George Grote

“ We say frequent and considerable, because no historian of philosophy is exempt from the defect more or less; or rather (to pass out of the self-confidence of the Absolute into the modesty of the Relative) we seldom find any historian whose estimate of great philosophical thinkers does not often differ from our own. Hence we are glad when ample original extracts are produced, enabling us to test the historian, and judge for ourselves—a practice which Sir W. Hamilton would have required no stimulus to enforce upon him. ”

“ Moreover, the living force of philosophy, as directress of human intelligence, depends upon keeping up in each of her devotees a full mastery of many divergent and opposite veins of reasoning—a knowledge, negative and affirmative, of the full case of opponents as well as of his own.
It is to Philosophy alone that our allegiance is sworn; and while we concur mostly with Mr Mill's opinions, we number both him and Sir W. Hamilton as a noble pair of brethren, serving alike in her train. ”

“ The infliction of physical suffering, the permission of moral evil, the adversity of the good, the prosperity of the wicked, the crimes of the guilty involving the misery of the innocent, the tardy appearance and partial distribution of moral and religious knowledge in the world—these are facts, which no doubt are reconcilable, we know not how, with the Infinite Goodness of God, but which certainly are not to be explained on the supposition that its sole and sufficient type is to be found in the finite goodness of man. ”

“ It subordinates syllogism to induction, the technical to the real; it divests the major premiss of its illusory pretence to be itself the proving authority, or even any real and essential part of the proof—and acknowledges it merely as a valuable precautionary test and security for avoiding mistake in the process of proving. Taking Mr Mill's 'System of Logic' as a whole, it is one of the books by which we believe ourselves to have most profited. The principles of it are constantly present to our mind when engaged in investigations of evidence, whether scientific or historical. ”

“ The structure of our minds renders us capable of knowing everything which is relative, though there are many such things which we have no evidence, nor shall ever get evidence, to enable us to know. Now the Infinite falls within the conditions of relativity, as indeed Sir W. Hamilton himself admits, when he intimates (p. 58) that though it cannot be known, it is, must be, and ought to be, believed by us, according to the marked distinction which he draws between belief and knowledge. We agree with Mr Mill in the opinion that it is thinkable, conceivable, knowable. ”

“ For we have it not in our power to ascertain, by any direct process, what Consciousness told us at the time when its revelations were in their pristine purity. It only offers itself to our inspection, as it exists now, when those original revelations are overlaid and buried under a mountainous heap of acquired notions and perceptions. ”

“ By Free-will is meant that a volition is not determined by motives, but is a spontaneous mental fact, neither having a cause, nor admitting of being predicted. Now, the very reason for giving notice that we intend to punish certain acts, and for inflicting punishment if the acts be committed, is, that we trust in the efficacy of the threat and the punishment as deterring motives. If the volition of agents be not influenced by motives, the whole machinery of law becomes unavailing, and punishment a purposeless infliction of pain. ”

“ All the real objects in nature known to us by observation are finite, and possess only in a finite measure their respective attributes. Upon this is founded the process of Science, so comprehensively laid out by Mr Mill in his 'System of Logic '—Induction, Deduction from general facts attested by Induction, Verification by experience of the results obtained by Deduction. The attributes, whiteness or hardness, in the abstract, are doubtless infinite ”

“ That we conceive the Infinite inadequately, is not to be held as proof that we do not conceive it at all; for in regard to finite things also, we conceive the greater number of them only inadequately. ”

“ We think that Dr Brown has 'done far greater service to the world than Sir W. Hamilton, in the origination and diffusion of important thought.' To speak only of two chief subjects in the field of important thought—Causality and the Freedom of the Will—we not only adopt the conclusions of Dr Brown, but we admire both his acuteness and his originality in vindicating and illustrating the first of the two, while we dissent entirely from the views of Sir W. Hamilton. This alone would be sufficient to make us approve the superiority assigned by Mr Mill to Dr Brown. ”

