proved that the _principia_ of
Science were raised from Sense by Induction. The learner, when he
comes to be taught, must bring some of these _principia_ with him, if
he is to learn Science from his teacher; just as he must also bring
with him a knowledge of the language, of the structure of sentences,
of the forms for affirmation and denial, &c., and various other
requisites. A recruit, when first coming to be drilled, must bring
with him a certain power of walking and of making other movements of
the limbs. But these pre-requisites, on the part of the learner as