The Battle of the Two Philosophies, by an Inquirer [L. F. M. Phillipps. a Study of J. S. Mill's an Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy]

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1866 edition. Excerpt: ... is faith the basis of knowledge? 27 rails in their true position again. If those lines are straight ones, they will see two straight lines enclosing, or tending to enclose a space. The other illustration, of the same hypothesis, is just of the same kind. A world is supposed where little boys can never by any chance add two and two together, but what a jack in the box, in the shape of a unit, jumps into the answer and turns it into five. Assuming that none of them had wit enough to detect the trick, their sums would doubtless be always wrong: but not because they would conceive that two and two make five, but because the invariable association would be so strong, they could never think of two and two, but always of two, one, two. Like too many in this world, they would speak of one thing, meaning another. The next point of Mr. Mill's attack is Sir. W. Hamilton's doctrine, that the basis of all our knowledge is in belief. As his own doctrine is identically the same in substance with this, it is very difficult to make out the grounds of this attack, and the more so as he seems to think Sir W. Hamilton's teaching on this point so self-evidently absurd that to state it is to refute it; whereas to us it appears so obviously true as to be almost incapable of proof. He tells us that Sir W. Hamilton recognises, besides knowledge, a second source of intellectual conviction, called Page 57, chap. v. belief; and we are inclined to answer, of course he must. He then quotes from him these words: "We know what rests on reason, hut believe what rests on authority. But reason itself must rest at last on authority, for the original data of reason do not rest on reason, but are necessarily accepted by reason on the authority of what is beyond itself....