CONDITIONED, Philosophy of the, or Philosophy of the Unconditioned. The name given by Sir William Hamilton to certain philosophical views first promulgated by him in an article contributed to the Edinburgh Re view, in October 1829, forming a critique on Victor Cousin's philosophy, especially of his doctrine of an absolute cause. The Uncondi tioned is regarded by Sir William Hamilton as a genus including two species: the Infinite, or the unconditionally unlimited, and the Absolute, or the unconditionally limited; and the thesis which he maintains and expounds in the essay referred to, and which forms one of the leading doctrines of his philosophical system, is that the Unconditioned, as thus explained, is en tirely unthinkable. In his own words, *the mind can conceive, and consequently can know only the limited, and the conditionally limited. . . • Conditional limitation is the fundamen tal law of the possibility of thought.° This he illustrates by stating that we can neither con ceive an absolute whole, that is, a whole so great that we cannot conceive it also as a part of a still greater whole; nor an absolute part, that is, a part so small that we cannot conceive it as a relative whole, divisible into still smaller parts. And this he declares to hold good as to spa :e, time and degree. °The Conditioned,* he goes on to say, °is the mean between two extremes — two unconditionates, exclusive of each other, neither of which can be conceived as possible, but of which, on the principles of contradiction and excluded middle, one must be admitted as The Unconditioned, on the other hand, being merely negations of the Conditioned in its opposite extremes, bound together by the aid of language and their com mon character of incomprehensibility, is not even a notion, either simple or positive. It pre
sents no object to the though; and can afford no real knowledge. From this, however, we are only to learn that our faculties are weak, and that hence we have no right to constitute our capacity of thought into the measure of existence. Although then we are unable to conceive anything above the relative and finite, it is quite competent to us to believe in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all that is conceivable by us. This doctrine was adopted by Mansel, dean of Saint Paul's, and applied by him to determine the limits of religious thought. It was combated by John Stuart Mill. Consult Hamilton, 'Discus sions on Philosophy and Literature> (1852) ; Mill, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy) (1865) ; Mansel, 'Limits of Re ligious (3d ed., 1870).