A theory, then, even in that best sense, to which I wish it accurately confined, as often as it ventures a single hair-breadth beyond the line of former observation, may be wrong, as an hypothesis may be wrong. But, in a theory, in this sense of it, there are both less risk of error, and less extensive evil from error, than in an hypothesis. There is less risk of error, because we speak only of the properties of bodies, that must be allowed actually to exist; and the evil of error is, for the same reason, less extensive, since it must be confined to this single point; whereas, if we were to imagine falsely the presence of some third substance, our supposition might involve as many errors, as that substance has qualities; since we should be led to suppose, and expect, some or all of the other consequences, which usually attend it, when really present.
The practical conclusion to be drawn from all this very long discussion, is, that we should use hypotheses to suggest and direct inquiry, not to terminate or supersede it; and that, in theorizing, – as the chance of error, in the application of a general law, diminishes, in proportion to the number of analogous cases, in which it is observed to hold, – we should not form any general proposition, till after as wide an induction, as it is possible for us to make; and, in the subsequent application of it to particulars, should never content ourselves, in any new circumstances, with the mere probability, however high, which this application of it affords; while it is possible for us to verify, or disprove it, by actual experiment.
LECTURE IX
RECAPITULATION OF THE FOUR PRECEDING LECTURES; AND APPLICATION OF THE LAWS OF PHYSICAL INQUIRY TO THE STUDY OF MIND, COMMENCED
For several Lectures, Gentlemen, we have been employed in considering the objects that are to be had in view, in Physical Inquiry in general, a clear conception of which seems to me as essential to the Philosophy of Mind, as to the Philosophy of Matter. I should now proceed to apply these general remarks more particularly to our own science; but, before doing this, it may be of advantage to retrace slightly our steps in the progress already made.
All inquiry, with respect to the various substances in nature, we have seen, must regard them as they exist in space, or as they exist in time, – the inquiry, in the one case, being into their composition; the inquiry, in the other case, into the changes which they exhibit. The first of these views we found to be very simple, having, for its object, only the discovery of what is actually before us at the moment, – which, therefore, if we had been endowed with senses of greater delicacy and acuteness, we might have known, without any inquiry whatever. It is the investigation of the elements, or separate bodies, that exist together, in the substances which we considered, or rather that constitute the substances which we considered, by occupying the space which we assign to the one imaginary aggregate, and are regarded by us as one substance, – not from any absolute unity which they have in nature, since the elementary atoms, however continuous or near, have an existence as truly separate and independent, as if they had been created at the distance of worlds, – but from a unity, that is relative only to our incapacity of distinguishing them as separate. It is to the imperfection of our senses, then, that this first division of Physical Inquiry owes its origin; and its most complete results could enable us to discover only, what has been before our eyes from the moment of our birth.
The second division of inquiry, – that which relates to the successions of phenomena in time, – we found, however, to have a different origin; since the utmost perfection of our mere senses could show us only what is, at the moment of perception, not what has been, nor what will be; and there is nothing in any qualities of bodies perceived by us, which, without experience, could enable us to predict the changes that are to occur in them. The foundation of all inquiry, with respect to phenomena as successive, we found to be that most important law, or original tendency, of our nature, in consequence of which we not merely perceive the changes exhibited to us at one particular moment, but from this perception, are led irresistibly to believe, that similar changes have constantly taken place, in all similar circumstances, and will constantly take place, as often as the future circumstances shall be exactly similar to the present. We hence consider events, not as casually antecedent and consequent, but as invariably antecedent and consequent, – or, in other words, as causes and effects; and we give the name of power to this permanent relation of the invariable antecedent to its invariable consequent. The powers of substances, then, concerning which so many vague, and confused, and mysterious notions prevail, are only another name for the substances themselves, in relation to other substances, – not any thing separate from them and intermediate, – as the form of a body, concerning which too, for many ages, notions as vague and mysterious prevailed, is not any thing different from the body, but is only the body itself, considered according to the relative position of its elements. Form is the relation of immediate proximity, which bodies bear to each other in space; – power is the relation of immediate and uniform proximity, which events bear to each other in time; and the relation, far from being different, as is commonly supposed, when applied to matter and to spirit, is precisely the same in kind, whether the events, of which we think, be material or immaterial. It is of invariable antecedence that we speak alike in both cases, and of invariable antecedence only. When we say, that a magnet has the power of attracting iron, we mean only, that a magnet cannot be brought near iron, without the instant motion of the iron towards it. When we say, in treating of mental influence, that man, in the ordinary circumstances of health, and when free from any foreign restraint, has the power of moving his hand, we mean only, that, in these circumstances, he cannot will to move his hand, without its consequent motion. When we speak of the omnipotence of the Supreme of Beings, – who is the fountain of all power, as he is the fountain of all existence, – we mean only, that the universe arose at his command, as its instant consequence, and that whatever he wills to exist or perish, exists, or is no more.
