Constance Naden and hylo-idealism : a critical study / by E. Cobham Brewer ; annotated by R. Lewins.

  • E. Cobham Brewer
Date:
1891
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Constance Naden and hylo-idealism : a critical study / by E. Cobham Brewer ; annotated by R. Lewins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    therefore cannot he disconnected with ourselves. We must sensate before we can ever know or see anything, and what we see we see in our own camera obscura—the head. Of course, the eye does not see the object looked at, but only its reflection on the optic nerves, telegraphed to the brain. So that in this sense every one makes his own universe; or else the non-ego must be absolutely separate from the ego, and yet in relative union with it—an obvious contradiction.* Dr. Dale in his concluding remarks says: “In her philo- sophical expositions, ...Miss Xaden shows acuteness and a charming lightness of touch. Her style is singularly graceful and clear, and her illustrations felicitous.... “ 1 called upon her a few days after her grandmother’s death, [and she] then told me how great a change had passed upon her whole conception of human life and destiny. My little ‘ Consie’.. .had faced the eternal problem of human thought... The heavens and the earth, truth and beauty, the awful contrasts between right and wrong, and the glory of the Supreme, [all these] she had come to think.. .are the creations of the grey thought cells of the cerebral hemispheres.” I do not think that Dr. Dale fully understood the young ])hilosopher. I’erhaps the indeflniteness of the words with which she tried to make her subject clear was in some measure at fault; but I do not believe Miss bladen meant that heaven and earth, truth and beauty, right and wrong, creator and creation, were sickly dreams, the mere imaginings of the mind.-f She speaks of the “ stimulus of thought,” the * Here Dr. Brewer conflict.'^ with what he asserts above as to “Creation.” Fru' to make a world or create it is identicah—R. L. t She certainly did not consider truth and beauty as sickly dreams. But Creator and Creation she necessarily held to be the mere provisional “ imagining.s of the [human] mind.” Dr. Dale’s gloss is certainly a mis- concej'tion ; l\Iiss Naden’s point being that all each self sees or feels is the product, or eject, of the grey thought cells of the supreme cerebral ganglia. This point is only an extension of Shakespeare’s : “ There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” or of Luther and Cardinal Newman’s “ Private Judgment.”—B. L.