Condition, in Logic, denotes that which must precede the operation of a cause. It is not regarded as that which produces an effect, but as that which renders the production of one possible—to some logicians, however, a distinction without a difference. For instance, when an impression is made on wax by a seal, the seal is said to be the cause; the softness or fluidity of the wax, a condition.
The Philosophy of the Conditioned was a phrase brought into use by Sir W. Hamilton to express the inability of the human mind to conceive or reason respecting the Absolute and the Infinite. Our thought, according to him, can only be of the relative and the finite, of which these terms are but the negations; relativity and finitude are the conditions under which the human intelligence operates. In one of his dissertations on this, he criticised and endeavoured to refute the opposite position as maintained by Cousin—a modification of the previous doctrine of Schelling—that 'the Unconditioned, the Absolute, the Infinite, is immediately known in consciousness, and this by difference, plurality, and relation.' Dean Mansel, in his Bampton Lectures (1858), brought Hamilton's doctrine into special prominence, and dwelt on the relativity of knowledge as a great fundamental law of the human mind.