Note (return) — Chapter VII

Now, after these explicit statements that we have an intuitive knowledge of matter and mind--a direct and immediate consciousness of self as a real, "self-subsisting entity," and a knowledge of "an external reality, immediately and in itself," it seems unaccountably strange that Hamilton should assert "that all human knowledge, consequently all human philosophy, is only of the Relative or Phenomenal;" 290 and that "of existence absolutely and in itself we know nothing." 291 Whilst teaching that the proper sphere and aim of philosophy is to trace secondary causes up to ultimate or first causes, and that it necessarily tends towards one First and Ultimate Cause, he at the same time asserts that "first causes do not lie within the reach of philosophy," 292 and that it can never attain to the knowledge of the First Cause. 293 "The Infinite God can not, by us, be comprehended, conceived, or thought." 294 God, as First Cause, as infinite, as unconditioned, as eternal, is to us absolutely "The Unknown." The science of Real Being--of Being in se--of self-subsisting entities, is declared to be impossible. All science is only of the phenomenal, the conditioned, the relative. Ontology is a delusive dream. Thus, after pages of explanations and qualifications, of affirmations and denials, we find Hamilton virtually assuming the same position as Comte and Mill--all human knowledge is necessarily confined to phenomena.