[44] The terms Ego and Mecum, to express the antithesis of these two λόγῳ μόνον χωριστὰ, are used by Professor Ferrier in his very acute treatise, the Institutes of Metaphysic, pp. 93-96. The same antithesis is otherwise expressed by various modern writers in the terms Ego and non-Ego — le moi et le non-moi. I cannot think that this last is the proper way of expressing it. You do not want to negative the Ego, but to declare its essential implication with a variable correlate; to point out the bilateral character of the act of consciousness. The two are not merely Relata secundum dici but Relata secundum esse, to use a distinction recognised in the scholastic logic.
The implication of Subject and Object is expressed in a peculiar manner (though still clearly) by Aristotle in the treatise De Animâ, iii. 8, 1, 431, b. 21. ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστι πάντα· ἢ γὰρ αἰσθητὰ τὰ ὄντα ἢ νοητά. ἐστὶ δ’ ἡ ἐπιστήμη μὲν τὰ ἐπιστητά πως, ἡ δ’ αἴσθησις τὰ αἰσθητά. The adverb πως (τρόπον τινά, as Simplikius explains it, fol. 78, b. 1) here deserves attention. “The soul is all existing things in a certain way (or looked at under a certain aspect). All things are either Percepta or Cogitata: now Cognition is in a certain sense the Cognita — Perception is the Percepta.” He goes on to say that the Percipient Mind is the Form of Percepta, while the matter of Percepta is without: but that the Cogitant Mind is identical with Cogitata, for they have no matter (iii. 4, 12, p. 430, a. 3, with the commentary of Simplikius p. 78, b. 17, f. 19, a. 12). This is in other words the Protagorean doctrine — That the mind is the measure of all existences; and that this is even more true about νοητὰ than about αἰσθητά. That doctrine is completely independent of the theory, that ἐπιστήμη is αἴσθησις.
It is in conformity with this affirmation of Aristotle (partially approved even by Cudworth — see Mosheim’s Transl. of Intell. Syst. Vol. II. ch. viii. pp. 27-28) — ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστι πάντα — that Mr. John Stuart Mill makes the following striking remark about the number of ultimate Laws of Nature:—
“It is useful to remark, that the ultimate Laws of Nature cannot possibly be less numerous than the distinguishable sensations or other feelings of our nature: those, I mean, which are distinguishable from one another in quality, and not merely in quantity or degree. For example, since there is a phenomenon sui generis called colour, which our consciousness testifies to be not a particular degree of some other phenomenon, as heat, or odour, or motion, but intrinsically unlike all others, it follows that there are ultimate laws of colour …The ideal limit therefore of the explanation of natural phenomena would be to show that each distinguishable variety of our sensations or other states of consciousness has only one sort of cause.” (System of Logic, Book iii. ch. 14, s. 2.)
Plato’s attempt to get behind the phenomena. Reference to a double potentiality — Subjective and Objective.
In Plato’s exposition of the Protagorean theory, the true doctrine held by Protagoras,[45] and the illusory explanation (whether belonging to him or to Plato himself), are singularly blended together. He denies expressly all separate existence either of Subject or Object — all possibility of conceiving or describing the one as a reality distinct from the other. He thus acknowledges consciousness and cognition as essentially bilateral. Nevertheless he also tries to explain the generation of these acts of consciousness, by the hypothesis of a latens processus behind them and anterior to them — two continuous moving forces, agent and patient, originally distinct, conspiring as joint factors to a succession of compound results. But when we examine the language in which Plato describes these forces, we see that he conceives them only as Abstractions and Potentialities;[46] though he ascribes to them a metaphorical copulation and generation. “Every thing is motion (or change): of which there are two sorts, each infinitely manifold: one, having power to act — the other having power to suffer.” Here instead of a number of distinct facts of consciousness, each bilateral — we find ourselves translated by abstraction into a general potentiality of consciousness, also essentially bilateral and multiple. But we ought to recollect, that the Potential is only a concept abstracted from the actual, — and differing from it in this respect, that it includes what has been and what may be, as well as what is. But it is nothing new and distinct by itself: it cannot be produced as a substantive antecedent to the actual, and as if it afforded explanation thereof. The general proposition about motion or change (above cited in the words of Plato), as far as it purports to get behind the fact of consciousness and to assign its cause or antecedent — is illusory. But if considered as a general expression for that fact itself, in the most comprehensive terms — indicating the continuous thread of separate, ever-changing acts of consciousness, each essentially bilateral, or subjective as well as objective — in this point of view the proposition is just and defensible.[47]
[45] The elaborate Dissertation of Sir William Hamilton, on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned (standing first in his ‘Discussions on Philosophy’), is a valuable contribution to metaphysical philosophy. He affirms and shows, “That the Unconditioned is incognisable and inconceivable: its notion being only a negation of the Conditioned, which last can alone be positively known and conceived” (p. 12); refuting the opposite doctrine as proclaimed, with different modifications, both by Schelling and Cousin.
In an Appendix to this Dissertation, contained in the same volume (p. 608), Sir W. Hamilton not only re-asserts the doctrine (“Our whole knowledge of mind and matter is relative, conditioned — relatively conditioned. Of things absolutely or in themselves, be they external, be they internal, we know nothing, or know them only as incognisable,” &c.) — but affirms farther that philosophers of every school, with the exception of a few late absolute theorisers in Germany, have always held and harmoniously re-echoed the same doctrine.
In proof of such unanimous agreement, he cites passages from seventeen different philosophers.
The first name on his list stands as follows:— “1. Protagoras — (as reported by Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, &c.) — Man is (for himself) the measure of all things”.