PERSONALITY. INTRODUCTION. "WE have taken up the fact of this universe," says Thomas Carlyle, "as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal substance of things, and opened them only to the shows and shams of things. We believe this universe to be intrinsically a great, unintelligible Perhaps. Extrinsically, clear enough, it is a great, most extensive cattle-fold, with most extensive kitchen-ranges and dining-tables, whereat he is wise who can find a place. All truth of this universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it-the pudding and praise of it—are and remain very visible to the practical man. There is no longer any God for us. God's laws are become a greatest happiness principle, a parliamentary expediency. The A heavens overarch us only as an astronomical timekeeper, a butt for Herschel's telescopes to shoot science at. Man has lost the soul out of him, and now after the due period begins to find the want of it." There is much truth in this, except, perhaps, that the last seven words are rather premature. Many of the leaders of thought believe and teach that God and the soul are no more. Professor Bain tells us that "the ego is a pure fiction, coined from nonentity:" and Mr John Morley is so anxious to show the absurdity of believing in, or even hoping for, a God, that he always writes the word with a small "g." The universe has been resolved into a set of phenomena, whose sequences exhibit only such meaningless regularity as may be observed in the drawing of balls out of a ballot-box; and the skilful analysts, by way of coup de grâce, have ended by resolving themselves into a set of similar phenomena. There are only appearances without us, and nothing to be seen behind the appearances; only appearances within us, and nothing by which the appearances can be seen. "The Universe = Phenomena. This is to be the gospel of the future. And when every man believes it,—when men come to recognise themselves as merely series of sensations, and the external world as only the abstract possibility of sensation in which custom has taught them to believe,-above all, when they come to feel that there is absolutely no chance of ever discovering any meaning in anything, then the true golden age will have been reached. In other words, when the search after reason has been given up, the true reign of reason will have begun. To those who think thus, metaphysics is, of course, a remnant of barbarism, only a little removed from the fetishism that flourished in the infancy of the race; or, at the best, it is but a puerile amusement which, when one becomes a man-that is to say a Positivist-ought to be put away. Now it is the purpose of the present essay to offer some suggestions tending to show that this estimate of metaphysics is incorrect, that the Positivists themselves are but metaphysicians in disguise, that pure Phenomenalism, without some admixture of metaphysical elements, is an unthinkable absurdity,-and that, from the works of the most violently anti-metaphysical writers, it is easy to extract one of the strongest apologies of metaphysics. It would be well at the outset clearly to distinguish between three words-viz., Psychology, Philosophy, and Metaphysics, which are frequently used as more or less synonymous. Language is poor |