64 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



same order, and how would the substratum be missed? By what signs 

 should we be able to discover that its existence had terminated ? Should 

 we not have as much reason to believe that it still existed as we now have? 

 And if we should not then be warranted in believing it, how can we be so 

 now ? A body, therefore, according to these metaphysicians, is not any 

 thing intrinsically different from the sensations which the body is said to 

 l)roduce in us ; it is, in short, a set of sensations, or rather, of possibihties 

 of sensation, joined together according to a fixed law. 



The controversies to which these speculations have given rise, and the 

 doctrines which have been developed in the attempt to find a conclusive 

 answer to them, have been fruitful of important consequences to the Science 

 of Mind. The sensations (it was answered) which we are conscious of, and 

 which we receive, not at random, but joined together in a certain uniform 

 manner, imply not only a law or laws of connection, but a cause external to 

 our mind, which cause, by its own laws, determines the laws according to 

 which the sensations are connected and experienced. The schoolmen used 

 to call this external cause by the name we have already employed, a sub- 

 stratimi,' audits attributes (as they expressed themselves) inhered, WtcvaWy 

 stuck, in it. To this substratum the name Matter is usually given in phil- 

 osophical discussions. It was soon, however, acknowledged by all who re- 

 flected on the subject, that the existence of matter can not be proved by ex- 

 trinsic evidence. The answer, therefore, now usually made to Berkeley and 

 his followers, is, that the belief is intuitive ; that mankind, in all ages, have 

 felt themselves compelled, by a necessity of their nature, to refer their sen- 

 sations to an external cause: that even those who deny it in theory, yield 

 to the necessity in practice, and both in speech, thought, and feeling, do, 

 equally with the vulgar, acknowledge their sensations to be the effects of 

 something- external to them: this knowledge, therefore, it is aflirmed, is as 

 evidently intuitive as our knowledge of our sensations themselves is intui- 

 tive. And here the question merges in the fundamental problem of meta- 

 physics properly so called : to which science we leave it. 



But although the extreme doctrine of the Idealist metaphysicians, that 

 objects are nothing but our sensations and the laws which connect them, 

 has not been generally adopted by subsequent thinkers ; the point of most 

 real importance is one on which those metaphysicians are now very gen- 

 erally considered to have made out their case : viz., that all we Jcnoio of ob- 

 jects is the sensations which they give us, and the order of the occurrence 

 of those sensations. Kant himself, on this point, is as explicit as Berke- 

 ley or Locke. However firmly convinced that there exists a universe of 

 " Things in themselves," totally distinct from the universe of phenomena, 

 or of things as they appear to our senses ; and even when bringing into 

 use a technical expression (JVoumenoii) to denote what the thing is in it- 

 self, as contrasted with the representation of it in our minds; he allows 

 that this representation (the matter of which, he says, consists of our sen- 

 sations, though the form is given by the laws of the mind itself) is all we 

 know of the object : and that the real nature of the Thing is, and by the 

 constitution of our faculties ever must remain, at least in the present state 

 of existence, an impenetrable mystery to us. " Of things absolutely or in 

 themselves," says Sir William Hamilton,* " be they external, be they in- 

 ternal, we know nothing, or know them only as incognizable ; and become 

 aware of their incomprehensible existence, only as this is indirectly and 



* Discussions on Philosophy, etc. Appendix I. , pp. 643, 644. 



