The Inner History of the National
Convention
of South Africa.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
George Linton; or, The First Years of an English Colony.
1876;
A Life Time in South Africa. Being the recollections of the first Premier of
Natal. 1900.
Rogers, A. W. An Introduction to the Geology of Cape Colony. 1905.
Rose, F. Horace. Haidee. 1917; and several earlier works.
Russell, George. The History of Old Durban, and Reminiscences of an Emigrant
of 1850. 1899.
Russell, Robert. "The Garden Colony. ' The Story of Natal and its Neighbours. 1903.
Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. A Novel. By Ralph Iron.
1883;
Dream Life and Real Life. . . . Ralph Iron. 1893; Dreams. Sixth edn.
1894;
Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. . . . 1897.
Solater, W. L. The Fauna of South Africa. Edited by W. L. Sclater. The Mammals
of S. Africa. By W. L. Sclater. 2 vols. 1900-1.
Scoble, John, and Abercrombie, H. R. The Rise and Fall of Kragerism. 1900.
## p. 10 (#28) ##############################################
IO
Scully, William Charles. Kafir Stories. 1895; The White Hecatomb, and other
stories. 1897; A Vendetta of the Desert. 1898; Between Sun and Sand: a tale
of an African Desert. 1898; By Veldt and Kopje. 1907; The Ridge of the White
Waters. 1912; Reminiscences of a S. African Pioneer. 1913; Lodges in the
Wilderness. 1915; A History of South Africa, from the Earliest Days to the
Union. 1915.
Silburn, P. A. The Colonies and Imperial Defence. 1909.
South African Association for the Advancement of Science. Annual Reports. Cape
Town, 1903–.
Statham, E. Reginald. Blacks, Boers, and British. A three-cornered problem. 1881;
Mr Magnus. 1896 ; Paul Kruger and his Times. 1896; South Africa as it is. . . . 1897.
Stewart, James. Lovedale, South Africa. Edinburgh and Glasgow. 1894; Dawn in
the Dark Continent. 1906.
Stockenstrom, Sir Andries. The autobiography of the late Sir Andries Stockenstrom,
Bart. . . . Edited by. . . Hon. C. W. Hutton. 2 vols. Cape Town, 1887.
Stow, George W. The Native Races of South Africa. Edited by G. McCall Theal. 1905.
The Life and Work of George William Stow. . . by Robert B. Young. 1908.
Stuart, James. A History of the Zulu Rebellion, 1906. 1913.
Sykes, Frank W. With Plumer in Matabeleland. An account of the operations. . . during
the Rebellion of 1896. 1897.
Theal, George McCall. History and Ethnography of Africa South of the Zambesi,
from. . . 1505 to. . . 1795. . . . 3 vols. 1910; History of South Africa, from 1795 to 1872.
4th edn. In five vols. 1915.
The above represent Dr Theal's two most ambitious and best-known works, which
also incorporate or supersede, to some extent, earlier monographs on subjects included
in their scope. The following is a selection from his other voluminous writings:
Chronicles of Cape Commanders. . . from 1651 to 1691. . . . Cape Town, 1882 ;
Kaffir Folk-Lore. 2nd edn. 1886; History of the Boers in S. Africa. 1887; The
Portuguese in S. Africa. 1896; Records of the Cape Colony, 1793-1831. 36 vols.
Cape Town, 1897–1905; Records of South-Eastern Africa. 9 vols, 1898–1903 ;
South Africa. (The Story of the Nations. ) 4th edn. 1899; Progress of South Africa
in the Nineteenth Century. (The Nineteenth Century Series. ) 1902; The Beginning
of South African History. Cape Town, 1902; The Yellow and Dark-Skinned
People of Africa, south of the Zambesi. . . . 1910; Willem Adriaan van der Stel, and
other historical sketches. 1913.
Thomas, C. H. Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed. 1900.
Trotter, Mrs A. F. Old Cape Colony. A chronicle of her men and houses, from 1652
to 1806. 1903.
Truscott, S. J. The Witwatersrand Goldfields. 2nd edn. 1902.
Tyler, Josiah. Forty Years among the Zulus. Boston and Chicago, n. d. [1891).
Viljoen, General Ben J. My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War. 1903.
Voigt, J. C. Fifty Years of the History of the Republic in South Africa (1795-1845).
2 vols. 1899.
Wagner, P. A. The Diamond Fields of Southern Africa. Johannesburg, 1914.
Walton, Sir Edgar H.
The Inner History of the National Convention of South Africa.
Cape Town, 1912.
Watermeyer, E. B. Three Lectures on the Cape of Good Hope, under the Government
of the Dutch East India Company. Cape Town, 1857 ; Selections from the Writings
of. . . E. B. Watermeyer, with a brief sketch of his life. Cape Town, 1877.
Wessels, J. W. History of the Roman-Dutch Law. Grahamstown, 1908.
Williams, Gardner F. The Diamond Mines of South Africa. Some account of their
Rise and Development. Revised edn. New York, 1905.