“ Each new-born child finds his religious creed ready prepared for him. In his earliest days of unconscious infancy, the stamp of the national, gentile, phratric, God, or Gods, is imprinted upon him by his elders; and if the future man, in the exercise of his own independent reason, acquires such convictions as compel him to renounce those Gods, proclaiming openly that he does so—he must count upon such treatment as will go far to spoil the value of the present life to him, even before he passes to those ulterior liabilities which Mr Mill indicates in the distance. ”

“ For he must be aware, if not of the fact, at least of the belief of his opponents, that the laws of the mind—the Laws of Association, according to one class of thinkers, the Categories of the Understanding, according to another—are capable of creating, out of those data of Consciousness which are uncontested, purely mental conceptions, which become so identified in thought with all our states of Consciousness, that we seem, and cannot but seem, to receive them by direct intuition. ”

“ To us these reasons are always of more or less value, whether we admit them to be valid or not. Many philosophers present their own doctrine as if it were so much ascertained and acknowledged truth, either intimating, or leading you to suppose, that though erroneous beliefs to the contrary formerly prevailed, these have now become discredited with every one. We do not censure this way of proceeding, but we prefer the manner of Sir W. Hamilton. He always keeps before us divergence and discrepancy of view as the normal condition of reasoned truth or philosophy ”

“ We have no conception of either Subject or Object, either Mind or Matter, except as something to which we refer our sensations, and whatever other feelings we are conscious of. The very existence of them both, so far as cognizable by us, consists only in the relation they respectively bear to our states of feeling. Their relation to each other is only the relation between those two relations. The immediate correlatives are, not the pair, Object, Subject, but the two pairs, Object, Sensation objectively considered—Subject, Sensation subjectively considered. ”

“ To this doctrine we cannot subscribe. As we understand concrete reality, we find no evidence to believe that there exist in nature any real concrete persons or things, possessing to an infinite degree such attributes as they do possess: e.g. any men infinitely wise or infinitely strong, any horses infinitely swift, any stones infinitely hard. Such concrete real objects appear to us not admissible, because experience not only has not certified their existence in any single case, but goes as far to disprove their existence as it can do to disprove anything. ”

“ When a father, such as we have described, declining to send his son either to school or college, constituted himself schoolmaster from the beginning, and performed that duty with laborious solicitude—when, besides full infusion of modern knowledge, the forcing process applied by the Platonic Socrates to the youth-Theætêtus, was administered by Mr James Mill, continuously and from an earlier age, to a youthful mind not less pregnant than that of Theætêtus—it would be surprising if the son thus trained had not reached even a higher eminence than his father. ”

“ Other philosophers (Brown, Mr Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, with many others) believe that the ego and the non-ego denote two realities, each self-existent, and neither dependent on the other; that the Noumenon, or 'thing per se,' is in itself a different thing from the Phenomenon, and equally or more real, but that, though we know its existence, we have no means of knowing what it is. ”

“ For in laying down the principle upon which the primary truths of Consciousness, the original data of intelligence, are to be ascertained and distinguished from generalizations out of experience and custom, he declares that the one single and certain mark is Necessity—they must be beliefs which we are under the necessity of believing—of which we cannot get rid by any mental effort. ”

“ Mr Mill repudiates the explanatory hypothesis tendered by Mr Mansel, as a solution, but without suggesting any better hypothesis of his own. For ourselves, we are far from endorsing Mr Mansel's solution as satisfactory; yet we can hardly be surprised if he considers it less unsatisfactory than no solution at all. And when we reflect how frequently and familiarly predicates applicable to man are applied to the Supreme Being, when they cannot possibly be understood about Him in the same sense—we see no ground for treating the proceeding as disingenuous, which Mr Mill is disposed to do. ”

“ A new work from one who has already manifested such mastery of philosophy, both in principle and in detail, and a work exhibiting the analysis and appreciation of the philosophical views of an eminent contemporary, must raise the highest expectation. We think no reader will be disappointed who peruses Mr Mill's 'Examination,' and we shall now endeavour to give some account of the manner in which he performs it. Upon topics so abstract and subtle as the contents of this volume, the antithesis between two rival theories is the best way, and often the only way, for bringing truth into clear view ”

