1. Life the Writings
James Frederick Ferrier was born in Edinburgh on June 16, 1808, the
son of John Ferrier, writer to the signet. Ferrier was educated by the
Reverend H. Duncan, at the manse of Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire; and
afterwards at Edinburgh High School, and under Dr. Charles Parr
Burney, son of Dr. Charles Burney (1757-1817), at Greenwich. He was at
the university of Edinburgh from 1825-1827, and then became a
fellow-commoner of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated BA. in
1831. He formed in the same year the acquaintance of Sir William
Hamilton, whose influence upon him was very great, and for whose
personal character and services to speculation he expresses the
highest reverence. For years together he was almost daily in
Hamilton's company for hours. In 1832 he became an advocate, but
apparently never practiced. His metaphysical tastes, stimulated by
Hamilton's influence, led him to spend some months at Heidelberg in
1834, in order to study German philosophy. He was on intimate terms
with his aunt, Miss Ferrier, and his uncle, John Wilson, and in 1837
married his cousin, Margaret Anne, eldest daughter of John Wilson. He
became a contributor to Blackwood's Magazine." He there wrote an
article on Coleridge's plagiarisms in 1840. His first metaphysical
publication was a series of papers, reprinted in his Remains, called
"An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness," in Blackwood's
Magazine for 1838 and 1839.
In 1842 he was appointed professor of civil history in the university
of Edinburgh; and in 1844-5 he lectured as William Hamilton's
substitute. In 1845 he was elected professor of moral philosophy and
political economy at St. Andrews. He was a candidate for the
professorship of moral philosophy, resigned by Wilson in 1852, and for
the professorship of logic and metaphysics vacated by Hamilton's death
in 1856. But he was unsuccessful on both occasions, and continued at
St. Andrews until his death. His chief work, the Institutes of
Metaphysic, was published in 1854. The theory which it upholds had
been already expounded to his class. It reached a second edition in
1856. In the same year he replied to his critics in a vigorous
pamphlet called Scottish Philosophy, the Old and New, which, with
certain omissions, is published as an "Appendix to the Institutes" in
his Remains. He thought that the misunderstandings of his previous
exposition had told against his candidature for the chair of
metaphysics. Ferrier devoted himself to his professorial duties at St.
Andrews; wrote and carefully rewrote his lectures, and lived chiefly
in his study. He could seldom be persuaded to leave St. Andrews even
for a brief excursion. An attack of angina pectoris in November 1861
weakened him permanently, though he continued to labor, and gave
lectures in his own house. Renewed attacks followed in 1863, and he
died at St. Andrews on June 11, 1864. After his death his minor
publications were collected and published together along with a series
of lectures as Lectures on Greek Philosophy and other philosophical
remains (1866).
2. Philosophy
Ferrier provides the earliest, and in some ways the most impressive,
statement of absolute idealism in English philosophy. As an historian
of philosophy Ferrier did not pretend to exceptional research; but he
had an ability to give a living presentation of their views. The
history of philosophy was, for him, no mere record of discarded
systems but "philosophy itself taking its time." He was a sympathetic
student of the German philosophers, banned by his friend Hamilton. It
is difficult to trace any direct influence of Hegel upon his own
doctrine, and indeed he said that he could not understand Hegel. But
both his earlier and his later writings have an affinity with Fichte —
especially in their central doctrine: the stress laid on
self-consciousness, and its distinction from the "mental states" with
which the psychologist is concerned. This doctrine connects him with
Berkeley also. He was one of the first to appreciate the true nature
of Berkeley's thought, as not a mere transition-stage between Locke
and Hume, but as a discovery of the spiritual nature of reality.
In an essay on "Berkeley and Idealism," published in 1842, perhaps
Ferrier's most perfect piece of philosophical writing, he signalizes
both the essential truth and the essential defect in a theory which
was at the time much less understood than it is now. Berkeley, he
says, "certainly was the first to stamp the indelible impress of his
powerful understanding on those principles of our nature, which, since
his time, have brightened into imperishable truths in the light of
genuine speculation. His genius was the first to swell the current of
that mighty stream of tendency towards which all modern meditation
flows, the great gulf-stream of Absolute Idealism." The element o
peculiar value in Berkeley's speculation is its concreteness, its
faithfulness to reality.
The peculiar endowment by which Berkeley was distinguished, far
beyond almost every philosopher who has succeeded him, was the eye he
had for facts, and the singular pertinacity with which he refused to
be dislodged from his hold upon them. . . . No man ever delighted less
to expatiate in the regions of the occult, the abstract, the
impalpable, the fanciful, and the unknown. His heart and soul clung
with inseparable tenacity to the concrete realties of the universe;
and with an eye uninfluenced by spurious theories, and unperverted by
false knowledge, he saw directly into the very life of things.
His theory needs only to be widened, and thus corrected, to provide
the true explanation of which philosophy is in search. How this is to
be done, is more clearly stated in the Institutes.