## p. 11 (#29) ##############################################
II
Wilmot, Alexander. History of the Zulu War. 1880; The Story of the Expansion of
Southern Africa. London and Cape Town, 1895 ; Monomotapa (Rhodesia). Its
monuments and its history from the most ancient times to the present century.
1896; The History of Our Own Times in South Africa (1872–1898). 3 vols.
London and Cape Town, 1897-9; The History of South Africa. . . . Intended as a
concise manual. . . for general use, etc. 1901; The Life and Times of Sir Richard
Southey. 1904.
Wilmot, Alexander, and Chase, John Centlivres. History of the Colony of the Cape of
Good Hope. From its discovery. . . to 1868. Cape Town, 1869.
Wilson, David Mackay. Behind the Scenes in the Transvaal. 1901.
Wirgman, A. T. The History of the English Church and People in South Africa. 1895.
pp. 590 ff. , chapter xiv. Education,
Adamson, J. W. A Short History of Education. Cambridge, 1919.
## p. 11 (#30) ##############################################
.
1
1
I
## p. 11 (#31) ##############################################
CHAPTER I
PHILOSOPHERS
1. INTRODUCTION
ENGLISH philosophy may be said to have touched low-water
mark in or about the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.
The general public had ceased to be occupied with matters of
speculative thought, and the universities did little or nothing to
keep an interest in them alive. Writing in 1835, John Stuart
Mill complained that philosophy was falling more and more into
disrepute and that great events had ceased to inspire great ideas.
'In the intellectual pursuits which form great minds,' he said, “this country
was formerly pre-eminent. England once stood at the head of European
philosophy. Where stands she now? . . . Out of the narrow bounds of mathe-
matical and physical science, not a vestige of a reading and thinking public
engaged in the investigation of truth as truth, in the prosecution of thought
for the sake of thought. Among few except sectarian religionists-and what
they are we all know-is there any interest in the great problem of man's
nature and life: among still fewer is there any curiosity respecting the nature
and principles of human society, the history or the philosophy of civilization;
nor any belief that, from such inquiries, a single important practical con-
sequence can followi. "
About the same time, or a few years earlier, similar views con-
cerning the low estate of English philosophy had been expressed
by Sir William Hamilton and by Thomas Carlyle? ; and a foreign
observer-Hegel-bad spoken with scorn of the usage of the word
'philosophy’ in the English language.
The writers who made this complaint were foremost in
bringing about a change. Without any approach to philo-
sophical method, Carlyle forced upon public attention ideas
concerning the ultimate meaning and value of life, and, in his
own way, had an influence upon the thought of his time which
may be compared with that of Coleridge in the generation
1 Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 1, pp. 96, 97.
? Cf. Masson, Recent British Philosophy, 3rd edn, pp. 2–5.
E. L. XIV.
CH. I.
1
## p. 11 (#32) ##############################################
29
[CH.
Philosophers
6
immediately preceding. Hamilton and Mill were the leaders of
a marked revival of interest in speculative topics, which rein-
stated philosophy in its due place in the national culture; and
this revival took two different directions connected with their
diverse views and training.
Philosophy, however, had not merely to overcome the public
indifference referred to by John Stuart Mill; it had also to
contend against itself, or, at least, against its dominant form.
The Benthamite creed, which was in the ascendant, was not
favourable to speculative enquiry. "The great problem of man's
nature and life' was regarded as solved in a sense which made
metaphysics and theology alike impossible ; ethical principles
were held to be finally settled by Bentham, so that nothing
remained but their application to different situations; even
political and social theory, the field of the chief triumphs of the
utilitarians, was divorced from history and from every ethical
idea save that of utility ; psychology, however, remained in need
of more adequate treatment than Bentham could give it, and
James Mill supplied the school with a theory of mind which was
in harmony with their other views.
II. JAMES MILL AND OTHERS
The economic doctrines which are characteristic of the utilitarian
school were elaborated by a writer who cannot be regarded as a
member of it and who, indeed, was not interested in philosophy
or even in the larger questions of social theory. This was David
Ricardo, the son of a Dutch Jew who had settled in London and
become a member of the Stock Exchange. Thrown on his own re-
sources, Ricardo soon made a fortune as a stockbroker, retired
from business at an early age and devoted his leisure to economics.
It was not until he had already made his mark as a writer on the
currency that he became acquainted with James Mill, by whose
encouragement, as well as by that of other friends, he was induced,
in 1817, to publish his chief work, Principles of Political Economy
and Taxation. Ricardo received his impetus towards economic
study from Adam Smith. He did not share the latter's breadth of
social outlook or his psychological insight; but he had a masterly
power of abstract reasoning which enabled him to present
economic doctrines in the form of a deductive science. He was
concerned not so much with the nature and causes' as with the
distribution of wealth. This distribution has to be made between
## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################
1] The Economics of Ricardo 3
the classes concerned in the production of wealth, namely, the
landowner, the capitalist, and the labourer; and Ricardo seeks
to show the conditions which determine the share of each. Here,
his theory of rent is fundamental. He did not claim originality
for this theory, which goes by his name, but attributed it to
Malthus's Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent and
Edward West's Essay on the Application of Capital to Land,
both of which appeared in 1815; while his editor, J. R. McCulloch,
discovered the same doctrine in a work by James Anderson,
entitled Enquiry into the Nature of Corn-Laws and published
in 1777. But Ricardo made the doctrine his own.
