84 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY. 



that we are here face to face with that final inexplicability, at which, as 

 Sir W. Hamilton observes, we inevitably arrive when we reach ultimate 

 facts ; and in general, one mode of stating it only appears more incom- 

 prehensible than another, because the whole of human language is 

 accommodated to the one, and is so incongruous with the other, that it 

 cannot be expressed in any terms which do not deny its truth. The real 

 stumbling-block is perhaps not in any theory of the fact, but in the fact 

 itself. The true incomprehensibility perhaps is, that something which 

 has ceased, or is not yet in existence, can still be, in a manner, present; 

 that a series of feelings, the infinitely greater part of which is past or 

 future, can be gathered up, as it were, into a single present conception, 

 accompanied by a belief of reality. I think, by far the wisest thing we 

 can do, is to accept the inexplicable fact, without any theory of how it 

 takes place ; and when we are obliged to speak of it in terms which 

 assume a theory, to use them with a reservation as to their meaning." 

 To the cautious nature of this statement no exception might be made, 

 were it not that on its purport depends the whole science of mind, and, 

 if it be taken in the full extent of its admissions, the general view of 

 mental phenomena, suggested by what Mr. Mill calls the Association 

 psychology, must be greatly modified. If it be admitted, as it seems 

 to be in the above statement, that in self-consciousness we come upon 

 an absolutely ultimate fact of mind, that is, upon a fact beyond which 

 it is impossible to proceed in the process of scientific explanation ; — if 

 the self cannot be decomposed into more elementary facts, and if this 

 indecomposable fact is to be accepted without any theory regarding it, 

 then Mr. Mill's previous limitation of our knowledge of self must be 

 abandoned. It can no longer be said, in the language of Hamilton, 

 that mind is but the name for a connected series of phenomena, or, in 

 the language of Mr. Mill, that we can know or imagine it merely by 

 the succession of its feeling. What I am conscious of when I use the 

 words •'!" and " me," is admitted to be incapable of explanation as 

 an aggregation of mental states in accordance with the laws of sugges- 

 tion. " I" am presented in consciousness with the same clearness and 

 immediacy with which my "feelings" are given; my feelings are in 

 fact ''I" under particular conditions. If the consciousness of my 

 mental states is to be regarded as the one intuition, whose certainty is 

 the basis and the starting point of all other certainties, the consciousness 

 of myself must be comprehended within that intuition. When we 

 speak; therefore, of the self as an inexplicable fact, we must not sup- 