This simple view of power, as the mere antecedent substance itself, in its relation to its immediate and invariable consequences, without the intervention of any mysterious tie, – since there surely can be nothing in nature, but all the substances which exist in nature, – it was necessary to illustrate, at great length, in consequence of the very false notions, that are generally, or, I may say, universally prevalent on the subject. The illustration, I am aware, must, to many of you, have appeared very tedious, and a sufficient exemplification of that license of exhausting occasionally your attention, and perhaps, too, your patience, of which I claimed the right of exercise, whenever it should appear to me necessary, to make any important, but abstract truth familiar to your mind. I shall not regret, however, any temporary feeling of weariness which I may have occasioned, by dwelling on this great fundamental subject, if I have succeeded in making familiar to your minds, the truths which I wished to impress on them, and have freed you from those false notions of occult and unintelligible agency in causes, – as something different from the mere causes or antecedents themselves, – which appear to me to have retarded, in a very singular degree, the progress of philosophy, – not merely, by habituating the mind to acquiesce in the use of language, to which it truly affixes no meaning, though even this evil is one of very serious injury in its general effects, – but by misdirecting its inquiries, and leading it, from the simplicity of nature, – in which every glance is truth, and every step is progress, – to bewilder itself, with the verbal mysteries of the schools, where there is no refreshment of truth to the eye, that is wearied with wandering only from shadow to shadow, – and where there is all the fatigue of continual progress, without the advance of a single step.
Even those philosophers, who have had the wisdom to perceive, that man can never discover any thing in the phenomena of nature, but a succession of events, that follow each other in regular series, – and who, accordingly, recommend the observation and arrangement of these regular antecedents and consequents, as the only attainable objects of philosophy, yet found this very advice, on the distinction of what they have termed efficient causes, as different from the physical causes, or simple antecedents, to which they advise us to devote our whole attention. There are certain secret causes, they say, continually operating in the production of every change which we observe, and causes which alone deserve the name of efficient; but they are, at the same time, careful to tell us, that, although these causes are constantly operating before us, and are all which are truly acting before us, we must not hope, that we shall ever be able to detect one of them; and indeed, the prohibition of every attempt to discover the efficient causes of phenomena, – repeated in endless varieties of precept or reproof, – is the foundation of all their rules of philosophizing; as if the very information, – that what we are to consider exclusively, in the phenomena of nature, is far less important, than what we are studiously to omit, – were not, of itself, more powerful, in stimulating our curiosity to attempt the forbidden search, than any prohibition could be in repressing it. “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” This will forever be the feeling of the inquirer, while he thinks that there are any causes, more than those, which he has already investigated. Even Newton himself, that sagest of observers and reasoners, who could say, with the simplicity of pure philosophy, “Hypotheses non fingo.” yet showed, as we have seen, by one of the most hypothetical of his Queries, that he was not exempt from the error which he wished to discourage – that inordinate love of the unknown, which must always lead those, who believe that there is something intermediate and undiscovered truly existing between events, to feel the anxious dissatisfaction of incomplete inquiry, in considering the mere antecedents and consequents which nature exhibits, and to turn, therefore, as if for comfort, to any third circumstance, which can be introduced, without obvious absurdity, as a sort of connecting link, between the pairs of events. To suppose that the mind should not have this disposition, would, indeed, be to suppose it void of that principle of curiosity, without which there can be no inquiry of any kind. He who could believe, that, between all the visible phenomena, there are certain invisible agencies continually operating, which have as real an existence as all that he perceives, and could yet content himself with numbering the visible phenomena, and giving them names, without any endeavour to discover the intervening powers, by which he is constantly surrounded, or at least to form some slight guess, as to that universal machinery, by which he conceived all the wonders of nature to be wrought, must be a being as