Essays in Rationalism

by Charles Robert Newman

The sum of the above strictures on this kind of so-called first principles, is—1. That they have not made good their title, and therefore are not to be accredited with it. 2. That there is a decided presumption against that title from the doubt and dissatisfaction with which it is met, where want of candor and intelligence cannot be imputed, especially when it is considered that the other, the sensuous experimental kind of first principles, have so frank an acceptance. 3. It seems to be absolutely provable, and I suppose I have above incidentally proved it, that they are not first principles. 4. The task is set to metaphysics of supplying the most satisfactory proof of all by bringing to light such propositions as would be perceived to underlie these so-called first principles, and to be the real first principles to which the others would give precedence.

As regards their name, it being so much in point, excuses the old remark that the elements of our knowledge stand in a reversed order in respect to this knowledge to what they assume in our process of acquiring it. A first principle, therefore, means also a last one; it is the last in whatsoever endeavors to descend to the bottom or to penetrate to the source of our knowledge, but it becomes the first when we trace it from this source through its derivative ideas.

The investigating act should not be confounded with the prospecting one. The sensible horizon of subjective vision can, by no mediation, be exalted into the real horizon of truth, wherein the genuine first principles that bound human capability are exclusively to be found.

It may be asked, apart from the inquiry what first principles there are, Is there a necessity that some first principles should be? So it seems from the data of the case. It is patent to common observation that the mind of man is recipient of ideas from the things that surround it. The contact of its apprehending faculty with the things it apprehends, must, it would seem, constitute first principles. After it has got them it might conceivably elicit from them derived principles, but the original ones cannot be thus derived, since there are none earlier from which to derive them.

Again, it is to be inquired, Does the mind, in receiving its ideas, possess and exercise in reference to the things on which it operates, a copying faculty or a transforming faculty? Does it import them simply in their native character, in the way a mirror does the object it reflects, or does it manufacture, cook, and assimilate them, so as to change them into something partaking of its own?

And, if it changes them, what is the extent of the change? Does it go so far only as the semi-idealism of Locke, or extend into the absolute idealism of the German school?

Because these questions have been wont to puzzle either the learned, or the public, or both, it does not follow that they are difficult. I suppose them to admit of decided answers before a supposed competent audience.

As I am unprovided with proof, although I suppose it is to be provable, that first principles of reason must needs be, I must speculate for a moment on the possibility of a proposition of the form of “two and two make four,” being derived from one of the form of “I scent the rose,” for this seems to be the alternative of there being no first principles of reason. Evidently I must confess to having no grounds for pronouncing such a derivation impossible, though I must grant it to be paradoxical. Our mal-cultivation of non-material science, and the imperfection of our metaphysics, is probably the only cause of the strange predicament.

No doubt M. Cousin, and several other eminent teachers of youth, to whose office it belongs to expound received metaphysics, have comprised First Principles in their course of philosophy; but as I have barely met with any of their writings, I must confess such an ignorance of them, as not even to know how far I am either adopting, or evading their phraseology, in discussing the same subjects. Mine, however, cannot be wrong, since the term “first principles,” that I have chosen, is one of familiar popular use; so that were this mode of speech, as indeed it is, peculiarly liable to ambiguity, it would, for that very reason, be preferable to any other, till such time as that ambiguity should have been explained, and the wrong thinking, of which it might have been the source, exposed and obviated. Not till this had been done would it be time to inquire whether the current metaphysics had invented any intrinsically better ways of speaking on these topics, for though the veriest tyro in such investigations would be justified in objecting to some of its technicalities, such as the invention of the word free-will, for instance, for the same reason that a beginner in zoology might object, were such an attempt ever made, to the introduction of the word sphynx or griffin into that branch of inquiry, there can be no doubt that other of its speculations are more happily conceived. Hence I suppose it would be a decided mistake to imagine, for example, that no trouve whatever is to be elicited from the obscurities of Kant, but on the other hand, one must as much take care to entertain sober conjectures of the possible value of such unsunned treasures, as to keep in mind that quackery may be not unqualified with some merit, and I might surmise that it was perhaps in virtue of his fabulous expectations in this direction, that Coleridge could not execute his long-meditated plan of elucidating that writer; or rather, perhaps—to speak more curtly—a spirit more differing from that which compounded the amalgam, was necessary to resolve and detect it.

According to this estimate of the value of our achieved studies, it would be expectable, in regard to my present topic, that almost all the materials for right conclusions on it must be extant somewhere or other in our books, no great amount of ability being required to turn them to proper account: an easily suppliable desideratum being thus left unsupplied, the public indifference manifested thereby would seem to bear the ascription of our unsatisfactory metaphysics to the fault, however apportioned between the many and the few, not of the intellect, but of the reason.