bs COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. i. 



Before prooeeding farther to develope this argument, we 

 may fitly include Positivism along with Idealism as opposed 

 to the ("inclusion which we are about to defend. The posi- 

 tion of Positivism with reference to this question has never 

 "been definitely stated by Comte, or by his most eminent and 

 consistent disciple, M. Littre, and it may indeed be doubted 

 whether, with all their remarkable endowments of another 

 sort, either of these thinkers lias ever given evidence of 

 enough power of psychologic analysis to grapple with such a 

 problem. It is certain that M. Littre" neither admits nor 

 understands (so as to state it correctly) the Spencerian doc- 

 trine that there exists an Unknowable Reality; and it will 

 be amply shown hereafter that Comte not only ignored the 

 existence of such a Reality, but implicitly and practically 

 denied it. It is to Mr. Mill, who has on different occasions 

 given in his assent to nearly all the doctrines which are dis- 

 tinctively characteristic of the Positive Philosophy, that we 

 must look for an explicit declaration of the precise relation 

 of Positivism to Idealism. Happily Mr. Mill has given us, 

 in his work on the Hamiltonian philosophy, an elucidation 

 of his views which leaves no room for misconception ; and 

 in his recent essay on Berkeley he has presented, in a single 

 sentence, the clue to the Positivist position. Among the un- 

 impeachable discoveries which philosophy owes to Berkeley, 

 says Mr. Mill, was that of " the true nature and meaning of 

 the externality which we attribute to the objects of our 

 senses : that it does not consist in a substratum supporting a 

 set of sensible qualities, or an unknown somewhat, which, 

 not being itself a sensation, gives us our sensations, but con- 

 sists in the fact that our sensations occur in groups, held 

 together by a permanent law, and which come and go inde- 

 pendently of our volitions or mental processes." Note that 

 Mr. Mill does not endorse the Berkeleian denial of the objec- 

 tive reality. True to the fundamental canon of Positivism, 

 he states merely the contents of the observed facts, which, as 



