Review of Alden's Elements of Intellectual Philosophy [From North American Review 103.2 (July 1866): 260-269.] ²⁷

Elements of Intellectual Philosophy, By Rev. Joseph Alden, D. D., LL. D., late President of Jefferson College. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1866. 12mo. pp. 292.

“In an experience of more than a quarter of a century as a college teacher, the author,” as he tells us in his Preface, “found that he was successful just in proportion as he was elementary in his instructions”; and he adds, “If men become familiar with the alphabet of thinking, they are prepared for progress toward profoundness.” But he does not tell us whether his success consisted in awakening a genuine interest in the problems of philosophy, or, as appears more probable from his book, in destroying all the attraction such problems have for the unwearied mind of youth. His book is indeed too elementary, — in fact chaotic, — altogether preliminary to any serious consideration of the problems of mental science. It goes over much ground, and professes to treat no topic exhaustively, but claims that “no topic has received superficial consideration.”

One would naturally expect, from such a mode of treatment, that many questions would be raised for the future consideration of the pupil who was thus inducted into philosophy. But no. There are no questions left for his consideration. Everything is settled by short and easy methods. It is the author’s intention, if this book is received with favor, “to prepare, for the benefit of those who have entered upon a course of philosophy under his guidance, a volume embracing additional topics and more extended investigations.” This volume will illustrate, we suppose, the kind of “progress towards profoundness” which those who have had the benefit of the author’s guidance might be expected to make. Until this appears, we cannot, of course, judge of it; but we gather from the present volume that it will settle some minor details, and allay some subsidiary questionings which a perverse ingenuity might raise, in spite of an elementary discipline in habits of dogmatizing.

The author’s idea of philosophy has the merit of not being new or

original with him. It is a very old and respectable one indeed, and is associated with great reputations; but it is none the less, in our estimation, deserving of reprobation. It would appear from most standard works on mental philosophy, that the science of mind contemplates only the avoidance of dangerous opinions, and the establishment of sound and wholesome ones, — that the questions of philosophy are nuisances, which must be counteracted by those hygienic prescriptions commonly called the elements of mental philosophy. These elements are, in fact, certain dogmas, which owe their existence and importance to the fact that some minds have the insane or uncommon propensity, and sometimes the ingenuity, to transcend, in their inquiries about themselves, the bounds of common sense. Such elements are therefore laid down for the purpose of keeping thought within these bounds, and giving the coup de grace to impertinent problems.

So urgent does this practical side of mental philosophy appear to writers like our author, that they do not stop to inquire whether the problems they settle so summarily are really in contravention of an enlightened common sense: it is enough if they appear to be. And so it happens that mental science comes to consist, in these books, of such facts as the mind already knows about itself and its processes, or can easily ascertain by direct inquiry, but which have for their principle or for the ground of their pre-eminent importance in philosophy the very questions which they set aside. We may, therefore, define the mental philosophy treated of by our author, and many writers like him, to be the art of settling the questions of mental science in an easy and summary manner. This is the alphabet by which the pupil is to be “prepared for progress towards profoundness.”

The author himself gives us no definition of his subject, but introduces it thus: —

“Numerous definitions of philosophy have been given. It would be of no advantage to repeat them. We have a field to explore. It is of comparatively little importance what name we give to the field, or to the process of exploration.

“A perfect definition of a science must include all that belongs to it, and exclude all that does not belong to it. It marks, therefore, the completion, not the commencement, of the science.”

The first of these paragraphs identifies definition with naming, and the second identifies it with exposition; and between the two the author fails to give what is all that is required, sufficient directions about the “field” we have “to explore,” and some notion of “the process of exploration.” These he leaves, perhaps wisely, for the reader to gather. We do not conceive it to be very important to the reader to

be told beforehand what precisely the scope of a treatise is to be; but it is important that the author should know, and we can see no reasons why he could not, in this case, have made an intelligible statement of it, in place of confounding the names, definitions, and expositions of his subject all together in two short paragraphs.

It would be unfair to our author to suppose that he is original in treating mental science as having no problems but such as a perverse ingenuity has raised, and which a sound mind will answer by an immediate reference to what it already knows. This view of the matter has come down traditionally in the school of philosophy to which the author belongs. Traditional misrepresentations of the opinions of the opposite school, put in the form of questions which nobody ever seriously asked, are refuted by virtually showing that the questions are idle and foolish. These refutations, and the discussions and definitions of the terms in which the questions are stated, together with a simple classification of the mental powers, make up the matter of orthodox common-sense philosophy, as presented by Dr. Alden, following in the wake of Hamilton and McCosh.