Rent, he
argued, does not enter into the cost of production; it varies on
different farms according to the fertility of the soil and the
advantages of their situation. But the price of the produce
is the same for all and is fixed by the conditions of production
on the least favourable land which has to be cultivated to meet
the demand ; and this land pays no rent. Rent, therefore, is the
price which the landowner is able to charge for the special
advantages of his land; it is the difference between its return
to a given amount of capital and labour and the similar return
of the least advantageous land which has to be cultivated.
Consequently, it rises as the margin of cultivation spreads to
less fertile soils. Obviously, this doctrine leads to a strong
argument in favour of the free importation of foreign goods,
especially corn. It also breaks with the economic optimism of
Adam Smith, who thought that the interest of the country
gentleman harmonised with that of the mass of the people, for
it shows that the rent of the landowner rises as the increasing
need of the people compels them to have resort to inferior land
for the production of their food.
The value of an article is determined, according to Ricardo,
by the amount of labour required to produce it under the least
favourable conditions; and this value has to be shared between
wages and profits (interest on capital and earnings of business
management not being distinguished in his analysis). Wages
depend on the price of necessaries (that is, chiefly, of food); the
law of population (which he takes over from Malthus) prevents
any further rise. On the other hand, profits depend on high or
low wages. Thus, in the progress of society, the 'natural
tendency of profits is to fall, until 'almost the whole produce
of the country, after paying the labourers, will be the property
of the owners of land and the receivers of tithes and taxes. '
1-2
## p. 11 (#34) ##############################################
4
Philosophers
[CH.
There is, therefore, an opposition of interests within the body
economic; and this opposition is held to be the result of natural
and inevitable law—happily checked, however, at repeated
intervals, by improvements and discoveries. For their effect
Ricardo made allowance. But he took no account of other
than economic motives in human conduct; he may be said to
have invented the fiction of the economic man,' though he did
not use the phrase. And he regarded the economic structure
of society as rigid, though his doctrines often read like satires
upon it, and they became, in the hands both of contemporary
and of later socialist writers, a powerful argument for fundamental
social changes.
Ricardo's method was to proceed from a few very general
propositions about society and human nature, and to draw out
their consequences deductively. That his premisses were one-sided
generalisations, and that his conclusions at best had only hypo-
thetical validity, he did not recognise. This method was also
characteristic of the Benthamite reasoning in political theory
generally. Thus it was that, in economics, James Mill professed
himself Ricardo's disciple. Mill's Political Economy (1821) re-
duces Ricardo's doctrines to text-book form, and states them with
the concise and confident lucidity which distinguished the author.
For Mill, however, unlike Ricardo, economics was only one
amongst a large number of topics, social and philosophical, which
were open to the same general method of treatment, and which
appealed to his interest. Mill was closely associated with Bentham
-at any rate, from 1808 onwards—and it is difficult to find any
originality in the fundamental doctrines of his creed. At the
same time, he had certain points of superiority. Much inferior
to Bentham in jurisprudence and all that concerned the details
of law, he had, perhaps, a clearer view of political theory and
certainly a wider knowledge of historical conditions. He was,
of course, a whole-hearted adherent of the greatest happiness
principle, and added nothing to its statement; but he was better
equipped for its defence on philosophical grounds and he could
supplement Bentham's deficiencies as a psychologist. But the
necessity of making an income by literary work and, afterwards,
the demands of official employment, as well as, always, the
engrossing interest of public affairs, left him little leisure for
philosophy.
1 See the bibliography by Foxwell, H. S. in appendix 11 (pp. 191—267) of the English
translation of A. Menger's Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (1899).
## p. 11 (#35) ##############################################
1]
James Mill
5
Mill's systematic work in political theory is contained in certain
articles, especially an article on government, contributed to the
supplement of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, edited by Macvey
Napier (1820). In these articles, the author proceeds, methodically,
to determine the best form of political order by deductive
reasoning; and his method was the object of severe criticism
by Macaulay in an article contributed to The Edinburgh Review
in 1829, but not republished in his collected Essays. This article
contained also an attack on the utilitarians generally; and Mill's
rejoinder, so far as he made any, is to be found in A Fragment on
Mackintosh (1835). This consists of 'strictures on some passages
of A Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy which
Sir James Mackintosh had contributed to the seventh edition
of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Like Mill, Mackintosh was
keenly interested in philosophy, although his career gave him
little time for its pursuit. In this, his only contribution to the
subject, he reviewed the work of the English moralists with
appreciation and insight. It contained criticisms of the utili-
tarians and of their intellectual predecessors which aroused Mill's
hostility, and its occasional lack of precision of thought laid it
open to attack. Mill's 'strictures are limited to a few points
only, and expose the weaknesses of his antagonist's positions in
a manner which would have been more effective if it had been
less violent—although his friends had induced him to moderate its
tone before making it public.
