Reason and Faith [pp. 648-685]

Reason and Faith.
O. A. Brownson says, in one of the finest passages he ever
penned, ends in a "sublime system of transcendental nullism."
And we must insist that it contradicts Hamilton's doctrine
of the veracity of consciousness. It is a first principle with
him that the absolute and universal veracity of consciousness
is to be maintained; that if its testimony to the non-ego
cannot be trusted, neither can its testimony to the ego; that
the maxim applicable to all other witnesses holds with regard
to this; falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus; that on this
hypothesis, "every system is equally true, or rather all are
equally false; philosophy is impossible, for it has now no
instrument by which truth can be discovered-no standard by
which it is to be tried; the root of our nature is a lie." (Metap.
p. 196.) This cannot be gainsaid. But it is utterly annihilating to the scheme, which makes these objects or properties,
or phenomena, subjective or egoistical, which are apprehended
in consciousness as objective realities external to the mind
itself. Mr. Mansel makes a futile effort to parry this argument, by telling us, that the reality which the mind understands itself to cognize in consciousness, "is not identical
with absolute existence unmodified by the laws of the percipient mind." P. 307. The mind holds itself to perceive
objects and properties as they are, not as they are "modified"
by its own "laws" or agency. Or rather it holds itself so
constituted as to be veracious, not false, and under "laws"
which lead it to know things as they are, not as they are
modified by itself. He tells us, on the same page, that Kant's
theory "amounts to no more than this: that we can see
things only as our faculties present them to us; and that we
can never be sure that the mode of operation of our faculties
is identical with that of other intelligences, embodied or
spiritual." With all respect, we will ask if this is precisely
the Kantian doctrine as he had before defined it? And
whether it be or not, and whatever may be the superiority in
the extent and mode of knowing in other intelligences, we
submit whether it is not an intuitive conviction that all
intelligences, so far as they know at all, know alike? One
may know more and another less, one may know through the
senses, the other by spiritual faculties alone; one by intuition,
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