James Frederick Ferrier

by Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane

'Answer—Knowledge.

'Philosophy is a Hunger of the Soul after Knowledge. What is Knowledge?—reduced through various intermediate stages to question, what is the common and essential quality in all knowledge—the quality which makes knowledge knowledge? Answer approached by raising question: What is the essential quality in all food—the quality which makes food food? This is obviously its physically nutritive quality. Whatever has the nutritive property is food; whatever has it not is not food, however like excellent beef and mutton it may be. So in regard to knowledge, its common and essential quality—the quality in virtue of which knowledge is knowledge—is its nutritive quality. Whatever nourishes and satisfies the mind is knowledge, as whatever nourishes and satisfies the body is food. The intellectually nutritive property in knowledge is the common and essential property in knowledge. What is the nutritive quality in knowledge? Answer (without beating about the bush)—Truth.

'What is Truth? Answer—Truth is whatever is supported by Evidence.

'What is Evidence? Evidence is whatever is supported by Experience. What is Experience? Here we stop; we can only divide Experience into its kinds, which are two, Experience of Fact and Experience of Pure Reason. Observe the manœuvre in the last line by which you knaves of the anti-metaphysical school are outwitted. You oppose Pure Reason to Experience, and philosophers generally assent to the distinction. This at once gives your school the advantage, for the world will always cleave to experience in preference to anything else, leaving us metaphysicians, who are supposed to abandon experience, hanging as it were in baskets in the clouds. But I do not abandon experience as the ultimate foundation of all knowledge; only I maintain that there are two kinds of experience, both of which are equally experience, the experience of Fact and the experience of Pure Reason. You are thus deprived of your advantage. I am as much a man of experience as you are.'

Evidently it had been a question with Ferrier whether he should use the expression Experience, so well known to us now, or substitute for it Consciousness, which, as a matter of fact, he afterwards did: 'Why is it so grievous and fatal an error to confound Experience and Consciousness? Is not a man's experience the whole developed contents of his consciousness? I cannot see how this can be denied. And therefore, before you wrote, I was swithering (and am so still) whether I should not make consciousness the basis of the whole superstructure—the raw material of the article which in its finished state is knowledge. After all, the dispute, I suspect, is mainly verbal.'

There are many evidences in these letters that Ferrier was not neglecting German Philosophy, for taking Experience as his basis he shows how it may be divided into Wesen (an sich), Seyn (für sich), and the Begriff (anundfürsich) on the lines of German metaphysics. As to the 'Common-Sense' Philosophy, he expresses himself in no measured terms: 'I am glad we agree in opinion as to the merits of the Common-Sense Philosophy. Considered in its details and accessories, it certainly contains many good things; but, viewed as a whole and in essentialibus, it is about the greatest humbug that ever was palmed off upon an unwary world. As an instance among many which might be adduced, of the ambiguity of the word, and of the vacillation of the members of this school, it may be remarked that while Reid made the essence of common-sense to consist in this, that its judgments are not conclusions obtained by ratiocination (Works, Sir W. Hamilton's edition, p. 425), Stewart, on the contrary, holds that these judgments are "the result of a train of reasoning so rapid as to escape notice" (Elements, vol. ii. p. 103). Sir W.'s one hundred and six witnesses are a most conglomerate set, and a little cross-examination would try their mettle severely.'