Mill's chief philosophical work was, however, his Analysis of
the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). In this he laid the
foundation in psychology for the utilitarian superstructure. It
is a compact statement of a theory of mind elaborated on the same
method as that by which any department of nature might be studied.
Mental phenomena are reduced to their simplest elements, and
the association of these into groups and successions is investi-
gated, all association being reduced by him to one law—that
of contiguity. In general, Mill follows: Hume and Hartley—but
Hartley much more than Hume. He disregards, however, the
physiological side of Hartley's theory, so that his own doctrines
are purely psychological. To the psychological school of a later
date, whose leading representatives were John Stuart Mill and
Alexander Bain, his chief positive contribution was the doctrine
of inseparable association; in addition, he marked out afresh
the lines to be followed by a theory which attempts to explain
the facts of consciousness from the association' of ultimate
## p. 11 (#36) ##############################################
6
[CH.
Philosophers
elements called 'sensations'-assumed as themselves not in need
of explanation.
A position intermediate between the associationism of Mill
and the traditional doctrines of the Scottish school was taken
by Thomas Brown, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh
from 1810 till his death in 1820. By the time he was twenty
years of age Brown had published Observations on the Zoonomia
of Erasmus Darwin (1798), which was recognised as a mature
criticism of that work. Seven years afterwards, in 1805, an
ecclesiastico-academical controversy drew from him a small volume
entitled Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the Doctrine
of Mr Hume concerning the Relation of Cause and Effect, of
which a second enlarged edition was published in 1806 and a
third edition, further enlarged and modified in arrangement and
title, in 1817. In this book, he maintained the view that causation
means simply uniform antecedence, 'to whatever objects, material
or spiritual, the words may be applied'; but he held, also, that
there was an intuitive or instinctive belief that, 'when the previous
circumstances in any case are exactly the same, the resulting
circumstances also will be the same. '
Brown's work on causation certainly showed him to be possessed
of an intellect of penetrating philosophical quality; and it may be
noted that, in his preface to the second edition of it, he already laid
down two principles which distinguished his subsequent writing.
One was that the philosophy of mind' is to be considered as a
science of analysis ; the other was the implicit rejection of the
doctrine of mental faculties as it had figured in previous academic
philosophies. Functions such as memory or comparison, he says,
are merely names for the resemblances among classes of mental
facts. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820),
published after his death, these principles were applied to the details
of perception and cognition. He made the important distinction
between the muscular sense and touch proper, resolved knowledge
of extension into a succession of muscular sensations, and knowledge
of the external world into a number of constituent sensations, but
held, nevertheless, to the real existence of the physical object on the
ground that it was implied in the intuitive belief in causality. In
these doctrines, and in his analysis of 'relative suggestion,' he made
contributions to psychology which were largely original, although
he was considerably indebted to De Tracy and other predecessors.
The eloquence of his style, as well as the subtlety of his analyses,
## p. 11 (#37) ##############################################
1]
Sir William Hamilton
7
made his lectures famous during his lifetime and, in their printed
form, for many years after his death. They were written hastily,
each lecture to meet the demand of the following day, and they
are too ornate in style for scientific purposes. The shortness
of the author's life, and his own unfortunate preference for his
poetical works over his philosophical, prevented a thorough
revision of what he had written or a consistent and adequate
development of his views.
III. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AND OTHERS
Hamilton's reputation has not withstood the test of time; but,
in his own day and for a number of years afterwards, his was one
of the two names which stood for the revival of philosophical
thought in Great Britain. His pre-eminence was not altogether
undisputed, however. Even from his younger contemporaries who
did most for Scottish metaphysics, different opinions regarding his
merit may be gathered. Ferrier regarded him, morally and intel-
lectually, as ‘amongst the greatest of the great? ’: whereas Hutchison
Stirling found in him 'a certain vein of disingenuousness that,
cruelly unjust to individuals, has probably caused the retardation of
general British philosophy by, perhaps, a generation? ' The truth
lies somewhere between these extreme views, and it is important
to arrive at a correct estimate of Hamilton's work in order to
understand the course of British philosophy.
Sir William Hamilton was born in 1788, in the old college of
Glasgow, where his father was a professor. He was educated there
and at Oxford, was called to the Scottish bar and, in 1836,
appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh.
In 1844 he had a stroke of paralysis, and, although he was able to
continue the work of his professorship until his death in 1856, he
never recovered his physical strength. His published work began
with a number of articles in The Edinburgh Review, republished
in 1852 as Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education
and University Reform. The most important of these were three
articles on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,' the Philosophy
of Perception' and 'Logic,' which appeared between 1829 and
1833. He afterwards devoted himself to the preparation of an
edition of Reid's Works, which he illustrated with elaborate
appended 'Notes,' chiefly historical in character. This work was
i Ferrier, J. F. , Scottish Philosophy: the old and the new (1856), pp. 15, 16.
