VOCABULARY OF PHILOSOPHY – COSMOTHETIC IDEALISTS

COSMOTHETIC IDEALISTS.—An alternative designation applied by Hamilton to Hypothetical Dualists,—a class which constitutes, he says, «the great majority of modern philosophers. Denying our immediate or intuitive knowledge of the external reality, whose existence they maintain, they, of course, hold a doctrine of mediate or representative perception, and, according to the various modifications of that doctrine, they are again subdivided into those who view, in the immediate object of perception, a representative entity present to the mind, but not a mere mental modification, and into those who hold that the immediate object is only a representative modification of the mind itself» (Metaph., lect. XVI.).