A Sketch of Philosophy [pp. 126-132]

tA SKETCH OF PHILOSOPHY.
imaginary science supernaturally re vealed by their gods. Of course magic
and sorcery were the legitimate results
of such beliefs.
Ancient philosophy descends to us in
two well defined schools, the Platonic
and the Aristotelian. The grand char acteristic of the former is innate ideas;
the latter holds that the mind is created
without any ideas whatever.
Bacon and Descartes are the founders
of modern philosophy. "The sciences,"
says Bacon, "have hitherto been in a sad
condition; philosophy, wasted in empty
and fruitless logomachies, has failed during so many centuries to bring out a single experiment of actual benefit to human life."
The praise of Bacon is founded, not
upon his skill in any particular branch
of knowledge, but in his great comprehensive understanding that took in almost the whole extent of universal science. He was not a philosopher, not a
discoverer, but he taught others how to
philosophize; he opened the way for discovery. Though he foresaw the true explication of the tides, the cause of color,
etc.; though he suggested chemical processes, and suspected the law of universal attraction, no one of these allured him
from his great work. His whole genius
was occupied in framing a imethod for
future research, "Instauratio Magna,"
and the vast Verulamian cycle has been
carried out in its several departments of
physics, metaphysics, morals, and politics
by Kepler, Galileo, Stewart, Reid, Herschel, and others.
"Cogito ergo sum," was the proposition
Descartes advanced, and upon this the
certainty of all other knowledge depends.
The watchword of these two great thinkers, and the guiding principle of all philosophy since then, is analysis. Bacon
taught how to analyze nature. Descartes
taught how to analyze thought. Thus we
have the two schools of modern philosophy, the German and the British. Of the
former we have Descartes, Kant, Cousin,
and all modern German and French
philosophers. Of the latter are Bacon,
VOL. XXXVI.-*
Hobbes, Hamilton, and all modern
Scotch and English philosophers. The
German begins with principles and ends
with facts. The British begins with facts
and ends with principles. The former
assumes most. The latter proves most.
The former is transcendental; the latter
is experimental.
These schools are in reality descendants
of the two ancient ones, and the leading
difference is still that open question, inhate ideas. The German mistakes the
same old position with the Platonic, that
certain ideas of time, space, right and
wrong, cause, and personal identity are
inherent, intuitive. The British, with
Aristotle, deny the intuitive power, though
they tacitly recognize the existence of
some of its ideas. Hamilton says," Lectures on Metaphysics," page 284, "But
the mind not only possesses a great apparatus of a5osteriori adventitious knowledge; it possesses necessarily a small
complement of a friori native cognitions." And again later, "While we can
never understand how any original datum
of intelligence is possible, we have no
reason to doubt from this inability that it
is true." Yet, in treating of cause and
space, he classes them among ideas
gained by sensation, and saying that we
can neither conceive of them as finite
nor as infinite, he would have a law of
the conditioned or thinkable, midway between the two. (Query,-Can we conceive of any idea derived firom sensation
as infinite or finite? Is any maximum or
minimum cognizable by the imagination
any more than by the senses, those analogues of fancy?)
Haven, with many of our American
philosophers, argues in favor of the intuitive power.
But there are other important questions
the consideration of which has divided
philosophy into various schools. To
bring out some of them we shall notice
the five prominent systems of modern
philosophy. First: Sensationalism: the
doctrine that all our ideas consist of sensations transformed. This doctrine is
held by Hobbes and Condillac. Locke
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