* Stirling, J. H. , Sir W. Hamilton : being the Philosophy of Perception (1865), p. vii.
:
:
## p. 11 (#38) ##############################################
8.
[CH.
A Life Time in South Africa. Being the recollections of the first Premier of
Natal. 1900.
Rogers, A. W. An Introduction to the Geology of Cape Colony. 1905.
Rose, F. Horace. Haidee. 1917; and several earlier works.
Russell, George. The History of Old Durban, and Reminiscences of an Emigrant
of 1850. 1899.
Russell, Robert. "The Garden Colony. ' The Story of Natal and its Neighbours. 1903.
Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. A Novel. By Ralph Iron.
1883;
Dream Life and Real Life. . . . Ralph Iron. 1893; Dreams. Sixth edn.
1894;
Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. . . . 1897.
Solater, W. L. The Fauna of South Africa. Edited by W. L. Sclater. The Mammals
of S. Africa. By W. L. Sclater. 2 vols. 1900-1.
Scoble, John, and Abercrombie, H. R. The Rise and Fall of Kragerism. 1900.
## p. 10 (#28) ##############################################
IO
Scully, William Charles. Kafir Stories. 1895; The White Hecatomb, and other
stories. 1897; A Vendetta of the Desert. 1898; Between Sun and Sand: a tale
of an African Desert. 1898; By Veldt and Kopje. 1907; The Ridge of the White
Waters. 1912; Reminiscences of a S. African Pioneer. 1913; Lodges in the
Wilderness. 1915; A History of South Africa, from the Earliest Days to the
Union. 1915.
Silburn, P. A. The Colonies and Imperial Defence. 1909.
South African Association for the Advancement of Science. Annual Reports. Cape
Town, 1903–.
Statham, E. Reginald. Blacks, Boers, and British. A three-cornered problem. 1881;
Mr Magnus. 1896 ; Paul Kruger and his Times. 1896; South Africa as it is. . . . 1897.
Stewart, James. Lovedale, South Africa. Edinburgh and Glasgow. 1894; Dawn in
the Dark Continent. 1906.
Stockenstrom, Sir Andries. The autobiography of the late Sir Andries Stockenstrom,
Bart. . . . Edited by. . . Hon. C. W. Hutton. 2 vols. Cape Town, 1887.
Stow, George W. The Native Races of South Africa. Edited by G. McCall Theal. 1905.
The Life and Work of George William Stow. . . by Robert B. Young. 1908.
Stuart, James. A History of the Zulu Rebellion, 1906. 1913.
Sykes, Frank W. With Plumer in Matabeleland. An account of the operations. . . during
the Rebellion of 1896. 1897.
Theal, George McCall. History and Ethnography of Africa South of the Zambesi,
from. . . 1505 to. . . 1795. . . . 3 vols. 1910; History of South Africa, from 1795 to 1872.
4th edn. In five vols. 1915.
The above represent Dr Theal's two most ambitious and best-known works, which
also incorporate or supersede, to some extent, earlier monographs on subjects included
in their scope. The following is a selection from his other voluminous writings:
Chronicles of Cape Commanders. . . from 1651 to 1691. . . . Cape Town, 1882 ;
Kaffir Folk-Lore. 2nd edn. 1886; History of the Boers in S. Africa. 1887; The
Portuguese in S. Africa. 1896; Records of the Cape Colony, 1793-1831. 36 vols.
Cape Town, 1897–1905; Records of South-Eastern Africa. 9 vols, 1898–1903 ;
South Africa. (The Story of the Nations. ) 4th edn. 1899; Progress of South Africa
in the Nineteenth Century. (The Nineteenth Century Series. ) 1902; The Beginning
of South African History. Cape Town, 1902; The Yellow and Dark-Skinned
People of Africa, south of the Zambesi. . . . 1910; Willem Adriaan van der Stel, and
other historical sketches. 1913.
Thomas, C. H. Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed. 1900.
Trotter, Mrs A. F. Old Cape Colony. A chronicle of her men and houses, from 1652
to 1806. 1903.
Truscott, S. J. The Witwatersrand Goldfields. 2nd edn. 1902.
Tyler, Josiah. Forty Years among the Zulus. Boston and Chicago, n. d. [1891).
Viljoen, General Ben J. My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War. 1903.
Voigt, J. C. Fifty Years of the History of the Republic in South Africa (1795-1845).
2 vols. 1899.
Wagner, P. A. The Diamond Fields of Southern Africa. Johannesburg, 1914.
Walton, Sir Edgar H.
The Inner History of the National Convention of South Africa.
Cape Town, 1912.
Watermeyer, E. B. Three Lectures on the Cape of Good Hope, under the Government
of the Dutch East India Company. Cape Town, 1857 ; Selections from the Writings
of. . . E. B. Watermeyer, with a brief sketch of his life. Cape Town, 1877.
Wessels, J. W. History of the Roman-Dutch Law. Grahamstown, 1908.
Williams, Gardner F. The Diamond Mines of South Africa. Some account of their
Rise and Development. Revised edn. New York, 1905.