The most important part of Ferrier's system was his working out of the 'Theory of Ignorance,' in which, indeed, he might congratulate himself in having in great measure broken open new ground. He says of it: 'Hurrah, εύρηκα, I have discovered the Law of Ignorance—and if I had a hecatomb of kain hens at my command I would sacrifice them instanter to the propitious patron of metaphysics. Look you here. The Law of Knowledge is this, that, in order to know any one thing we must always know two things; hoc cum alio—object plus subject—thing + me. This is the unit of knowledge. Analogously, only inversely, in order to be ignorant of any one thing we must be ignorant of two things—hujus cum alio—object plus subject—thing + me. This is the unit of ignorance.' Apparently, in spite of full explanation of his newly-discovered view, Ferrier's correspondent had failed to take it in, and consequently he gently rails at him for 'sticking at the axiom,' and wishes him to help him to a name for what he calls the 'Agnoiology' for want of something better. He goes on: 'I take it that I have caught you in my net, and that wallop about as you will I shall land you at last. I have now little fear that I shall succeed in convincing you, or at anyrate less hardened sinners, that the knowledge of object-subject is a self-contradiction, and that therefore object-subject, or matter per se, is not a thing of which we can with any sense or propriety be said to be ignorant. Be this as it may, you must at anyrate recognise in this doctrine a very great novelty in philosophy. The more incogitable a thing becomes, the more ignorant of it do we become—that is the natural supposition. Is it not then a bold and original stroke to show that when a thing passes into absolute incogitability we cease that instant to be ignorant of it? I believe that doctrine to be right and true, but I am certain that, obvious as it is, it has been nowhere anticipated or even hinted at in the bygone career of speculation. I claim this as my discovery. In the doctrine of Ignorance I believe that I have absolutely no precursor. What think you?'

Mr. Makgill had accused Ferrier of anthropomorphism in his system, and he replies as follows:—'You cannot charge me with anthropomorphism without being guilty of it yourself. Don't you see that "the Beyond" all human thought and knowledge is itself a category of human thought? There is much naïveté in the procedure of you cautious gentry who would keep scrupulously within the length of your tether: as if the conception of a without that tether was not a mode of thinking. Will you tell me why you and Kant and others don't make existence a category of human thought? This has always puzzled me.

'Surely the man who made extension and time mere forms of human knowledge need have made no bones of existence. Meanwhile, as the post is just starting, I beg you to consider this, that the anthropomorphist and the anti-anthropomorphists are both of necessity anthropomorphists, and for my part I maintain that the anti-man is the bigger anthropomorphist of the two.' This criticism of the 'Beyond' and its unknowableness, while yet it was acknowledged, is as much to the point in the present day as it was in those, and its statement brings forcibly before our minds the truth of Goethe's well-known saying: 'Der Mensch begreift niemals wie anthropomorphisch er ist.'

The doctrine of Ignorance, so essential to Ferrier's system, he found it hard to make clear to others:—'I am astonished at your not seeing the use, indeed the absolute necessity, of a true doctrine of ignorance. This blindness of yours shows me what I may expect from the public; and how careful I must be, if I would go down at all, to render myself perfectly clear and explicit. Don't you see that a correct doctrine of ignorance is necessary for two reasons—first, on account of the false doctrine of ignorance universally prevalent, one which has hitherto rendered, and must ever render, anything like a scientific ontology impossible; and, secondly, because this correct theory of ignorance follows inevitably from my doctrine of knowledge? This, which I consider a very strong recommendation, an indispensable condition of the theory of ignorance, is the very ground on which you object to it. Surely you would not have me establish a doctrine of ignorance which was not consistent with my doctrine of knowledge. Surely I am entitled to deduce all that is logically deducible from my principles. Your meaning I presume is that my doctrine of ignorance flows so manifestly from my doctrine of knowledge that it is unnecessary to develop and parade it. There I differ from you. It flows inevitably, but I cannot think that it flows obviously. Else why was it never hit upon until now?… Don't tell me, then, that my conclusions that matter per se, Ding an sich, is what it is impossible for us to be ignorant of, just because it is absolutely unknowable (and for no other reason). Don't tell me that this conclusion is so obvious as not to require to be put down in black and white, when we find Kant and every other philosopher drawing, but most erroneously, the directly opposite conclusion from the same premises. Matter per se, Ding an sich, was of all things that of which we were most ignorant!! and the ruin of metaphysics was the consequence of their infatuated blindness. Your objection, then, to my doctrine of ignorance, viz., that it is fixed in the very fixing of the doctrine of knowledge, and therefore does not require explication or elucidation, I cannot regard as a good objection. It is true that the one of these fixes the other; but it requires some amount of explanation and demonstration to make this palpable to the understandings even of the most acute, and I am not sure that even you (yes, put on your best pair of spectacles, you will need them) yet see how impossible it is for us to be ignorant of matter per se, or of anything which is absolutely unknowable.'