We will begin our illustrations of this philosophy with the great central question of the cognition of objects external to the mind. On this our author says: —

“Some say we are conscious of the state of mind termed cognition or perception, and of nothing else. We see an external object. The seeing, cognizing, is confessedly a mental act. Of its existence, it is said, we are certain; but we are not certain of anything else. We are not certain that there is anything external corresponding to this state of mind, which alone is the object of consciousness. Thus we have no certainty of the existence of external objects.

“The error contained in the above statement consists in not taking the whole of the conscious state of mind into view. That of which we are conscious is this: we are conscious that we cognize the object. When we say we are conscious that we have a cognition, — a subjective state of mind, — we have not stated the whole truth. Our consciousness embraces the cognition of the object. We are as certain that we cognize the object, as we are that we have a mental state.” — p. 34.

What a satisfactory state of certainty is this, which precludes, of course, the possibility of hallucination, or deception by our senses! But this, though personally convenient, is of little philosophical worth. It omits to take account of the only real philosophical question. This is not whether we have an adequate feeling of certainty in our judgments of external existence, but it is the scientific question, why this feeling can be opposed by a doubt, such as we cannot feel or entertain in regard to our judgments of the internal states of the mind. It is

enough for philosophy that a doubt can be entertained in the one case, though only arbitrarily, which cannot be entertained, even arbitrarily, in the other. This fundamental problem in philosophy our author entirely overlooks, or rather misinterprets, probably through the misrepresentations of it received from other writers. He appears to suppose that the doubt in question is one for the mind to decide upon as to its legitimacy; whereas this doubt, or the possibility of it, is a point to be explained as to its significance, since it lies at the foundation of the distinction between mental states and the existence of external objects.

Philosophy does not begin with a doubt for the purpose of testing its legitimacy; but upon recognizing the possibility of a doubt, its business is to study the significance or the grounds of this possibility. A possibility of doubt in regard to a judgment of externality is the one characteristic which all true philosophers allow as its distinguishing mark, however differently they may interpret the meaning of this mark in their theories of perception. The thorough-going idealist interprets its meaning to be, that there is no certainty, besides the mind’s cognizance of its own states; but the interpretation of most philosophers is, that there is no intuitive certainty except of these states. Even Sir William Hamilton, so far from denying that the possibility of doubt is a discriminating mark of external cognition, has insisted more than any other philosopher on its importance; and he discriminates by means of it between the testimony of consciousness concerning the reality of an external world, and the certainty we have about our own mental states. But our author has removed all cause of contention among philosophers, not by criticising their solutions of this problem, but by sweeping away the problem itself.

The appeal to consciousness for what is ultimate in it is legitimate in philosophy only when made critically, that is, by such rational procedures as will enable us to distinguish between what is really simple and what is apparently so, like those effects of constant association which resemble ultimate elements of knowledge. Sir William Hamilton has laid down rules, though inadequate ones, for such criticism; and even Dr. McCosh, many of whose opinions our author adopts, proposes what may be regarded as tests for determining the ultimate facts of consciousness, which are, however, of little philosophical worth. But our author does not appear to be aware that any discussion is required in criticism of the natural dogmas of the undisciplined mind. He simply dismisses the real problems of philosophy, and adheres to the crude dogmas of common sense.

With the main problem, which we have noticed, he dismisses, of course, all the subsidiary ones. Thus he says: —

“Some philosophers have labored hard to discover how the idea of externality — of something external — is first acquired. It is acquired when the mind cognizes an external object. Whenever the mind cognizes an object out of the mind, it cognizes it as out of the mind. No one in cognizing a material object by means of sight or touch ever cognized it as a modification of his own mind, or as existing within his mind.” — p. 35.

This is carrying common sense in philosophy to an extreme. We doubt if its most ardent advocates would claim much authority for its judgments on a question in philosophy, when it so far mistakes the purport of the question as to propose the complete realization of an idea as an explanation of its origin. Nobody ever questioned that the idea of externality is already acquired, when the mind discriminates from its own states any existence as an external object. But though “no one in cognizing a material object by means of sight or touch ever cognized it as a modification of his own mind,” yet it is contended that the elements of which such cognition consists may, nay, must, at one time have been indistinguishable from mere mental states, and that they become what they are simply by their combinations and their relations to other mental states. “Suppose,” says the author, “a person destitute of all the senses except hearing. Let a violin be sounded near him. What would be the effect on his mind? He would cognize a sound; and he would cognize it as external to his own mind.” This would depend, we imagine, on his previous experience of sounds, — on whether they had generally occurred in connection with other and previous mental states, just as anger and fear do,—or had always arisen from bodily conditions, like hunger and thirst, — or, thirdly, had remained dissociated from any of these, and had generally occurred without any reference to them. These are the ways, we suppose, in which sensations get referred to their classes, and finally, in the development of perception, come to lose their importance as sensations or as pleasures and pains in their greater importance as the signs of external or foreign sources of other pleasures and pains. For the idea of externality involves the function of sensations as signs, either in their simplest state, or more commonly in combinations, in which they become inseparably associated; and their proper function as signs is to produce a state of expectation with reference to the things signified, without being themselves the objects of any expectation. A sign must occur inconsequently; else it is more properly called a cause or an antecedent merely. In being as a sign unexpected, the idea has the mark of externality in it; and by producing a state of expectation it possesses the mark of reality, and is thus the sign of an external reality.