## p. 11 (#29) ##############################################
II
Wilmot, Alexander. History of the Zulu War. 1880; The Story of the Expansion of
Southern Africa. London and Cape Town, 1895 ; Monomotapa (Rhodesia). Its
monuments and its history from the most ancient times to the present century.
1896; The History of Our Own Times in South Africa (1872–1898). 3 vols.
London and Cape Town, 1897-9; The History of South Africa. . . . Intended as a
concise manual. . . for general use, etc. 1901; The Life and Times of Sir Richard
Southey. 1904.
Wilmot, Alexander, and Chase, John Centlivres. History of the Colony of the Cape of
Good Hope. From its discovery. . . to 1868. Cape Town, 1869.
Wilson, David Mackay. Behind the Scenes in the Transvaal. 1901.
Wirgman, A. T. The History of the English Church and People in South Africa. 1895.
pp. 590 ff. , chapter xiv. Education,
Adamson, J. W. A Short History of Education. Cambridge, 1919.
## p. 11 (#30) ##############################################
.
1
1
I
## p. 11 (#31) ##############################################
CHAPTER I
PHILOSOPHERS
1. INTRODUCTION
ENGLISH philosophy may be said to have touched low-water
mark in or about the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.
The general public had ceased to be occupied with matters of
speculative thought, and the universities did little or nothing to
keep an interest in them alive. Writing in 1835, John Stuart
Mill complained that philosophy was falling more and more into
disrepute and that great events had ceased to inspire great ideas.
'In the intellectual pursuits which form great minds,' he said, “this country
was formerly pre-eminent. England once stood at the head of European
philosophy. Where stands she now? . . . Out of the narrow bounds of mathe-
matical and physical science, not a vestige of a reading and thinking public
engaged in the investigation of truth as truth, in the prosecution of thought
for the sake of thought. Among few except sectarian religionists-and what
they are we all know-is there any interest in the great problem of man's
nature and life: among still fewer is there any curiosity respecting the nature
and principles of human society, the history or the philosophy of civilization;
nor any belief that, from such inquiries, a single important practical con-
sequence can followi. "
About the same time, or a few years earlier, similar views con-
cerning the low estate of English philosophy had been expressed
by Sir William Hamilton and by Thomas Carlyle? ; and a foreign
observer-Hegel-bad spoken with scorn of the usage of the word
'philosophy’ in the English language.
The writers who made this complaint were foremost in
bringing about a change. Without any approach to philo-
sophical method, Carlyle forced upon public attention ideas
concerning the ultimate meaning and value of life, and, in his
own way, had an influence upon the thought of his time which
may be compared with that of Coleridge in the generation
1 Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 1, pp. 96, 97.
? Cf. Masson, Recent British Philosophy, 3rd edn, pp. 2–5.
E. L. XIV.
CH. I.
1
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29
[CH.
Philosophers
6
immediately preceding. Hamilton and Mill were the leaders of
a marked revival of interest in speculative topics, which rein-
stated philosophy in its due place in the national culture; and
this revival took two different directions connected with their
diverse views and training.
Philosophy, however, had not merely to overcome the public
indifference referred to by John Stuart Mill; it had also to
contend against itself, or, at least, against its dominant form.
The Benthamite creed, which was in the ascendant, was not
favourable to speculative enquiry. "The great problem of man's
nature and life' was regarded as solved in a sense which made
metaphysics and theology alike impossible ; ethical principles
were held to be finally settled by Bentham, so that nothing
remained but their application to different situations; even
political and social theory, the field of the chief triumphs of the
utilitarians, was divorced from history and from every ethical
idea save that of utility ; psychology, however, remained in need
of more adequate treatment than Bentham could give it, and
James Mill supplied the school with a theory of mind which was
in harmony with their other views.
II. JAMES MILL AND OTHERS
The economic doctrines which are characteristic of the utilitarian
school were elaborated by a writer who cannot be regarded as a
member of it and who, indeed, was not interested in philosophy
or even in the larger questions of social theory. This was David
Ricardo, the son of a Dutch Jew who had settled in London and
become a member of the Stock Exchange. Thrown on his own re-
sources, Ricardo soon made a fortune as a stockbroker, retired
from business at an early age and devoted his leisure to economics.
It was not until he had already made his mark as a writer on the
currency that he became acquainted with James Mill, by whose
encouragement, as well as by that of other friends, he was induced,
in 1817, to publish his chief work, Principles of Political Economy
and Taxation. Ricardo received his impetus towards economic
study from Adam Smith. He did not share the latter's breadth of
social outlook or his psychological insight; but he had a masterly
power of abstract reasoning which enabled him to present
economic doctrines in the form of a deductive science. He was
concerned not so much with the nature and causes' as with the
distribution of wealth. This distribution has to be made between
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1] The Economics of Ricardo 3
the classes concerned in the production of wealth, namely, the
landowner, the capitalist, and the labourer; and Ricardo seeks
to show the conditions which determine the share of each. Here,
his theory of rent is fundamental. He did not claim originality
for this theory, which goes by his name, but attributed it to
Malthus's Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent and
Edward West's Essay on the Application of Capital to Land,
both of which appeared in 1815; while his editor, J. R. McCulloch,
discovered the same doctrine in a work by James Anderson,
entitled Enquiry into the Nature of Corn-Laws and published
in 1777. But Ricardo made the doctrine his own.