different from the common intellectual beings of this earth, as the perfect sage of the Stoics from the frail creatures, of mingled vice and virtue, that live and err around us. That, in considering the phenomena of nature, we should confine our attention to the mere antecedents and consequents, which succeed each other in regular series, is unquestionably the soundest advice that can be given. But it is sound advice, for this reason more than any other, that the regular series is, in truth, all that constitutes the phenomena, and that to search for any thing more, is not to have an unattainable object in view, but to have no conceivable object whatever. Then only can the inquirer be expected to content himself with observing and classing the sequences, which nature presents to us spontaneously, or in obedience to our art, when he is convinced, that all the substances which exist in the universe – God and the things which he has created – are every thing which truly exists in the universe, to which nothing can be added, which is not itself a new substance; that there can be nothing in the events of nature, therefore, but the antecedents and consequents which are present in them; and that these, accordingly, or nothing, are the very causes and effects, which he is desirous of investigating.
After this examination of the notions connected with the uniform successions of events, our attention was next turned to the nature and origin of hypothetical inquiry, which we found reason to ascribe to the imperfection of our senses, that renders it impossible for us to know whether we have observed the whole train of sequences in any phenomenon, from our inability to distinguish the various elements that may be the subjects of minute changes unobserved.
We are hence eager to supply, by a little guess-work of fancy, the parts unobserved, and suppose deficiencies in our observation where there may truly have been none; till at length, by this habitual process, every phenomenon becomes, to our imagination, the sign of something intermediate as its cause, the discovery of which is to be an explanation of the phenomenon. The mere succession of one event to another appears, to us, very difficult to be conceived, because it wants that intervening something, which we have learned to consider as a cause; but there seems to be no longer any mystery, if we can only suppose something intervening between them, and can thus succeed in doubling the difficulty, which we flatter ourselves with having removed; since, by the insertion of another link, we must now have two sequences of events instead of one simple sequence. This tendency of the imagination to form and rest on hypotheses, – or, in other words, to suppose substances present and operating, of the existence of which we have no direct proof, – we found to be one great source of error in our practice of philosophizing.
Another source of error, we found to be the too great extension of what are termed general laws; which though a less error in itself, is yet, in one respect, more dangerous than the former; because it is the error of better understandings, – of understandings that would not readily fall into the extravagant follies of hypotheses, but acknowledge the essential importance of induction, and think they are proceeding on it without the slightest deviation, almost at the very moment when they are abandoning it for conjecture. To observe the regular series of antecedents and consequents, and to class these as similar or dissimilar, are all which philosophers can do with complete certainty. But there is a constant tendency in the mind, to convert a general law into an universal law, – to suppose, after a wide induction, that what is true of many substances that have a very striking analogy, is as certainly true of all that have this striking analogy, – and that what is true of them in certain circumstances, is true of them in all circumstances, – or, at least, in all circumstances which are not remarkably different. The widest induction which we can make, however, is still limited in its nature; and, though we may have observed substances in many situations, there may be some new situations, in which the event may be different, or even, perhaps, the very reverse of that which we should have predicted, by reasoning from the mere analogy of other circumstances. It appeared to me necessary, therefore, in consequence of the very ambiguous manner in which writers on this higher branch of logic speak of reasoning from general laws to particulars, to warn you, that the application to particulars can be made with certainty, only to the very particulars before observed and generalized, – and that, however analogous other particulars may seem, the application of the general law to them admits only of probability, which may, indeed, as the induction has been wider, and the circumstances of observed analogy more numerous, approach more or less to certainty, but must always be short of it, even in its nearest approximation.
