A new theory of knowing and known : with some speculations on the border-land of psychology and physiology / by John Cunningham.

Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new theory of knowing and known : with some speculations on the border-land of psychology and physiology / by John Cunningham. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    mysticism as the solid everlasting hills stand out from the stupendous but evanishing ranges of cloud-mountains behind them. The recent philosophy of our own country, which is based upon the doctrine of ideas, has been almost equally para- doxical as that of Germany. Sir William Hamilton, indeed, made an effort to escape from conclusions which he felt were nonsensical, but he was unable to free himself from an idealism which, like the seed of the thistle, sticks to his mantle and refuses to be brushed off; and he has multiplied con- tradictions instead of removing them. He taught, or seemed to teach, that in perception we are conscious of the outer world, and this was a step in the right direction; but he maintained that in the same act we are conscious also of the percipient mind, which is not only contrary to experience, but is the very error which is the source of all other errors, and must be rooted out before philosophy can be right. And if Hamilton has made a feeble effort to emancipate himself from idealism in his doctrine of perception, in his doctrine of memory he has entirely resigned himself to it. Unlike Hamilton, Mr John Stuart Mill has no desire to rid himself of idealism, he glories in it as the only true philosophy, and is happy in believing that there is no matter, no mind—in short, nothing; and his only concern as a philosopher is to explain how all the world see that which they do not see, and touch that which they do not touch, and believe in the existence of that which does not exist, and he does this by his theory of the Permanent Possibility of Sensations and Ideas. The only true universe is this Permanent Possibility —this shadow of a shade—this abstract word signifying nothing. The Positive Philosophy, though it pretends to be based, above all other philosophies, upon what is positive and real, has yet received into its system idealism in its purest forms.
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