s, and a
personality.[331] This is a great deal to affirm and deny of an
existence "absolutely unknown." May we not be permitted to affirm of
this hidden and unknown something that it is _conscious Mind_,
especially as Mind is admitted to be the only analogon of Power; and
"the _force_ by which we produce change, and which serves to symbolize
the causes of changes in general, is the final disclosure of
analysis."[332]

[Footnote 328: "First Principles," p. 235.]

[Footnote 329: Ibid., p. 99.]

[Footnote 330: Ibid., p. 81.]

[Footnote 331: Ibid., pp. 108-112.]

[Footnote 332: Ibid., p. 235.]

3. We advance to the review of the third fundamental principle of
Hamilton's philosophy of the Unconditioned, viz., that the terms
infinite and absolute are names for a "mere negation of thought"--a
"mental impotence" to think, or, in other words, the absence of all the
conditions under which thought is possible.

This principle is based upon a distinction between "positive" and
"negative" thought, which is made with an air of wonderful precision and
accuracy in "the Alphabet of Human Thought."[333] "Thinking is
_positive_ when existence is predicated of an object." "Thinking is
_negative_ when existence is not attributed to an object." "Negative
thinking," therefore, is not the thinking of an object as devoid of this
or that particular attribute, but as devoid of all attributes, and thus
of all existence; that is, it is "the negation of all
thought"--_nothing_. "When we think a thing, that is done by conceiving
it as possessed of certain modes of being or qualities, _and the sum of
these qualities constitutes its concept or notion_." "When we perform an
act of negative thought, this is done by thinking _something_ as _not_
existing in this or that determinate mode; and when we think it as
existing in no determinate mode, _we cease to think at all--it becomes a
nothing_."[334] Now the Infinite, according to Hamilton, can not be
thought in any determinate mode; therefore we do not think it at all,
and therefore it is for us "a logical Non-entity."

[Footnote 333: "Discussions," Appendix I. p. 567.]

[Footnote 334: "Logic," pp. 54, 55.]

It is barely conceivable that Hamilton might imagine himself possessed
of this singular power of "performing an act of negative thought"--that
is, of thinking and not thinking at once, or of "thinking something"
that "becomes nothing;" we are not conscious of any such power. To think
wit