Such, then, is physical inquiry, both as to its objects, and its mode of procedure, particularly as it regards the universe without; and the laws which regulate our inquiry in the internal world of thought are, in every respect, similar. The same great objects are to be had in view, and no other, – the analysis of what is complex, and the observation and arrangement of the sequences of phenomena, as respectively antecedent and consequent.
In this respect, also, I may remark, the philosophy of matter and the philosophy of mind completely agree – that, in both equally, our knowledge is confined to the phenomena which they exhibit. We give the name of matter to the unknown cause of various feelings, which, by the constitution of our nature, it is impossible for us not to refer to something external as their cause. What it is, independent of our perception, we know not; but as the subject of our perception, we regard it as that which is extended, and consequently divisible, impenetrable, mobile; and these qualities, or whatever other qualities we may think necessary to include for expressing the particular substances that affect our senses variously, constitute our whole definition of matter, because, in truth, they constitute our whole knowledge of it. To suppose us to know what it is in itself, in absolute independence of our perception, would be manifestly absurd: since it is only by our perception, – that is to say, by the feelings of our mind, – that it can be known to us at all; and these mere feelings of the mind must depend, at least, as much on the laws of the mind affected, as on the laws of the substance that affects it. Whatever knowledge we may acquire of it, therefore, is relative only, and must be relative in all circumstances; though, instead of the few senses which connect us with it at present, we were endowed with as many senses as there are, perhaps, qualities of matter, the nature of which we are at present incapable of distinguishing; – the only effect of such increased number of senses being, to render more qualities of matter known to us, not to make matter known to us in its very essence, as it exists without relation to mind.
“Tell me,” says Micromegas, an inhabitant of one of the planets of the Dog Star, to the secretary of the Academy of Sciences in the planet Saturn, at which he had recently arrived in a journey through the heavens, – “Tell me, how many senses have the men on your globe?” – I quote, as perhaps the name has already informed you from an ingenious philosophic romance of Voltaire, who, from various allusions in the work, has evidently had Fontenelle, the illustrious secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, in view, in the picture which he gives of the Saturnian secretary. – “We have seventy-two senses,” answered the academician, “and we are, every day, complaining of the smallness of the number. Our imagination goes far beyond our wants. What are seventy-two senses! and how pitiful a boundary, even for beings with such limited perceptions, to be cooped up within our ring, and our five moons! In spite of our curiosity, and in spite of as many passions as can result from six dozen of senses, we find our hours hang very heavily on our hands, and can always find time enough for yawning.” – “I can very well believe it,” says Micromegas, “for, in our globe, we have very near one thousand senses; and yet, with all these, we feel continually a sort of listless inquietude and vague desire, which are forever telling us that we are nothing, and that there are beings infinitely nearer perfection. I have travelled a good deal in the universe. I have seen many classes of mortals far beneath us, and many as much superior; but I have never had the good fortune to find any, who had not always more desires than real necessities to occupy their life. – And, pray, how long may you Saturnians live with your few senses?” continued the Sirian. – “Ah! but a very short time, indeed!” said the little man of Saturn, with a sigh. – “It is the same with us,”said the traveller; “we are forever complaining of the shortness of life. It must be an universal law of nature.” – “Alas!” said the Saturnian, “we live only five hundred great revolutions of the sun (which is pretty much about fifteen thousand years of our counting.) You see well, that this is to die almost the moment one is born. Our existence is a point – our duration an instant – our globe an atom. Scarcely have we begun to pick up a little knowledge, when death rushes in upon us, before we can have acquired any thing like experience. As for me, I cannot venture even to think of any project. I feel myself but like a drop of water in the ocean; and, especially now, when I look to you and to myself, I really feel quite ashamed of the ridiculous appearance which I make in the universe.”