He saw that something subjective was a necessary and inseparable
part of every object of cognition. But instead of maintaining that it
was the ego or oneself which clove inseparably to all that could be
known, and that this element must be thought of along with all that is
thought of, he rather held that it was the senses, or our perceptive
modes of cognition, which clove inseparably to all that could be
known, and that these required to be thought of along with all that
could be thought of. These, just as much as the ego, were held by him
to be the subjective part of the total synthesis of cognition which
could not by any possibility be discounted. Hence the unsatisfactory
character of his ontology, which, when tried by the test of a rigorous
logic, will be found to invest the Deity — the supreme mind, the
infinite ego, which the terms of his system necessarily compel him to
place in synthesis with all things — with human modes of apprehension,
with such senses as belong to man — and to invest Him with these, not
as a matter of contingency, but as a matter these, not as a matter of
necessity. Our only safety lies in the consideration — a consideration
which is a sound, indeed inevitable logical inference — that our
sensitive modes of apprehension are mere contingent elements and
conditions of cognition; and that the ego or subject alone enters, of
necessity, into the composition of everything which any intelligence
can know.
Although there are occasional references to Kant in Ferrier's works,
he develops his theory through a continuous criticism of Reid, on the
one hand, and of Hamilton, on the other. Reid is, for him, the
representative of Psychology or the "science of the human mind," and
therefore, despite his own protestations to the contrary, of
"Representationism." Hamilton is the representative of Agnosticism, or
the doctrine of the unknowableness of the Absolute Reality. Against
the former view, he argues that we have a direct knowledge of Reality,
both material and spiritual; against the latter, he formulates his
"agnoiology" or "theory of ignorance," to prove that the "ignorance"
of which Hamilton would convict the human mind is not properly called
ignorance or defect, but is simply that repudiation of the
unintelligible or self-contradictory which is the essential
characteristic of intelligence, rather than a defect peculiar to the
human mind.
The fundamental error of Psychology is the acceptance of sensation, or
the "state of consciousness," as the original datum of knowledge, the
consequence being that the inference to the existence of the object,
as well as to the subject, is more or less uncertain. As a matter of
fact, the subject and the object are inseparable. "Matter per se" is
never the object of knowledge; what we perceive is always "Matter
mecum." The elementary fact of knowledge is not matter, but the
perception of matter, or the subject as conscious of the object,
either subjective or objective. Mere "phenomena" never exist; what
exists is always phenomenal to a self or subject. If we define
"substance" as that which is capable of existing, or of being
conceived, alone and independently, then the conscious self, that is,
the subject as conscious of an object, is substance, and can be known.
The ego cannot know objects without knowing itself along with them; it
cannot know itself except along with objects. It is because the
psychologists have ignored the conscious, or rather the self-conscious
self, which is present in all knowledge, that they have been unable to
escape the conclusion that all we know is "ideas" or "phenomena" which
represent, and may misrepresent, the object or substantial reality.
For the refutation of the Hamiltonian doctrine of the Relativity of
Knowledge, Ferrier formulated what he regarded as an entirely original
"theory of ignorance." Ignorance, he holds, presupposes the
possibility of knowledge; we can be ignorant only of that which it is
possible for us to know. It is not a defect, but a merit of knowledge
not to know that which cannot be known because it is the
unintelligible or the self-contradictory. Now we have seen that
subject and object, or mind and matter, per se, are both alike
unknowable in this sense; since they are never presented in
consciousness alone but always together, it follows that they cannot
be represented or thought in separation from one another. It is of
such an inconceivable or unintelligible reality that Hamilton
proclaims that ignorance is inevitable; he might as well proclaim the
unknowableness of Nothing, or of Nonsense. It is the glory, rather
than the humiliation, of intelligence to repudiate the unintelligible
or self-contradictory.
On the basis of this "epistemology" and "agnoiology" Ferrier proceeds
to construct his "ontology." Self-conscious mind, the ultimate element
in knowledge, is also the ultimate element in existence. Repudiating
the errors of subjective idealism, he finds himself compelled to
accept absolute or objective idealism. The individual ego, along with
the universe of his thought, is not independent. "The only independent
universe which any mind or ego can think of is the universe in
synthesis with some other mind or ego." And since one such other mind
is sufficient to account for the universe of our experience, we are
warranted in inferring that there is only one. Ferrier thus summarizes
the argument which yields "this theistic conclusion":
Speculation shows us that the universe, by itself, is the
contradictory; that it is incapable of self-subsistency, that it can
exist only cum alio, that all true and cogitable and non-contradictory
existence is a synthesis of the subjective and the objective; and then
we are compelled, by the most stringent necessity of thinking, to
conceive a supreme intelligence as the ground and essence of the
Universal Whole. Thus the postulation of the Deity is not only
permissible, it is unavoidable. Every mind thinks, and must think of
God (however little conscious it may be of the operation which it is
performing), whenever it thinks of anything as lying beyond all human
observation, or as subsisting in the absence or annihilation of all
finite intelligences.
The ethical implications of such an idealism are strikingly suggested
in the Philosophy of Consciousness, where the parallelism between the
functions of self-consciousness in the intellectual and in the moral
spheres is made clear, and it is shown that "just as all perception
originates in the antagonism between consciousness and our sensations,
so all morality originates in the antagonism between consciousness and
the passions, desires, or inclinations of the natural man." It is in
this refusal to accept the guidance of the natural passions and
inclinations, this "direct antithesis" of the "I" to the "natural
man," that our moral freedom consists. What is this supreme act by
which man asserts his supremacy over nature, within and without
himself?
What is it but the act of consciousness, the act of becoming "I,"
the act of placing ourselves in the room which sensation and passion
have been made to vacate? This act may be obscure in the extreme, but
still it is an act of the most practical kind, both in itself and in
its results. . . . For what act can be more vitally practical than the
act by which we realize our existence as free personal beings? and
what act can be attended by a more practical result than the act by
which we look our passions in the face, and, in the very act of
looking at them, look them down?
No comments:
Post a Comment