derive its own character from that object. Shift, unsettle, disturb the object, and the mind is unsettled also. It falls into doubt and perplexity. It loses confidence in itself. It feels at the mercy of a power which it cannot command; before a future which it cannot foresee surrounded by hidden agencies, as if the ground on which it stood were undermined; without daring to anticipate, or prove, or inquire, or believe, or act on belief, when the next moment may overturn the experience of the last, and it is left without guidance or end like a vessel tost upon the waters, rudderless and without a compass, with no port to make for, and no stars to steer by. Once And yet this is the condition into which a man must ultimately sink, who does not hold firmly, under whatever name, a belief in objective facts, and immutable external existences, such as Plato placed before him under the name of idéal or forms. make truth subjective, conceive of it as existing only in the mind, and though at first, as the better class of Sophists did, you may endeavour to make it permanent, by universal consent, by authority, by appealing to the unaltering voice of conscience, to the unanimous testimony of reason, sooner or later this must be lost. It must be lost, because you cannot fix the mind itself. Still the atmosphere, so that not a breath will disturb either the foliage or the water, and the reflection will lie unbroken in a calm and perfect picture. Ruffle the branches with a breeze, but let the water lie undisturbed, and the picture may still be traced, though less distinct. But ruffle the water also, and the picture perishes. And no energy of thought, no uniformity of circumstances, no fixedness of habit or purpose, can so freeze and petrify the mind, that it shall not fluctuate and vary every hour; that even when the objects remain fixed, it shall always give them back unaltered, much less that, when nothing is before it, but the reflection of its own disturbed movement, it shall preserve any thing like consistency or unity. And all systems alike have more or less recognized the necessity of combining in the education and government of man these two principles, of objectiveness, and of immutability or unity. The Oriental philosophy endeavoured to absorb the whole man in the very being of God, as a drop of water mingles with the sea, so as to destroy all individuality, and with individuality all the doubt and distraction arising from a variation of objects. The Egyptian hierarchy raised up the authority of a priesthood, prescribing every action of life, ruling over the diet of the sovereign as over the pencil of the painter, and the hand of the musician1, lest the objective standard of truth should be shaken by innovation in trifles. Other Eastern empires surrounded their political laws with the same magic circle of prescription and identity. Even when all these external fences had been broken down, Greek philosophy endeavoured to take refuge in natural principles, the testimony of the wise, the uniform conduct of legislators, the voice of mankind at large, to guarantee the permanence of its principles. Even sophistry could not exist without them, and transferred infallibility and certainty to the will, fancy, conscience of the individual, just as a modern Dissenter creates an infallible Pope for every doctrine of religion, and almost for every act, within his own reason, and his own heart. Without infallibility or immutability somewhere, man cannot live; and the only question has been, not whether it exists, but where it resides, and how it is to be found. All likewise agreed in making it apparently objective; for even the Sophists made the will of the individual the voice of Nature, and his reason the 1 Plato's Laws. unerring interpreter of absolute external truth, so far as they supposed that truth to exist; but what this Nature was, or what this external truth, they did not profess to ascertain: and thus, with this pretence of objectiveness, their standard was in reality wholly subjective, dependent on the mind of man. And the mind of man thus let loose from external restraint, and sanctioned by a presumed authority in its wildest licences, whether of opinion or of will, soon showed itself in its real nature. And the theory, beautiful at first, became at last open profligacy and folly. ἐν βιότου προτελείοις χρονισθεὶς δ ̓ ἀπέδειξεν τροφεῦσιν ἀμείβων. Esch. Agamem. v. 700. CHAPTER XXX. Βυτ if these τὰ ὄντα these immutable, external facts and laws, are thus necessary to us, what evidence have we of their existence? Sense presents at first but a chaos of irregular phenomena. Conscience, like a flickering lamp, burns unsteadily, and varies with the breath of circumstances, or with changes in the moral atmosphere in which it lives. Reasoning is but calculation; and where is the mechanism so sure as to guarantee its results from error? And when sense, and conscience, and reason are exhausted, what else remains, by which we can learn truth? Grant even the existence of things externally, can we gain any notion of these except by something within us? Must not all belief in objective existences depend at last upon subjective evidence? We are shut up, as it were, in a prison, and though we may infer and imagine what is passing without the walls, it must be by something which is perceived within them. This is the objection now commonly made to all deference to authority or historical testimony. The believer, it is said, chooses his own authority, and therefore the criterion of truth is ultimately within himself. It is also the objection practically made to Plato's doctrine, that we can obtain no knowledge of the idéal except by an internal action of the mind, or by ideas, in the modern sense of the word. And thus his system sinks to a level with that of the Sophists. To answer these doubts, let us take the analogy, in the first place, of physical science. What is its fundamental principle? It is, that in the apparent chaos of natural phenomena, there are an order, and a plan, however imperceptible to untutored minds, general laws, established analogies, universal principles of creation-that the strata of the earth are not tossed on each other confusedly, but are arranged in a form, an idea-that the organization of animals, however various, is developed upon one type-that their combinations are so fixed, that from a detached bone the whole frame-work of the skeleton may be, and has been prophesied, and the prophecy realized-that one law rolls the planets in their orbits, and throws a pebble to the ground-that reproduction is similarly provided for in the animal and vegetable world—that even the mystical fanaticism, as it has been held, of Pythagoras, the doctrine that all things are created in numbers, is after all the true theory of chemistry, and that " no combination can take place between the elements of matter, except in certain fixed numerical proportions '." The discovery of these forms, or idea, these övra, or permanent existing facts,the extrication of them from the mass of confused observations, in which they at first lie buried,-is the great business of what men now call science-science, as if knowledge and certainty were exclusively confined to matter; and as if mind had neither idéal nor övra, or such only as are placed beyond the reach of man, to mention which is mere mysticism. Farther, the knowledge of these forms and universal existences is held necessary not only to our animal life, for which we cannot provide without being able to prophesy the future from the experience of the past by reference to general laws,—but even to our intellectual perfection. The certainty of these laws gives, it is thought, certainty and stability to our knowledge, and the certainty of our knowledge confers dignity and elevation on the mind. 1 See an interesting View of the Atomic Theory by Dr. Daubeney, the distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Botany in the University of Oxford. 1831, p. 112. |