PRIMARY FACULTIES, 485 
very foundation of our being, I mean our reason, is that which least belongs to us, which 
we are to believe the most borrowed. We receive continually and at every moment, a reason 
superior to ourselves, just as we continually breathe an air which is not of ourselves, or as 
we constantly see the objects around us by the light of the sun, whose rays do not belong to 
our eyes. ‘There is an internal school, where man receives what he can neither acquire 
himself, nor learn from other men who live by alms like himself. Where is this perfect 
reason which is so near me, and yet so distinct and different from me? Is it not God 
himself, the being for whom I am inquiring ?” 
104. “There are cognitions in the mind which are not contingent,—which are neces- 
sary,—which we cannot but think,—which thought supposes as its fundamental condition. 
These cognitions, therefore, are not mere generalizations from experience. But if not 
derived from experience, they must be native to the mind; unless on an alternative that 
we need not at present contempla:., we suppose with Plato, St. Austin, Cousin, and other 
philosophers, that Reason, or more properly Intellect, is impersonal, and that we are con- 
scious of these necessary cognitions in the Divine Mind... . . On the power possessed 
by the mind of manifesting those phenomena, we may bestow the name of the Regulative 
Faculty. This faculty corresponds in some measure to what in the Aristotelic philosophy 
was called. Nots,—vwis (intellectus, mens), when strictly employed, being a term in that philo- 
sophy for the place of principles,—the locus principiorum. It is analogous likewise to the 
term Heason, as occasionally used by some of the older English philosophers, and to the 
Vernunft (reason) in the philosophy of Kant, Jacobi, and others of the recent German 
metaphysicians, and from them adopted into France and England. It is also nearly con- 
vertible with what I conceive to be Reid’s, and certainly Stewart’s notion of Common 
Sense.”* 
105. Probably no English thinker has ever devoted so much attention to the limits and 
offices of the different Intellectual Powers as Sir William Hamilton, and I note with pecu- 
liar satisfaction, the exact accordance of his division of the Cognitive Faculties, both in 
order of development and relative position, with my own views of the province of Ration- 
ality. ‘To show the extent of this accordance, I will quote the closing remarks of his 
twentieth lecture on Metaphysics. 
106. “Such are the six special Faculties of Cognition; 1°, The Acquisitive or Presenta- 
tive or Receptive Faculty, divided into Perception and Self-Consciousness ;+ 2°, The Con- 
servative or Retentive Faculty, Memory; 3°, The Reproductive or Revocative Faculty, 
* Hamilton: Metaphysics, p. 277. 
+ The only point on which I am inclined to question this division, is the propriety of regarding Self-Conscious- 
ness as a faculty collateral with Perception. I would rather view it as a form of Sense or of Intuition, each of 
which, in its turn, is a form of Perception. 
