Note 104 — Chapter III

Two acute reasoners, who will be alternately acquitted of madness by contending schools of thought, have arrived at conclusions very favourable to the sanity of idealizing men. In his first lecture at the Royal Institution, Professor Masson spoke in the following terms of Hume and Fichte. "There is the system of Nihilism, or, as it may be better called, Non-Substantialism. According to this system, the Phænomenal Cosmos, whether regarded as consisting of two parallel successions of phænomena (Mind and Matter), or of only one (Mind or Matter), resolves itself, on analysis, into an absolute Nothingness,—mere appearances with no credible substratum of Reality; a play of phantasms in a void. If there have been no positive or dogmatic Nihilists, yet both Hume for one purpose, and Fichte for another, have propounded Nihilism as the ultimate issue of all reasoning that does not start with some à priori postulate."—Recent British Philosophy, p. 66. The reader will observe that to raise the question fully, we have spoken of the special form of Idealism to which Mr. Mill gives the first place in his description, (Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 8.) "According to one of the forms, the sensations which, in common parlance, we are said to receive from objects, are not only all that we can possibly know of the objects, but are all that we have any ground for believing to exist.——Those who hold this opinion are said to doubt or deny the existence of matter. They are sometimes called by the name Idealists, sometimes by that of Sceptics, according to the other opinions which they hold. They include the followers of Berkeley and those of Hume. Among recent thinkers, the acute and accomplished Professor Ferrier, though by a circuitous path, and expressing himself in a very different phraseology, seems to have arrived at essentially the same point of view. These philosophers maintain the Relativity of our knowledge in the most extreme form in which the doctrine can be understood, since they contend, not merely that all we can possibly know of anything is the manner in which it affects the human faculties, but that there is nothing else to be known; that affections of human or of some other minds are all that we can know to exist."

Mr. Mill's own position will be found in his 11th Chapter. After defining Matter to be a "Permanent Possibility of Sensation," (p. 227) and explaining his definition, he writes in a note (p. 232), the following decisive sentences: "My able American critic, Dr. H. B. Smith, contends through several pages that these facts afford no proofs that objects are external to us. I never pretended that they do. I am accounting for our conceiving, or representing to ourselves, the Permanent Possibilities as real objects external to us. I do not believe that the real externality to us of anything, except other minds, is capable of proof."

Mr. O'Hanlon's pamphlet entitled "A Criticism of John Stuart Mill's Pure Idealism; and an attempt to shew that, if logically carried out, it is Pure Nihilism," seems less known than it deserves to be. Mr. Mill noticed and answered it in his 3rd Edition—chiefly among the criticisms commencing p. 244.——Mr. O'Hanlon's early decease has given a painful interest to his promising labours. Some paragraphs from his now scarce pamphlet are placed at the end of Additional Note D, on "Pure Idealism."