Rent, he
argued, does not enter into the cost of production; it varies on
different farms according to the fertility of the soil and the
advantages of their situation. But the price of the produce
is the same for all and is fixed by the conditions of production
on the least favourable land which has to be cultivated to meet
the demand ; and this land pays no rent. Rent, therefore, is the
price which the landowner is able to charge for the special
advantages of his land; it is the difference between its return
to a given amount of capital and labour and the similar return
of the least advantageous land which has to be cultivated.
Consequently, it rises as the margin of cultivation spreads to
less fertile soils. Obviously, this doctrine leads to a strong
argument in favour of the free importation of foreign goods,
especially corn. It also breaks with the economic optimism of
Adam Smith, who thought that the interest of the country
gentleman harmonised with that of the mass of the people, for
it shows that the rent of the landowner rises as the increasing
need of the people compels them to have resort to inferior land
for the production of their food.
The value of an article is determined, according to Ricardo,
by the amount of labour required to produce it under the least
favourable conditions; and this value has to be shared between
wages and profits (interest on capital and earnings of business
management not being distinguished in his analysis). Wages
depend on the price of necessaries (that is, chiefly, of food); the
law of population (which he takes over from Malthus) prevents
any further rise. On the other hand, profits depend on high or
low wages. Thus, in the progress of society, the 'natural
tendency of profits is to fall, until 'almost the whole produce
of the country, after paying the labourers, will be the property
of the owners of land and the receivers of tithes and taxes. '
1-2
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4
Philosophers
[CH.
There is, therefore, an opposition of interests within the body
economic; and this opposition is held to be the result of natural
and inevitable law—happily checked, however, at repeated
intervals, by improvements and discoveries. For their effect
Ricardo made allowance. But he took no account of other
than economic motives in human conduct; he may be said to
have invented the fiction of the economic man,' though he did
not use the phrase. And he regarded the economic structure
of society as rigid, though his doctrines often read like satires
upon it, and they became, in the hands both of contemporary
and of later socialist writers, a powerful argument for fundamental
social changes.
Ricardo's method was to proceed from a few very general
propositions about society and human nature, and to draw out
their consequences deductively. That his premisses were one-sided
generalisations, and that his conclusions at best had only hypo-
thetical validity, he did not recognise. This method was also
characteristic of the Benthamite reasoning in political theory
generally. Thus it was that, in economics, James Mill professed
himself Ricardo's disciple. Mill's Political Economy (1821) re-
duces Ricardo's doctrines to text-book form, and states them with
the concise and confident lucidity which distinguished the author.
For Mill, however, unlike Ricardo, economics was only one
amongst a large number of topics, social and philosophical, which
were open to the same general method of treatment, and which
appealed to his interest. Mill was closely associated with Bentham
-at any rate, from 1808 onwards—and it is difficult to find any
originality in the fundamental doctrines of his creed. At the
same time, he had certain points of superiority. Much inferior
to Bentham in jurisprudence and all that concerned the details
of law, he had, perhaps, a clearer view of political theory and
certainly a wider knowledge of historical conditions. He was,
of course, a whole-hearted adherent of the greatest happiness
principle, and added nothing to its statement; but he was better
equipped for its defence on philosophical grounds and he could
supplement Bentham's deficiencies as a psychologist. But the
necessity of making an income by literary work and, afterwards,
the demands of official employment, as well as, always, the
engrossing interest of public affairs, left him little leisure for
philosophy.
1 See the bibliography by Foxwell, H. S. in appendix 11 (pp. 191—267) of the English
translation of A. Menger's Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (1899).
## p. 11 (#35) ##############################################
1]
James Mill
5
Mill's systematic work in political theory is contained in certain
articles, especially an article on government, contributed to the
supplement of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, edited by Macvey
Napier (1820). In these articles, the author proceeds, methodically,
to determine the best form of political order by deductive
reasoning; and his method was the object of severe criticism
by Macaulay in an article contributed to The Edinburgh Review
in 1829, but not republished in his collected Essays. This article
contained also an attack on the utilitarians generally; and Mill's
rejoinder, so far as he made any, is to be found in A Fragment on
Mackintosh (1835). This consists of 'strictures on some passages
of A Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy which
Sir James Mackintosh had contributed to the seventh edition
of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Like Mill, Mackintosh was
keenly interested in philosophy, although his career gave him
little time for its pursuit. In this, his only contribution to the
subject, he reviewed the work of the English moralists with
appreciation and insight. It contained criticisms of the utili-
tarians and of their intellectual predecessors which aroused Mill's
hostility, and its occasional lack of precision of thought laid it
open to attack. Mill's 'strictures are limited to a few points
only, and expose the weaknesses of his antagonist's positions in
a manner which would have been more effective if it had been
less violent—although his friends had induced him to moderate its
tone before making it public.
