Search -
An examination of Mr. J. S. Mill's philosophy
An examination of Mr J S Mill's philosophy Author:James McCosh Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Sir W. Hamilton says, " Philosophy is wholly dependent on consciousness." (Reid's Works, p. 746.) This is going too far, as philosophy cannot be constructed with... more »out discursive processes. But Mr. Mill has committed a far more serious error, when he Bays that "Locke was therefore right in believing that the origin of our ideas is the main stress of the problem of mental science, and the subject which must first be considered in forming the theory of the mind." (p. 147.) M. Cousin seems to me to be altogether right when he lays it down as a rule, that in psychology we must begin with a painstaking inquiry into the actual nature of our ideas. Mr. Mill has thus reversed the order of things, placing that which is first last, and that which is last first, — putting the theory of ideas before the observation of the ideas, which evidently holds out great temptations to him to determine their nature by his theory. Not that we are precluded from making an inquiry into the origin of ideas. This is a very fair subject of investigation, provided always that we acknowledge its difficulties and its uncertainties, and proceed in a cautious manner and in the proper method. But even here the main agent must be consciousness, in the sense which has been explained, that is, as giving us directly a knowledge of our own mental operations, and indirectly an acquaintance with those of others. In order to the successful resolution of ideas into their originals, wehave two objects, or classes of objects, to look at. We have, first, to consider the ideas or convictions which we would seek to account for, and, secondly, the elements into which we would resolve them. The first of these operations must be done by consciousness exclusively. Even in the other and more complicated and perplexing inquiry, intros...« less