Autobiography
that termination did not come too soon and too easily, I foresaw, from
the laws of human nature, and the experience of revolutions, that when
it did come it would in all probability be thorough: that the bulk of
the Northern population, whose conscience had as yet been awakened only
to the point of resisting the further extension of slavery, but whose
fidelity to the Constitution of the United States made them disapprove
of any attempt by the Federal Government to interfere with slavery in
the States where it already existed, would acquire feelings of another
kind when the Constitution had been shaken off by armed rebellion, would
determine to have done for ever with the accursed thing, and would join
their banner with that of the noble body of Abolitionists, of whom
Garrison was the courageous and single-minded apostle, Wendell Phillips
the eloquent orator, and John Brown the voluntary martyr.[8] Then, too,
the whole mind of the United States would be let loose from its bonds,
no longer corrupted by the supposed necessity of apologizing to
foreigners for the most flagrant of all possible violations of the free
principles of their Constitution; while the tendency of a fixed state of
society to stereotype a set of national opinions would be at least
temporarily checked, and the national mind would become more open to the
recognition of whatever was bad in either the institutions or the
customs of the people. These hopes, so far as related to slavery, have
been completely, and in other respects are in course of being
progressively realized. Foreseeing from the first this double set of
consequences from the success or failure of the rebellion, it may be
imagined with what feelings I contemplated the rush of nearly the whole
upper and middle classes of my own country even those who passed for
Liberals, into a furious pro-Southern partisanship: the working
classes, and some of the literary and scientific men, being almost the
sole exceptions to the general frenzy. I never before felt so keenly how
little permanent improvement had reached the minds of our influential
classes, and of what small value were the liberal opinions they had got
into the habit of professing. None of the Continental Liberals committed
the same frightful mistake. But the generation which had extorted negro
emancipation from our West India planters had passed away; another had
succeeded which had not learnt by many years of discussion and exposure
to feel strongly the enormities of slavery; and the inattention habitual
with Englishmen to whatever is going on in the world outside their own
island, made them profoundly ignorant of all the antecedents of the
struggle, insomuch that it was not generally believed in England, for
the first year or two of the war, that the quarrel was one of slavery.
There were men of high principle and unquestionable liberality of
opinion, who thought it a dispute about tariffs, or assimilated it to
the cases in which they were accustomed to sympathize, of a people
struggling for independence.
It was my obvious duty to be one of the small minority who protested
against this perverted state of public opinion. I was not the first to
protest. It ought to be remembered to the honour of Mr. Hughes and of
Mr. Ludlow, that they, by writings published at the very beginning of
the struggle, began the protestation. Mr. Bright followed in one of the
most powerful of his speeches, followed by others not less striking. I
was on the point of adding my words to theirs, when there occurred,
towards the end of 1861, the seizure of the Southern envoys on board a
British vessel, by an officer of the United States. Even English
forgetfulness has not yet had time to lose all remembrance of the
explosion of feeling in England which then burst forth, the expectation,
prevailing for some weeks, of war with the United States, and the
warlike preparations actually commenced on this side. While this state
of things lasted, there was no chance of a hearing for anything
favourable to the American cause; and, moreover, I agreed with those who
thought the act unjustifiable, and such as to require that England
should demand its disavowal. When the disavowal came, and the alarm of
war was over, I wrote, in January, 1862, the paper, in _Fraser's
Magazine_, entitled "The Contest in America," [and I shall always feel
grateful to my daughter that her urgency prevailed on me to write it
when I did, for we were then on the point of setting out for a journey
of some months in Greece and Turkey, and but for her, I should have
deferred writing till our return.] Written and published when it was,
this paper helped to encourage those Liberals who had felt overborne by
the tide of illiberal opinion, and to form in favour of the good cause a
nucleus of opinion which increased gradually, and, after the success of
the North began to seem probable, rapidly. When we returned from our
journey I wrote a second article, a review of Professor Cairnes' book,
published in the _Westminster Review_. England is paying the penalty, in
many uncomfortable ways, of the durable resentment which her ruling
classes stirred up in the United States by their ostentatious wishes for
the ruin of America as a nation; they have reason to be thankful that a
few, if only a few, known writers and speakers, standing firmly by the
Americans in the time of their greatest difficulty, effected a partial
diversion of these bitter feelings, and made Great Britain not
altogether odious to the Americans.