The test of the idealist’s sincerity which has been derisively proposed,

namely, that he should run against the objects in whose absolute existence he does not believe, and learn by the pain they will cause him the error of his creed, is indeed the very test the idealist allows of that external reality in which alone he does believe. For bodily pains and pleasures are real, — simply real; and their causes or antecedents, when known in perception, make this perception real also. Simple sensations are real, and so arc invariable sequences, and hence a knowledge of their antecedents must be a real knowledge. If such cognitions, while happening in no constant relations to antecedent states of the mind, are yet found to have an order among themselves, the mind soon comes to apprehend this order in the course of experience under the form of the general laws and ideas of external nature. But what is the external object, and how is it distinguishable from the group of sensations which constitute the cognition of it? In most systems of idealistic philosophy, this object is regarded as an external something, of which the idea or the group of sensations is regarded as the sign. This we believe to be an inadequate account, since, so far as an idea is a sign at all in a cognition, it is the sign of the unknown cause, not of itself, but of other actual or possible sensations, the existence of which as pleasures or pains constitutes the reality and the efficiency of the cognition; and the general expectation of these sensations is our general sense of an external reality. The idea is not a sign of an external existence numerically distinct from itself and a counterpart of itself, but only a sign of the sources of those other mental states which as real pleasures and pains can be expected as concomitants or consequences of it. In this consists the difference between the occurrence of an idea in a real cognition, and its recurrence in the representations of memory or imagination. In the latter form the idea loses its real externality, since it is no longer the sign of real pleasures or pains, present or inferable as consequent upon it. The idea in this form is also in itself less distinct as a group of sensations, so that relative distinctness becomes a secondary mark of reality. But reality essentially consists in the connection of an idea with concomitant or consequent pleasures and pains. In dreams the secondary mark is present, though the essential one is absent, and this discrepancy is the source of the surprise which we often feel in dreams in not suffering the consequences which our apparent cognitions lead us to expect. There are thus two marks of reality in a real cognition, —distinctness and real significance; and there are two corresponding objects, — the mental one, or the cognition itself as a state of the mind, and the existence of the external source of what it really signifies or reveals. Of the first we are immediately conscious, and cannot doubt its existence, since it is presented in itself as a state of the mind; but of the second object there may be a doubt, as in dreams or hallucinations.

The question of philosophy in regard to this doubt is not whether it is as legitimate in our waking moments as it is in our dreams; and our author answers no real question in philosophy by his assertion that “we are as certain that we cognize the object, as we are that we have a mental state.” What he really does is to overlook one of the most indisputable facts which philosophy has to consider, namely, that there is a difference in respect to our capacity to doubt between the external and internal objects of cognitions.

The next problem which he proceeds to suppress is the more special question of the origin and ultimate elements of the ideas of extension and space. “We get the idea of externality through all our senses; but not in all cases the idea of extended externality. A distinction is to be made between externality extended and unextended.” (p. 36.) This is the best that he has to say on this question. What follows in the next chapter, instead of being an explanation of the mode in which we get the idea of extended externality, or any account of the distinction between extended and unextended externality, is only an appeal to consciousness for facts which have no bearing on the subject. It is no explanation of the origin of the idea of extension to say, “that the mind cognizes extension and form by means of the eye, that is, cognizes extended and figured objects by means of the eye.” (p. 38.) But this is all that the author offers in the way of positive science on the subject. He objects, on the flimsiest grounds, to the several attempts at explanation which have been made. To the doctrine “that we get the idea of extension and figure by the sense of touch, and that those ideas are, by association, transferred to our visual perceptions,” he says: “So far is this from being clear, it is doubtful whether any accurate idea of figure could be gained by the sense of touch alone. Let one be blindfolded, and then let an object different from any object previously seen and handled be presented to the sense of touch, and he will form a very inaccurate idea of its figure.” It is surprising that the author should have overlooked the accuracy with which the blind discriminate forms by touch; but tactual determinations of figures should not be confounded with their visual representations, and the author misrepresents the theory he is criticising if he supposes that the sense of touch was ever regarded as competent to give by itself anything like visual images to the mind, or to do more than inform the vision of the tactual significance of visual marks. The author appears to conclude, because an untrained touch alone is inadequate to take the place of trained vision in a blindfolded man, that therefore the touch could have been of no service in training the eye to produce visual images of extension.

