SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's philosophy. 217 



which wrought into luminous language the most intractable eccentri- 

 cities of scepticism, we can understand how the farthest and fullest 

 consequences of the doctrine which traces all ideas to experience were 

 unfolded with a consistency which was deterred by no consideration of 

 human interests, whether esteemed to be petty or lofty alike. 



There is of course much in Hume's, as in every creative mind, the 

 origin of which the most elaborate investigation into the circumstan- 

 ces of his life leaves us unable to trace ; still it is impossible to avoid 

 recognising the influence of the philosopher who has been mentioned 

 immediately before him and whom we know to have been a power 

 among the thinking young men of Scotland while Hume was still 

 a young man. The evidence, which the Treatise of Human Nature 

 contains, of the general " impression that Berkeley's writings left 

 upon Hume," has been noticed by Dugald Stewart ;* and we are now 

 to see that the bishop's philosophy furnishes a point of transition to 

 that of the sceptic. The theory of the former, which ascribes real 

 existence to the sensible objects or "ideas" that are immediately pre- 

 sented to the mind, and denies that they represent any unknown and 

 unknowable substance, is adopted likewise by the latter ; but whenever 

 they come to define what is implied in existence, they diverge into 

 two theories of the universe as hopelessly irreconcilable as could be 

 conceived. For while the bishop maintains that the natural belief in 

 the existence of things, independently of their being perceived by our 

 minds is valid, and explains that as being an existence in the Eternal 

 and Universal Mind who knows all things, one of the most elaborately 

 finished sectionsf in the whole of the Treatise is occupied with an 

 effort to prove that the belief is altogether illusory and to explain the 

 origin of the illusion. 



This divergence in the interpretation, which the two speculations 

 severally give to the existence of matter, arose from another difference 

 •which reveals more fully the thorough consistency at which Hume 

 unshrinkingly aimed. If matter is but a system of "ideas" which 

 have no existence beyond the mind that perceives them, what must 

 follow with regard to mind? Is it also "only a system of floating 

 ideas without any substance to support them ?" Berkeley was too 

 acute not to see, too honest not to face this question •,% ^"*i '^^^ 



• Dissertation, p. 351 (Hamilton's Edition.) 

 fBook I , chap. 4, sect 2. Cf , Book I , chap. 2, sect. &. 

 JSee the third Dialogue in Wright's edition of his works, Vol. I., pp. 203-4. 

 Mj references are all to this edition. 



