Philosophy Views
Hamilton was an exponent of the Scottish
common-sense philosophy and a conspicuous defender and expounder
of Thomas Reid, though under the influence of Kant
he went beyond the traditions of the common-sense school, combining
with a naive realism a theory of the relativity of knowledge.
His psychology, while marking an advance on the work of Reid
and Stewart, was of the " faculty " variety and has
now been largely superseded by other views. His contribution
to logic was the now well-known theory of the quantification of
the predicate, by which he became the forerunner of the present
algebraic school of logicians.
It is his law of the conditioned, with his correlative philosophy
of the unconditioned, which comes into nearest relation with theology.
This law is " that all that is conceivable in thought lies
between two extremes, which, as contradictory of each other, can
not both be true, but of which, as mutually contradictory, one
must be true. . . . The law of the mind, that the conceivable
is in every relation bounded by the inconceivable, I call the
law of the conditioned." This involved his position that the Infinite is "incognizable and inconceivable."
This doctrine on its philosophic side is a protest against Kant's
skeptical result affirming that reason lands in hopeless contradictions;
on its theological side it proclaims the impossibility of knowing
the Absolute Being. Only by taking first the philosophic aspect
can we correctly interpret its theological relations. Kant had
made a priori elements only forms of the mind; and accordingly,
the ideas of self, the universe, and God, became only regulative
of our intellectual procedure, and in no sense guaranties of truth.
Accordingly, Kant has dwelt on " the self-contradiction of
seemingly dogmatical cognitions (the cum antithesi) in none of
which we can discover any decided superiority." These were,
that the world had a beginning, that it had not; that every composite
substance consists of simple parts, that no composite thing does
consist of simple parts; that causality according to the laws
of nature is not the only causality operating to originate the
world, that there is no other causality; that there is an absolutely
necessary being, that there is not any such being. Hamilton's
object was to maintain that such contradictions are not the product
of reason, but of an attempt to press reason beyond its proper
limits. If, then, we allow that the conceivable is only of the
relative and bounded, we recognize at once that the so-called
antinomies of reason are the result of attempts to push reason
beyond its own province, to make our conceptions the measure of
existence, attempting to bring the incomprehensible within the
limits of comprehension.
Thus far a real service was rendered by Hamilton in criticizing
the skeptical side of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He estimated
this result so highly as to say of it, " if I have done anything
meritorious in philosophy, it is in the attempt to explain the
phenomena of these contradictions." At this point Hamilton
ranks Reid superior to Kant; the former ending in certainty, the
latter in uncertainty. But there remain for Hamilton's philosophy
the questions: If we escape contradiction by refusing to attempt
to draw the inconceivable within the limits of conception, what
is the source of certainty as to the infinite? How are knowledge
and thought related to the existence and attributes of the Infinite
Being? Here Hamilton is entangled in the perplexity of affirming
certainty which is yet unknowable. That there is an
Absolute Being, source of all finite existence, is, according
to him, a certainty; but that we can have any knowledge of the
fact is by him denied. Reid had maintained the existence of the
Supreme Being as a necessary truth; and Hamilton affirms that
the divine existence is at least a natural inference; but he nevertheless
holds that the Deity can not be known by us. This is with him
an application of the law of the conditioned-a conclusion inevitable
under admission that all knowledge implies the relative, the antithesis
of subject and object. This doctrine of ignorance was developed
by H. L. Mansel, and eagerly embraced by the experientialists,
J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. This gave an impulse to Agnosticism,
the influence of which must be largely credited to Kant, who reduced
the a priori to a form of mental procedure, and to Hamilton, who
rejected Kant's view, yet regarded the absolute as incognizable.
However, while insisting that " the infinite God can not
by us, in the present limitation of our faculties, be comprehended
or conceived," Hamilton adds that "faith-belief is the
organ by which we apprehend what is beyond our knowledge."
The author of this article is anonymous. The IEP is actively seeking an author who will write a replacement article.
© 2006