This duty having been performed, my principal occupation for the next
two years was on subjects not political. The publication of Mr. Austin's
_Lectures on Jurisprudence_ after his decease, gave me an opportunity of
paying a deserved tribute to his memory, and at the same time expressing
some thoughts on a subject on which, in my old days of Benthamism, I had
bestowed much study. But the chief product of those years was the
_Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy_. His _Lectures_,
published in 1860 and 1861, I had read towards the end of the latter
year, with a half-formed intention of giving an account of them in a
Review, but I soon found that this would be idle, and that justice could
not be done to the subject in less than a volume. I had then to consider
whether it would be advisable that I myself should attempt such a
performance. On consideration, there seemed to be strong reasons for
doing so. I was greatly disappointed with the _Lectures_. I read them,
certainly, with no prejudice against Sir William Hamilton. I had up to
that time deferred the study of his _Notes to Reid_ on account of their
unfinished state, but I had not neglected his _Discussions in
Philosophy_; and though I knew that his general mode of treating the
facts of mental philosophy differed from that of which I most approved,
yet his vigorous polemic against the later Transcendentalists, and his
strenuous assertion of some important principles, especially the
Relativity of human knowledge, gave me many points of sympathy with his
opinions, and made me think that genuine psychology had considerably
more to gain than to lose by his authority and reputation. His
_Lectures_ and the _Dissertations on Reid_ dispelled this illusion: and
even the _Discussions_, read by the light which these throw on them,
lost much of their value. I found that the points of apparent agreement
between his opinions and mine were more verbal than real; that the
important philosophical principles which I had thought he recognised,
were so explained away by him as to mean little or nothing, or were
continually lost sight of, and doctrines entirely inconsistent with them
were taught in nearly every part of his philosophical writings. My
estimation of him was therefore so far altered, that instead of
regarding him as occupying a kind of intermediate position between the
two rival philosophies, holding some of the principles of both, and
supplying to both powerful weapons of attack and defence, I now looked
upon him as one of the pillars, and in this country from his high
philosophical reputation the chief pillar, of that one of the two which
seemed to me to be erroneous.
Now, the difference between these two schools of philosophy, that of
Intuition, and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere matter
of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences, and lies
at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical opinion
in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to demand
that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful and
widely-spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and
indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable
part of his argument to show, how those powerful feelings had their
origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible.
There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy
which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by
circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up
favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the
voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that
of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing
tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as
innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs
that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between
individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally
would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief
hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one
of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement. This tendency has
its source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterized the
reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is a
tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative
interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure
to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by the
more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy. That philosophy not
always in its moderate forms, had ruled the thought of Europe for the
greater part of a century. My father's _Analysis of the Mind_, my own
_Logic_, and Professor Bain's great treatise, had attempted to
re-introduce a better mode of philosophizing, latterly with quite as
much success as could be expected; but I had for some time felt that the
mere contrast of the two philosophies was not enough, that there ought
to be a hand-to-hand fight between them, that controversial as well as
expository writings were needed, and that the time was come when such
controversy would be useful. Considering, then, the writings and fame of
Sir W. Hamilton as the great fortress of the intuitional philosophy in
this country, a fortress the more formidable from the imposing
character, and the in many respects great personal merits and mental
endowments, of the man, I thought it might be a real service to
philosophy to attempt a thorough examination of all his most important
doctrines, and an estimate of his general claims to eminence as a
philosopher; and I was confirmed in this resolution by observing that in
the writings of at least one, and him one of the ablest, of Sir W.
Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the justification
of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly immoral--that it is
our duty to bow down in worship before a Being whose moral attributes
are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps extremely
different from those which, when we are speaking of our