SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's philosophy. 377 



Reid maintains that we are conscious of the operations of our minds, 

 but not of the objects to which these operations are directed. An 

 operation of the mind, Hamilton objects, is what it is only in relation 

 to the object which it apprehends ; and consequently, since we cannot 

 know one term in a relation to the exclusion of the other, it is im- 

 possible to be conscious of an operation of the mind without being 

 conscious of its object.. In like manner, when Hamilton teaches that, 

 in the relation of a mind to its modifications which constitutes con- 

 sciousness, there is a knowledge of the modifications, but not of the 

 mind, may we not object that, as the mind and its modifications are 

 the two terms of a relation, it is impossible to be conscious of the 

 latter without being conscious of the former ? 



A further ground of objection to Hamilton's doctrine has already 

 been indicated in the meaning of the word, modification. A modifi- 

 cation or mode of anything, he explains, is merely a particular manner 

 in which it exists or acts ; and this is the radical idea which with 

 some subordinate varieties of meaning he finds embodied in the 

 various terms, state, quality, attribute, property, accident, phenome- 

 non.^- Now, the manner or form of anything may undoubtedly, and 

 for scientific purposes must frequently, be separated in thought from 

 the thing itself, and contemplated and reasoned about apart ; but no one 

 dreams that manners or forms have any existence by themselves. To 

 adduce Hamilton's own words in illustration, "thought," he says in 

 a resume, of one of his Lectures on Logic, " thought, I showed, could 

 be viewed, by an analytic abstraction, on two sides or phases. "We 

 could either consider the object thought or the manner of thinking 

 it, in other words, we could scientifically distinguish from each other 

 the matter and the form of thought. Not that the matter and form 

 have any separate existence ; no object being cogitable except under 

 some form oif thought, and no form of thought having any existence 

 except some object be thought under it."t " This," he goes on to 

 explain, " is merely one of a thousand sim.ilar abstractions we are ia 

 the habit of making;" and undoubtedly he would admit the dis- 

 tinction of a modification and a thing modified to be merely one of 

 such scieiitific abstractions, not a real separation. It is true then 

 that, in abstract or scientific speculation, I may contemplate my 



* Led. on Metaph., sect. VIII. 



f Led. on Logic, Vol. I., p. 21. See also p. 15. 



