OX THE ORIGIN OF REASON. 



54' 



the same manner the development of phonetic 

 forms, without reference to their meanings. We 

 must try to find the empirical laws according to 

 which concepts can be concatenated, laws which 

 alone enable us to judge of real relationship of 

 ideas, as phonetic laws of real relationship of 

 sounds. Thus only shall we gain an insight into 

 the nature of reason, and be enabled to ascribe to 

 it that certainty which consists in a knowledge of 

 a necessity determined by law." 



Let us see now how Noire works out this new 

 discovery. What he takes as granted on the 

 subjective side of his philosophy is sensation, 

 corresponding to motion. Thai sensation, how- 

 ever, is something different from what we have 

 made it, by separating from it in language what 

 in reality can never be separated from it, viz., 

 some kind of self-conscious thought. Even the 

 faintest shiver is pervaded by something which 

 we must accustom ourselves to call thought. 

 The fact is, we suffer from the abundance of 

 terms which have been created to signify the 

 various manifestations of sensation as well as 

 the faculties corresponding to them, and which, 

 from being used loosely, have encroached on 

 each other to that extent that it is almost im- 

 possible now to disentangle them. It would be 

 the greatest benefit to mental science if all such 

 words as perception, intuition, remembering, 

 ideas, conception, thought, cognition, senses, 

 mind, intellect, reason, soul, spirit, etc., could 

 for a time be struck out of our philosophical dic- 

 tionaries, and not be admitted again until they 

 had undergone a thorough purification. Sensa- 

 tion, then, in the sense in which Noire uses it, so 

 far from being the lowest degree only of mental 

 activity — so far from being what is most easy to 

 understand and what would seem to require no 

 explanation at all — is really the most mysterious 

 act, the act which we can explain by no other, of 

 which there is no simile or metaphor anywhere. 

 Like motion, sensation will always remain an ul- 

 timate fact — a ne phis ultra of human philosophy. 

 French philosophers imagined that by their tenet 

 of Penser <Pest sentir they were degrading thought, 

 and such had been the influence of fashion that j 

 few only at the time could see that sensation, 

 being at all events the indispensable antecedent 

 of thought, was in no way a viler function, but 

 had a perfect right to claim precedence of 

 thought. The French tenet became faulty only 

 because Condillac and his school took sentir in 

 its unnaturally restricted sense. They had pre- 

 viously taken out of sentir all that is penser, and 

 then thought they could startle the world, like a 



juggler, by showing that the bird was still to be 

 found in the empty egg-shell. Give u^ sensation, 

 such as it really is, not such as it has been imag- 

 ined to be for logical purposes, as something 

 distinct from thought, but impregnated with 

 thought, and everything in the human mind 

 becomes intelligible, and penser may as truly be 

 said to be sentir as the oak-tree is the acorn. 



But then it has been asked : " Is there no 

 such thing as mind, soul, reason, intellect, etc. ? 

 Is not the soul a simple substance ? Is not rea- 

 son a special gift ? " Such is the influence of 

 words on thought, that as soon as we throw away 

 a word, or attempt to define its meaning, every- 

 body thinks he is being robbed. But the sun 

 rises just the same, though we say now that it 

 does not rise ; the moon has not been minished, 

 though for thousands of years she has been told 

 that she is waning; and all our mental life will 

 remain just the same, though we deny that reason 

 has any independent substantive existence. All 

 the various shades of sensation from the first to 

 the last were doubtlessly distinguished and named 

 for some very useful purpose. The mischief was, 

 that there were too many distinctions to remain 

 distinct, and that, as usual, what was meant as an 

 adjective was soon changed into a substantive. 

 Perception, intuition, remembering, ideas, con- 

 ception, thought, cognition — all these exist as 

 modes or developments of sensation, but sensa- 

 tion itself exists only as a quality of the monon, 

 and therefore neither mind, nor intellect, nor 

 reason, nor soul, nor spirit, being all modes or 

 products of sensation, can claim any substantive 

 existence beyond what they derive through sen- 

 sation from the monon. To speak of reason as a 

 thing by itself, as even 'Kant does, is simply 

 philosophical mythology ; to speak of mind, in-» 

 tellect, reason, soul, or spirit, as so many inde- 

 pendent beings, with limits not very sharply de- 

 fined, yet each differing from the other, is neither 

 more nor less than philosophical polytheism. A 

 man is not, however, an atheist because he does 

 not believe in Aphrodite as a goddess ; nor is a 

 philosopher to be called hard names because he 

 does not believe in mind, intellect, reason, soul, 

 or spirit, as so many independent substances, or 

 powers, or faculties, or goddesses. 



Noire sees all this quite clearly in some parts 

 of his works ; but at other times he seems still 

 under the sway of the old philosophical theogony. 

 Thus he sometimes identifies himself with Geiger, 

 whose words he quotes on the title-page of his 

 text-book : " Language has created Reason; before 

 there was Language, man was without Reason." 



