178 SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's philosophy. 



knowledges,, feelings and desires without attending to myself who 

 know, feel and desire, as it is also possible, in such speculation, to 

 contemplate myself without attending to any of those states in one 

 or other of which I must exist when I am conscious of myself. In 

 actual life however I am conscious of my affections and actions not 

 as abstract conceptions, but as concrete facts, and the statement that 

 I am conscious of my affections and actions as such, can have no other 

 intelligible meaning than that I am conscious of myself as affected or 

 as acting. 



In these suggestions I have by no means been seeking merely to 

 drive an argumentum ad hominem, or to draw, by a mere play on the 

 meanings of words or the relations of abstract notions, conclusions 

 which have no value beyond abstractions, because incapable of being 

 verified by observed facts. On the contrary, I believe that the facts 

 revealed by the most accurate observation of mental phenomena will 

 not for a moment tolerate a theory which implies that I am conscious 

 of knowing and feeling, but that I am not conscious of myself who 

 know and feel. What I am in reality who thus know myself in all 

 that I am and do, is a question which belongs of course to the science 

 of being, and will meet us therefore again at a subsequent stage of this 

 criticism. In reference to the self, considered as a factor of conscious- 

 ness, there are several other questions which might be discussed here 

 appropriately enough, even though not directly suggested by Hamil- 

 ton's analysis of consciousness, but as the most important of these 

 must re-appear for consideration in other connections, and especially 

 in connection with the knowledge of the not-self, their discussion may 

 for the present be postponed. 



The subject, which naturally presents itself next for onr considera- 

 tion, is the evidence and authority of consciousness. In connection 

 with this, consciousness is to be considered first of all as the witness 

 whose testimony reveals to us the phenomena of the mind. If Phe- 

 nomenal Psychology is the science conversant about mental pheno- 

 mena, and if consciousness is a knowledge of these phenomena with- 

 out which they cannot exist, then clearly it is to consciousness that 

 we must resort for an acquaintance with the objects of the science. 

 This is the doctrine of Sir William Hamilton ; but in maintaining it 

 he placed himself unavoidably in conflict with phrenology and with 

 those positivists who degrade psychology from the rank of an inde- 

 pendent science to that of a mere branch of cerebral physiology. It is 

 now our duty to inquire into the success of his polemic. In doing so 