“ Indeed, the fact that human volitions are both predictable and modifiable, quite as much as all those physical phenomena that depend upon a complication of causes—which is only a corollary from what has just been said—is so universally recognized and acted upon by all men, that there would probably be little difference of opinion about this question, if the antithesis were not obscured and mystified by the familiar, but equivocal, phrases of Free-will and Necessity. ”

“ A writer has to consider not merely by what reasons any novelty of belief or disbelief may be justified, but also how much it will be safe for him to publish, having regard to the irritable sore places of the public judgment. ”

“ Every man's mind is gradually built up from infancy to maturity; the process is always going on before our eyes, yet the stages of it—especially the earliest stages, the most pregnant with instruction—are never studied and put on record by observers trained in inductive logic, knowing beforehand what they ought to look for as the sine quâ non for proving or disproving any proposed theory. Such cases as that cited by Platner—cases of one marked congenital defect of sense, enabling us to apply the Method of Difference—are always within reach ”

“ He defines Matter to be a permanent possibility of Sensation; he maintains that this is really all which (apart from philosophical theories) mankind in general mean by it; he shows that mere possibilities of sensation not only may, but must, according to the known Laws of Association, come to present 'to our artificialized Consciousness' a character of objectivity— (pp. 198, 199) . The correlative subject, though present in fact and indispensable, is eliminated out of conscious notice, according to the Law of Obliviscence. ”

“ Accordingly Mr Mansel combats as a heresy of his opponents, the opinion that infinite goodness differs only in degree from finite goodness.—Here, then, I take my stand upon the acknowledged principle of logic and of morality; that when we mean different things we have no right to call them by the same name, and to apply to them, the same predicates, moral and intellectual. ”

“ The only question which appears to us important is, whether we can understand and reason upon the meaning of the terms and propositions addressed to us. If we can, the subjects propounded must be cogitable and conceivable, whether we admit the propositions affirmed concerning them or not; if we cannot, then these subjects are indeed incogitable by ourselves in the present state of our knowledge, but they may not be so to our opponent who employs the terms. ”

“ For ourselves we embrace the theory of Mr Mill: [13] yet we are aware that the remark just cited from Sir W. Hamilton represents the dissatisfaction entertained towards it by many objectors. The unscientific and antiscientific yearnings, prevalent among mankind, lead them to put questions which no sound theory of Causation will answer; and they are ready to visit and trust any oracle which professes to deliver a confident affirmative solution of such questions. Among all the terms employed by metaphysicians, none is used in a greater variety of meanings than the term Cause. ”

“ Whoever attempts to give any philosophical account of the generation of the universe, tracing its phenomena, as an aggregate, to some ultra-phenomenal origin, must include in his scheme a fundamentum for all those opposite and contradictory manifestations which experience discloses in the universe. There always have been, and still are, many philosophers who consider the Abstract and General to be prior both in nature and time to the Concrete and Particular ”

“ It may well be believed that the apparently suppressed links in a chain of association, those which Sir W. Hamilton considers as latent, really are so: that they are not even momentarily felt, the chain of causation being continued only physically—by one organic state of the nerves succeeding another so rapidly, that the state of mental consciousness appropriate to each is not produced.'
Mr Mill gives various illustrations in support of this doctrine. ”

“ Mr Mill announces his resolution to determine for himself, and according to his own reason and conscience, what God he will worship, and what God he will not worship. For ourselves, we cordially sympathize with his resolution. But Mr Mill must be aware that this is a point on which society is equally resolved that no individual shall determine for himself, if they can help it. ”

“ Historians of science describe to us the laborious and multiplied observations, and the elaborate precaution for ensuring accuracy of observation, which recent chemical and physical inquirers have found indispensable for the establishment of their results. We cannot, therefore, be surprised that mental philosophers, dealing with facts even more obscure, and careless about enlarging, varying, authenticating their records of particular facts, should have had little success in establishing any results at all. ”