On the more probable doctrine, that the notion of extension is the joint product of sight and touch, (including, we should add, muscular sensations,) the author cites the following argument: —

“Some admit that we can cognize extension by the eye, but deny that we can cognize figure, that is, solidity, length, breadth, and thickness. That we now acquire a knowledge of solidity by the eye is, it is said, the result of inference from our experience gained by the sense of touch. It is admitted that we seem to cognize solidity by means of sight, and, in reply, it is said that we seem to cognize distance by the sense of sight, whereas our cognition of distance is an inference or judgment.”

To this the author replies, “Now we affirm that we do cognize distance by means of the eye.” By which he means, of course, that the cognizance is by means, of the eye alone, and that it is an immediate, simple, inexplicable act; else his statement would be an irrelevant and trifling one. He does not tell us, however, whether this immediacy is known on the authority of consciousness, or in some other way; but he obviously thinks that he has a right to affirm it, and that the burden of proof rests on those who deny it. For he says, “Those who deny this assume that in all our primary perceptions by sight all objects appear equally near”; and adds, “This is a mere assumption. Memory does not reveal to us our primary perceptions.” There is so much of truth and significance in this last remark, that we are surprised that the author did not make a better use of it. It is, indeed, a mere assumption to assert that at any time, in the development of vision, objects should have appeared equally near; but as an assertion essential to the theory which the author is criticising, it is an assumption of his own. And the opposite assertion, that at all times, in the growth of our visual powers, objects must have appeared at unequal distances, is also a mere assumption, concerning which memory does not inform us. There is, indeed, a third alternative more probable than either, namely, that antecedently to our conjunct experiences of light and tactual and muscular sensations no notions of extension or even of externality were attached to them. There is no presumption, therefore, or burden of proof in the matter, and the author’s dictum, “that we do cognize distance by means of the eye,” is of no authority on the question. The only direct authority is in a memory which is silent on the subject, and hence the question is one for science and indirect inference to deal with. The facts of physiological and optical science, together with the psychological doctrines of association, are thus the real foundation of the doctrines which our author proposes to reject in his summary way by a dictum of consciousness.

That the eye by itself, that is, the optical apparatus and the retina,

independently of muscular sensations and movements and tactual perceptions, cannot give the means of discriminating what we do discriminate in vision, and cannot afford the ground for inferring relations of distance, or even externality, from the sensations of light, is a position in mental science which must he regarded as demonstrated. And we further believe that, with these auxiliary sensations, movements, and perceptions, all the mental phenomena of vision can be adequately accounted for. This is one of the problems of mental science. The following is the author’s way of disposing of it: —

“It is asked, How, since the image on the retina is inverted, do we see objects upright? The reply is, we do see them upright. This we know. Why the physical conditions of perception are as they are, we do not know. A similar answer may be given to the question, why, when there is an image of the object in each eye, we see but one object. Some recent discoveries in optics reveal in a measure the connection between binocular vision and the cognition of form.” — p. 39.

This reply, that “we do see objects upright,” is in fact no answer at all to the question the author proposes. Who has ever doubted this? The question is not one of fact, but it is a demand for the explanation of a fact. Equally irrelevant is the remark, that “ we do not know why the physical conditions of perception are as they are.” The question is not one of final causes, but it is the scientific inquiry concerning the mode in which these physical conditions are conditions, in consequence of which, and not in spite of which, the perception is realized; and this explanation is not so very far to seek as the author appears to think. Indeed, the only difficulty in the problem comes from the mistake, often made, of supposing that the images on the retina are cognized in themselves as extended objects, instead of being simply, in their several and ultimate parts, the means of cognizing the parts of the real external and extended objects.

In the last sentence which we have quoted, the author intimates that science has done something towards solving the problem of binocular vision. Some account of this would have been to the point, but the author is content to assure his pupils that their confidence in the fact itself of vision cannot be improved or impaired by any explanation, since the fact of seeing a single upright object, though it be by means of two inverted images, rests on the infallible testimony of consciousness. What sort of ideas of a true mental science can such an assurance communicate? None, we think, but the erroneous ones, that science undertakes to explain a fact by disputing it, and that we ought therefore to be contented to affirm the fact without trying to explain it.

Such is the elementary instruction which the author has found to be

the most successful by an experience of a quarter of a century, and now thinks worthy to be presented to the public. Our illustrations of his method, though taken from his earlier chapters, are sufficiently characteristic of the whole work, and make it unnecessary for us to say more.