Mill's chief philosophical work was, however, his Analysis of
the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). In this he laid the
foundation in psychology for the utilitarian superstructure. It
is a compact statement of a theory of mind elaborated on the same
method as that by which any department of nature might be studied.
Mental phenomena are reduced to their simplest elements, and
the association of these into groups and successions is investi-
gated, all association being reduced by him to one law—that
of contiguity. In general, Mill follows: Hume and Hartley—but
Hartley much more than Hume. He disregards, however, the
physiological side of Hartley's theory, so that his own doctrines
are purely psychological. To the psychological school of a later
date, whose leading representatives were John Stuart Mill and
Alexander Bain, his chief positive contribution was the doctrine
of inseparable association; in addition, he marked out afresh
the lines to be followed by a theory which attempts to explain
the facts of consciousness from the association' of ultimate
## p. 11 (#36) ##############################################
6
[CH.
Philosophers
elements called 'sensations'-assumed as themselves not in need
of explanation.
A position intermediate between the associationism of Mill
and the traditional doctrines of the Scottish school was taken
by Thomas Brown, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh
from 1810 till his death in 1820. By the time he was twenty
years of age Brown had published Observations on the Zoonomia
of Erasmus Darwin (1798), which was recognised as a mature
criticism of that work. Seven years afterwards, in 1805, an
ecclesiastico-academical controversy drew from him a small volume
entitled Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the Doctrine
of Mr Hume concerning the Relation of Cause and Effect, of
which a second enlarged edition was published in 1806 and a
third edition, further enlarged and modified in arrangement and
title, in 1817. In this book, he maintained the view that causation
means simply uniform antecedence, 'to whatever objects, material
or spiritual, the words may be applied'; but he held, also, that
there was an intuitive or instinctive belief that, 'when the previous
circumstances in any case are exactly the same, the resulting
circumstances also will be the same. '
Brown's work on causation certainly showed him to be possessed
of an intellect of penetrating philosophical quality; and it may be
noted that, in his preface to the second edition of it, he already laid
down two principles which distinguished his subsequent writing.
One was that the philosophy of mind' is to be considered as a
science of analysis ; the other was the implicit rejection of the
doctrine of mental faculties as it had figured in previous academic
philosophies. Functions such as memory or comparison, he says,
are merely names for the resemblances among classes of mental
facts. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820),
published after his death, these principles were applied to the details
of perception and cognition. He made the important distinction
between the muscular sense and touch proper, resolved knowledge
of extension into a succession of muscular sensations, and knowledge
of the external world into a number of constituent sensations, but
held, nevertheless, to the real existence of the physical object on the
ground that it was implied in the intuitive belief in causality. In
these doctrines, and in his analysis of 'relative suggestion,' he made
contributions to psychology which were largely original, although
he was considerably indebted to De Tracy and other predecessors.
The eloquence of his style, as well as the subtlety of his analyses,
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1]
Sir William Hamilton
7
made his lectures famous during his lifetime and, in their printed
form, for many years after his death. They were written hastily,
each lecture to meet the demand of the following day, and they
are too ornate in style for scientific purposes. The shortness
of the author's life, and his own unfortunate preference for his
poetical works over his philosophical, prevented a thorough
revision of what he had written or a consistent and adequate
development of his views.
III. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AND OTHERS
Hamilton's reputation has not withstood the test of time; but,
in his own day and for a number of years afterwards, his was one
of the two names which stood for the revival of philosophical
thought in Great Britain. His pre-eminence was not altogether
undisputed, however. Even from his younger contemporaries who
did most for Scottish metaphysics, different opinions regarding his
merit may be gathered. Ferrier regarded him, morally and intel-
lectually, as ‘amongst the greatest of the great? ’: whereas Hutchison
Stirling found in him 'a certain vein of disingenuousness that,
cruelly unjust to individuals, has probably caused the retardation of
general British philosophy by, perhaps, a generation? ' The truth
lies somewhere between these extreme views, and it is important
to arrive at a correct estimate of Hamilton's work in order to
understand the course of British philosophy.
Sir William Hamilton was born in 1788, in the old college of
Glasgow, where his father was a professor. He was educated there
and at Oxford, was called to the Scottish bar and, in 1836,
appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh.
In 1844 he had a stroke of paralysis, and, although he was able to
continue the work of his professorship until his death in 1856, he
never recovered his physical strength. His published work began
with a number of articles in The Edinburgh Review, republished
in 1852 as Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education
and University Reform. The most important of these were three
articles on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,' the Philosophy
of Perception' and 'Logic,' which appeared between 1829 and
1833. He afterwards devoted himself to the preparation of an
edition of Reid's Works, which he illustrated with elaborate
appended 'Notes,' chiefly historical in character. This work was
i Ferrier, J. F. , Scottish Philosophy: the old and the new (1856), pp. 15, 16.
* Stirling, J. H. , Sir W. Hamilton : being the Philosophy of Perception (1865), p. vii.
:
:
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8.
[CH.
